Widescreen Gaming Forum

Okay, now I know there have been some posts about this, and some replies to other posts. I have a Westinghouse 32" widescreen TV, with a native PC resolution of 1360x768. Here is what I can tell, after playing around with Madden 06.
The menu screens are apparently hard-coded into the game to run at 800x600. Short of actually re-coding the whole menu structure, I doubt there is a way around this. The game itself supports widescreen...sort of. In the video tab of the options screen, you can set the resolution to a maximum of 1280x768. As mentioned, the menus still stay 800x600, but once you actually start a game, the actual resolution of the image produced by the video card (if supported) WILL BE 1280x768!
HOWEVER - The image is stretched out. My TV has a menu selection where you can show what the resolution (etc.) is that's being received from the selected source, and it confirms that it is receiving a full 1280 by 768 pixels. This is not a 1024x768 image with any pixels doubled, it is actually rendered at 1280x768. However, the FOV is the same as if it was a 4:3 aspect ratio image, so it doesn't just look like a 1024x768 image, stretched out by the TV, set to fill the whole display area.
Now, you can go into the ini or cfg file (as mentioned in other topics), and adjust the resolution manually. I set it to 1360x768, and had similar results (just wider). All the players looked short and fat (moreso than usual...lol), and everything else was squashed. Curiously, in both resolutions, the loading screen was 800x600 just like the menus, when loading, before a game, but it was the in-game resolution (whichever I picked), when reloading the menus, after exiting a game.
I've seen a lot of people confuse the issue by saying that it kept the resolution the same, and didn't go to any kind of widescreen mode, but I suspect that they were expecting the menus to go wide, too. Again: the menus NEVER change, even to 1024x768. They are ALWAYS 800x600. As far as I can tell, there is no FOV+H solution to Madden 06, and I'm not even sure one would be possible. If anyone has different (better) results, let me know!

(PS: First post :D )