Little help please. I just bought a 360. I have a 16:9 lcd rear projection display, native resolution 720p. Display has component+dvi inputs but no hdmi. So I hooked up the 360 via the component av cable that came with it.

When I went into the dashboard, I set up the Display with what it should be - Widescreen display, at 720p. Dashboard looked great. Popped in the original Halo and it displayed at 4:3 - black bars on the side, no widescreen. Not cool. Popped in Halo 2 and it was widescreen fine. I guess this means that the original halo disc just doesn't support widescreen?

But then I remembered that with my original xbox, once I had the high-def adapter pack, original halo worked in widescreen mode (at least, if I recall correctly. It's boxed up now).

Long story short, my question is - Is there any way to get the original Halo to show up widescreen on my tv, using the 360?

Halo 1 was a 4:3 game, and appearantly the 360 is treating it that way and pillboxing it. Halo 2 on the other hand did do proper 16:9. You should never see this problem with real 360 games. :)

But then I remembered that with my original xbox, once I had the high-def adapter pack, original halo worked in widescreen mode (at least, if I recall correctly. It's boxed up now).

The original Halo was definitely 4x3. What probably happened is that your original Xbox was outputting at 480p (which is the highest resolution the original game would support on the old Xbox) and your projector may have stretched the image. Many TV's and projectors default to stretching a 480p image. That's what my old plasma TV did with Halo and I didn't realize it was 4x3 until I ran the game thru my 360 at a higher resolution and got the pillarboxes.

The original Halo was definitely 4x3. What probably happened is that your original Xbox was outputting at 480p (which is the highest resolution the original game would support on the old Xbox) and your projector may have stretched the image. Many TV's and projectors default to stretching a 480p image. That's what my old plasma TV did with Halo and I didn't realize it was 4x3 until I ran the game thru my 360 at a higher resolution and got the pillarboxes.

Well what confused me is that, if I recall correctly, my TV was pillboxing it ("it" being original Halo on the original XBOX) until I bought the high-def adapter. After that it showed up widescreen fine (pretty sure no Stretching or anything, I'd have noticed). So I guess the high def adapter for the original xbox did some sort of conversion or something...Who knows. Whatever, sounds like the 360 doesn't do that and I'm just stuck with pillboxed original Halo. Too bad, I do still break that out occasionally...

That adapter did not magically convert Halo to 16:9. All it did was output at 480p rather then 480i, which confused your TV into stretching the image into widescreen. That is all, no widescreen conversion was going on.

Halo is very much a special case, and actually the handling for widescreen changed at one point in Halo 2 after one of the patches. Thus, it's a very poor series to use as an example when generalizing about Xbox 360 behavior.

Try an Xbox 360 game.

That adapter did not magically convert Halo to 16:9. All it did was output at 480p rather then 480i, which confused your TV into stretching the image into widescreen. That is all, no widescreen conversion was going on.

Gotcha. Good info, Gracias.

I guess if you wanted to avoid having Halo pillboxed, you could just set your Xbox to output 480p 4:3 for when you wanted to play the game.

Some original Xbox games were designed to do 16:9 widescreen when played at 480p, but would revert back to 4:3 when brought up to 720p resolution. I'll assume the developers did this to reduce the amount of pixels in use to avoid choppy gameplay. Soul Calibur 2 is an example; I'd assume the original Halo may be the same. As already suggested, I'd try to set your 360 video mode to 480p widescreen to see if it works.

Soul Calaber 2 is the only orignal Xbox game that pillarboxed 720p output. Halo for the Xbox doesn't even support 720p, or widescreen. If you've played the orignal Halo in widescreen, you either played it stretched or played the PC version.