Cannot get screen resolution to anything other than 640x480

I just installed Black Mesa, launched via Steam & downloaded the Source SDK component. When I fire up BM, it works, but the screen is in 640x480, and the video options don’t show anything else in the dropdown (selecting 16x9 gives me 854x480, but that’s it).

I tried providing command line args to the app by right-clicking on the Steam entry and providing “-w 1280 -h 720” in the Launch Properties dialog, but this doesn’t work either - still low rez, still no choices in the dropdown.

My setup is a Intel Q6600 w/Asus P5K-E motherboard, Radeon HD 4870, and the monitor is a Panasonic 720P projector (PT-AX100U), connected with an HDMI cable.

Any ideas where I can get the Source engine to realize I have a higher-rez monitor?

I bet that projector might confuse Source in detecting what type of video setup you have. Chances are, stuff is just not compatible. You seem like a smart person, so I bet you’ve already tried updating videocard drivers, testing other Source games, etc. I take it Windows does run in high res?

If you have a monitor also attached to the computer set that as primary and the resolution you want the game to play at. Then using your video card driver (not the windows one) duplicate the display. This may get it working as steam should think its using the monitor.

Yeah, thanks for the suggestions, but I did all that already. The setup runs all my other games just fine, and other games detect the proper resolutions the monitor supports. Oddly enough, there’s only one other game that had problems with my setup, the decidedly undemanding Legend of Grimrock, which would crash after installation - rooting around in a support forum let me find the change to the config file that would let me run LoG in windowed mode (which I then maximized). I was hoping there was some kind of config-file twiddling I could do to force the Source engine to use the right settings.

Back in the Quake days you could run parameters and console commands for the resolution, but I doubt that’s possible in Source.

This is not the best solution, but have you tried hooking up the projector through VGA instead of HDMI?

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.