rdesktopce builds done with LOW_RES ‘marker’

I have added two new build variants to rdesktopce_rdp5 (see also older article).

The normal builds make Windows Mobile ‘think’ the app is HI_RES_AWARE and so QVGA screens (see geometry setting in winrdesktop.ini) are NOT scaled to the larger screens of current devices:

with HI_RES_AWARE and geometry=240×320 on a WXGA screen:

ScreenShotFullscreenQVGA_on_WXGA_HIRES

If you have read my article “Remote Desktop Mobile on VGA devices: QVGA applications do not scale well” you know that Windows Mobile will scale the application output if the application is not HI_RES_AWARE.

with Subsystem version 4.20 and geometry=240×320 on a WXGA screen:

ScreenShotFullscreenQVGA_on_WXGA_LOWRES

The effect is simple, Windows Mobile will scale the application output, if the application uses a lower resolution like QVGA.

As rdesktopce_rdp5 does not use the HI_RES_AWARE resource, the only indicator for the awareness is the Subsystem version. This version number can be simply changed in the Linker Settings of the Visual Studio project. Right click on the project in Solution Explorer of Visual Studio, then look at Properties>Configuration Properties>Linker>Command Line. Replace the Additional Options entry ‘/subsystem:windowsce,5.01’ by ‘/subsystem:windowsce,4.20’ and save that change. Now do a build and you get an application exe with Subsystem version number 4.20.

Note: if the geometry setting is larger than the lowres QVGA resolution (240×320), then you get only a small part. Example: device screen resolution is 480×800, geometry is ‘geometry=480×640’, then you will only a QVGA view of the terminal server screen (left image). The right image shows what you get with the HI_RES_AWARE rdesktopce_rdp5 version on the same device:

ScreenShotFullscreenVGA_on_WXGA_LOWRES ScreenShotFullscreenVGA_on_WXGA_HIRES

I have added two build variants for these LOW_RES builds, so one can simply build a HI_RES_AWARE or a lowres exe file.

Latest source code and binaries at github (lowres release binary, hires release binary)

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