It sucks when you buy a $4.99 (or even more) game for your iPhone and you find out that the game doesn’t support the Retina Display. How is that even possible, 5 months after the release of the iPhone 4? I don’t know, but we might have a solution here: Retinasizer, a free tweak available in Cydia, can force games to run natively with high-resolution graphics on the Retina Display.
While all of this sounds awesome and perfect, Retinasizer forces OpenGL-based games to run at the native 960x640 resolution of the iPhone 4. Among the games confirmed to be working with Retinasizer:
- Sonic 4
- PES 2010
- Tiger Woods Golf
- Sim City Deluxe
- F.A.S.T.
- ACE Combat
- Street Fighter 4
- Zombie Infection
Which is quite a good list. Not every iOS game is based on OpenGL, but many are. Sonic 4 alone should convince you to give a try to this tweak. All you have to do is look for Retinasizer on Cydia (again, it’s a free download) and install it; it doesn’t come with a settings panel just yet but the developer promises it’ll be added in a future release.
The tweak also works fine with iOS 4.1, personally tested. What it does is simple: it upscales games to have Retina Display-ready graphics. Menus and text won’t be upscaled (at least they’re not in Sonic 4), but everything else will look as if it was written to be compatible with the magical Apple display.
It is possible that some games will display errors and general weird stuff on screen when forced to upscale. Like I said, I tested it on Sonic 4 and it works great. Please let us know what other games support Retinasizer in the comments.
Update: link to full-res Sonic 4 screenshot.
