How do I change the video settings from outside Starcraft 2?

In switching from residence life to house life for a brief vacation, I've been forced to downgrade from my 1920x1080 resolution-supporting monitor to a 1024x800 monitor, although I brought my computer along with me. I forgot to change the settings on my games to a lower resolution before heading out, and now whenever I try to open Starcraft 2, my screen goes black and I'm told that my monitor doesn't support the resolution.

Is there any way I can change the video settings outside of the game so I can resume playing Starcraft 2? If not, is there any way I can bypass this Black Screen Monitor Resolution Error Thing(TM) to play the game?

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2 Answers

Under My Documents/Starcraft II in Windows or ~/Library/Application Support/Blizzard/StarCraft II in Mac OSX (not the Starcraft II installation folder), there is a text file called Variables.txt which contains all the basic settings for the game, including graphics and sound options.

In this file, the variables height and width determine respectively the height and width in pixels of your game window on launch. Changing these from (in my case) 1080 and 1920 to 800 and 1024 fixed the problem.

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Pressing alt+enter (Windows) or ⌘+M (Mac OS X) should make the game run in windowed mode. The key-combination should usually work as soon as the login dialog appears, so you might have to wait a short period of time.

Once the game runs in windowed mode, you should be able to go to the settings and change your display resolution, then switch back to fullscreen.

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