Video card issues
Monday, March 5, 2012 by kona0197 | Discussion: Personal Computing
So I have a widescreen monitor. How can I get the video card to play my games in non-widescreen mode?
Reply #3 Monday, March 5, 2012 8:38 PM
I think that you are talking about playing in non-widescreen resolutions (i.e. 1024x768) in games that don't support widescreen. In other words, if you want to play in a smaller resolution without the picture stretching out and looking blurry, you have to change the setting using your video driver control panel. In the NVidia control panel you go to Display > Adjust desktop size and position and then apply "no scaling" under the scaling tab. (You could also choose Aspect Ratio, but then your picture would not be stretched, but it might be blurry). I choose the GPU instead of the monitor to perform the scaling, but you might try it either way and see which way works for you.
If you are using an ATI card, I'm not sure how to adjust this, but I know there's a way to do it. You might want to search on the net for ATI scaling, aspect ratio, etc.
Anyway, I hope this helps...
Reply #5 Monday, March 5, 2012 9:15 PM
I found a way to do it (in Win7), but it's a pain (and come to think of it there has to be a better way):
Go to Control Panels > Display > Change Resolution to the desired resolution
Click on "Advanced Settings"
This should open another control panel with a some tabs. Choose the Intel(R) Graphics and Media Control Panel
Under "scaling" choose "maintain aspect ratio"
The problem with this is you'd have to do this each time you wanted to play a game and then change it back. There's got to be a way to tell the control panel to always choose the aspect ratio, but I'm not sure how.
Reply #6 Monday, March 5, 2012 9:48 PM
It's been set to "maintain aspect ratio" ever since I installed Windows 7. I've never had to mess with that setting. However my game still plays stretched out.
Reply #7 Monday, March 5, 2012 9:59 PM
My pathetic attempt to get old games to play in non-widescreen instead of fat-face was to get a new non-widescreen monitor about a year ago, and go dual-monitor. Sadly, most of my games don't give a choice, but insist on running on the primary display. If new games like FE would be enhanced to offer that choice I could make the non-wide screen the primary and the old games would work, but as it is now the 1-wide 1-narrow setup is no better than 2-wide would be.
Reply #9 Monday, March 5, 2012 10:36 PM
Yeah. Not much there for the OSD menu, just barely enough to mess with the basics.
Reply #11 Monday, March 5, 2012 11:43 PM
Hoyle card games, Hoyle board games, Command & Conquer
Reply #13 Tuesday, March 6, 2012 6:47 PM
You might be able to do it using Virtualbox and an old copy of WinXP, running your old games in a window.
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Reply #1 Monday, March 5, 2012 6:51 PM
Windowed mode and display resolution is usually an option within the game itself. Almost all my games allow for setting to standard resolutions, I do have some that don't offer widescreen though.
I don't think a GFX card setting will do it for you.