As discussed in 4:3 Aspect Ratios and 16:9 monitors , if you don't have your widescreen monitor connected by a DVI cable, it cannot be (easily) done.

Thank you for this. I'll experiment with the display settings as soon as I get a chance. (I think I'll need to install the Nvidia drivers instead of using the stock Windows drivers...)

Thanks again, and a Happy New Year!

This is a curious question since I have a widescreen monitor connected by DVI on my main system and text mode runs in 4:3 when full-screen despite my having set the resolution manually to 1920x1080. :o

The exception to this is if I set the machine type to vgaonly, in which case it will suddenly go wide.

I think there could be a variety of things going on here. It could be the output mode, it could be the resolution you're selecting combined with your monitor's settings for handling standard-aspect resolutions...

Try the various different output modes in the DOSBox configuration file, and failing that, try setting DOSBox's full-screen resolution to your monitor's native resolution, use ddraw or opengl output, and set your scaler to something like "normal2x forced" or "normal3x forced" to get rid of the bluring and see if that works.

As @Jorpho suggested, the display of text-modes in full-screen mode is affected by both the monitor and the driver.

In my case, I found that I needed to use my monitor's built-in control panel (the one that you access by pressing a button on the monitor frame). While DOSBox was displaying full-screen text - and ONLY while DOSBox was displaying full-screen text - I could use the controls on the monitor to choose an option to preserve aspect ratio. (This option was not available on my monitor's control panel when Windows was on screen.)

Also, I needed to play with various settings for fullscreenresolution= , output= and a few others in the same group. I'm not at the machine that has the wide-screen monitor right now, so I can't give details, but this should get anyone started who has the same problem.

One potential further problem: on a laptop, which doesn't have a built-in monitor control panel, this may require settings in the driver.

I just noticed that text modes behave differently on widescreen monitors between v0.73 and v0.74 of DOSBox. Using identical configuration files, running with the machine type set to svga_et4000 and the output method set to ddraw, text mode in v0.73 touches the top and bottom of a widescreen resolution but has black bars on the side, while in v0.74 the text mode touches the left and right sides and falls just a few pixels short of the top and bottom of my monitor, resulting in a widened image. (Running 1920x1080 resolution.)

...not really sure what to suggest or anything, I just felt I should point that out.