Does anyone know of a good way to get lower resolution 4x3 games to look good on a widescreen lcd? Does anyone know a of a program or anything that can take the video output of any game and scale it up while maintaining the aspect ratio. For my purposes a program that could scale up the resolution to 1024x768 or possibly better(but possibly impossible), 1200x900 or maybe even just simply running a fullscreen game in a window. Any option that might make a 640x480 game not look like crap on my screen would probably be fine for my immediate purposes.

I have a viewsonic VA1912wb widescreen lcd with a native resolution of 1440x900 and a sapphire radeon 9600xt. I have only found the resolutions of 1440x900, 1360x768, and 1280x768 to use the correct aspect ratio. All the rest stretch and scale, no matter what the driver settings are. 640x480 in particular looks pretty ugly.

I have the 10th anniversary edition of MYST Masterpiece Edition which happens to run fullscreen in 640x480. So far this is the game that bothers me the most. I think if I had the option I would choose to run it in a small window instead of the ugly full screen but I don't think I have even that simple option.

I'm sure that others fair better running lower resolution 4x3 games on widescreen lcds, but I doubt most can create an ideal situation. The ideal situation would probably be to scale the entire screen image up to the native resolution while keeping the correct aspect ratio. I think people with nvidia cards may have this option. However, for everyone else it might be nice if there was some kind of wrapper program that takes the games video output and scales it up to the native resolution while keeping the correct aspect ratio, kind of like a video program like vlc or media player classic can scale up a video of any resolution and keep the aspect ratio.

Maybe some kind of overlay using sdl or opengl or something? For a modern 3d game that might be a little far fetched but for a simple 2d game like MYST it sounds completely reasonable to me. Of course if the nvidia drivers can already do this just fine then maybe it would be better for everyone to just get nvidia cards...or even stick with their crts or at least 4x3 lcds but I don't think that's a reasonable option. Some kind of wrapper or overlay program would be nice no matter what way you look at it.

A simple doubling of resolution isn't going to work with 640x480 on my screen either because that will equal 1280x1024, and my screen can only handle a height of 900 pixels.