Hi,
I'm looking to but a Dell Latitude D800. It comes with an FX 5650. I want it mainly for Windows 98. Does anyone know if the video driver can be set up to maintain the aspect ratio for games that don't support wide screen?
Thank you.
The Dell D800 is an oddball display. True widescreen are 16/9 (like 1600x 900) or 1.78 ratio. That Dell is 1.6 ratio (1680x1050).
4:3 ratio games that do not support wide screen will either be with black bars on each side (typical) or possibly stretched to fit width, but that stretch would make things look short and fat 😀
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
Horun wrote on 2024-06-30, 02:08:The Dell D800 is an oddball display. True widescreen are 16/9 (like 1600x 900) or 1.78 ratio. That Dell is 1.6 ratio (1680x1050).
1680x1050 was a fairly common resolution in the mid-2000s... and it is the same 16:10 aspect ratio as 1920x1200, 1440x900, 1280x800, which were also common at the time. The original widescreens for computers were all 16:10. Both in laptops starting around 2005-6ish and in desktop monitors where they replaced 5:4 (1280x1024) and 4:3 (1024x768/1600x1200) resolutions. Plenty of people (Apple, Samsung, Dell, etc) had ~20-22" 1680x1050 monitors; I have a Samsung T220HD from 2008 in my closet that's 1680x1050.
Then the industry discovered they could chop off some pixels, adopt TV 16:9 resolutions, and market those as HD/"full HD". So 1920x1080 replaced 1920x1200, 1600x900 replaced 1680x1050, 1366x768 replaced... 1440x900, and 1280x720 replaced 1280x800. (Then over time, 1600x900 and 1280x720 largely vanished, leaving only the two TV resolutions)
(And then somehow, people came to believe that those 16:9 monstrosities were "true widescreen" when in reality they were worse in every way than the 16:10 resolutions they replaced except for watching 16:9 videos. Interestingly, to their credit, Apple stuck to 16:10 on all their laptops except the 11" MacBook Air even as the rest of the industry jumped off the 16:9 downgrade cliff. And even today's Mac panels with notches are 16:10 + the menu bar notch area)
The one I found on ebay seems to be an option with 1200x800 resolution. But the question is if the drivers would let me force it to maintain the aspect ratio.
