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Matrox G450 + DVI cable = squashed image

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First post, by retro games 100

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I connect a DVI cable to my G450 card. This cable goes to my LCD, which is marked DVI-D. When I turn on the PC, the image looks squashed: it has large black/blank "letterbox areas" at the top and bottom of the screen. The BIOS POST text is squashed in to the centre of the screen. When the Windows 98 desktop appears, the squashed image problem disappears. However, if I then "restart in DOS mode", the squashed image problem reappears.

I can circumvent this problem by attaching a "gizmo" to the G450 DVI port. This gizmo is a "converter adaptor thingy" which allows you to connect a conventional 15-pin VGA cable to it. So, this VGA cable then goes in to the VGA port on my LCD. Problem fixed, but I think it is a shame that I cannot use my DVI cabling!

Any ideas gratefully received, thank you, best regards, Robert.

Reply 1 of 1, by idspispopd

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Old post, but since nobody answered I'll give it a try.
My guess is that neither the G450 nor the LCD is able to do resolution scaling when using DVI-D, or at least not in pure DOS.
VGA text mode uses 720x400 pixels. Since the screen is supposed to be 4:3 the pixels are not supposed to be square so the image will look squashed when the pixels are directly mapped on a TFT with square pixels.

See http://www.matrox.com/graphics/media/pdf/prod … en_millg450.pdf page 38:

Problem: Display on digital monitor appears blurry or uses only a portion of the screen Cause: You may be using a lower display […]
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Problem: Display on digital monitor appears blurry or uses only a portion of the screen
Cause: You may be using a lower display resolution than what your digital monitor supports. If your
monitor supports display scaling, the image on your screen may appear blurry. If display
scaling isn’t supported, the display may use only a portion of your screen.
Solution: Select the highest display resolution available. This generally results in better image quality.

Did you check what happens when you switch to a different resolution than the native resolution of the TFT within Windows?

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