I personally tend to use a widescreen monitor with XP or newer. But it really depends on the games you play wether or not they are meant for widescreen resolutions.

Roughly speaking, if you intend to play games from 2005 or newer, you might want to use a widescreen monitor.

Most games older than that don't natively support widescreen resolutions.

From what I've found, most 19" LCD monitors seem to use 1280x1024 which is 5:4 rather than 4:3. Granted, 1280x1024 was a somewhat common resolution (certainly more common than 1280x960 for some reason) and most programs/games from the Win98/XP era support that resolution. But if you are running other lower 4:3 resolutions (eg 640x480, 800x600, etc) things may look janky/skinny/bad when scaled to 1280x1024. Also I've found that most LCD monitors of that era tend to have shoddy internal scalers, which doesn't help.

There were some higher end LCD monitors that ran 1600x1200 (typically they were 20" monitors). That is of course a 4:3 aspect ratio, but will be a fair bit harder to find than a 19" LCD. Another option is to find a 24" widescreen monitor (eg 1920x1200) which supports pixel perfect 1600x1200 (black bars on left & right, no stretching). From your post, I'm not sure if this is what you're already doing...

In regards to you question about loosing anything... I find that most XP era games look fine on 4:3 even if they support widescreen. And many of the newer XP era games that are BETTER on widescreen... tend to work fine in Windows 10 on modern hardware.

bZbZbZ wrote on 2020-12-28, 06:13:

And many of the newer XP era games that are BETTER on widescreen... tend to work fine in Windows 10 on modern hardware.

With the exception of anything utilizing DRM that Windows 10 strips.

I am going to check out my monitor and see if it will do 1600x1200 and if not, switch to the 19" that I know will do that for 4:3.

It depends on the size of the monitor / resolution you want. 4:3 pretty much ends at 20-21" 1600x1200 (there are some expensive and rare exceptions to this). Widescreen desktop monitors can be found starting from 15-17", but they are too small in my opinion. I wouldn't advise any widescreen monitor <21".

Lots of XP games can do widescreen natively or with patches. For those who cannot, it is good to have a monitor that has an "aspect" mode, but most modern GPU drivers can force aspect mode in software.

In short, I see no issue with widescreen monitors on XP and for XP games.

I've recently gone the other way, upgrading my 17" 5:4 screens to 21" wide screen.
If I'm really honest I don't really notice much difference between the 2 aspect ratios, GTA SA is probably the newest game I play as a reference.
Dos on the other hand is a mixed bad. Top down games like Warcraft don't look bad stretched out but 1st person perspective like Doom and Duke3d look terrible IMHO.

As for the 4:3 vs 5:4 , If you were happy playing games on a very wrong widescreen aspect, i doubt you'll notice the subtle difference between 4:3 and 5:4

Newest game I play is something like GTA SA a so using that as an example

I think it's a personal preference. I prefer widescreen resolutions even on older operating systems (such as OS/2 Warp, NT 3.51, and Win9x). My 27" Widescreen monitor handles VGA and SVGA resolutions just fine with letter boxing and pretty good pixel scaling, so I can use the screen in many DOS and older Windows applications. I don't mind the letterboxing.

The only issue I have is that most of my video cards do not pre-format text modes and low-resolution graphics with the right signals for my monitor to scale them properly. I end up with distorted text columns and graphics as the monitor spreads the image across the screen (very annoying). My ATI Radeon x1900 GT is the only graphics card I own that handles these modes properly in conjunction with my widescreen monitor.

On the other hand, if you prefer 4:3 monitors or hate letterboxing, you really won't go wrong with a square monitor. You could even use it with Windows 10 or macOS without too much issue (you'll just lose some screen real-estate).

A widescreen monitor that's capable of displaying 4:3 (or 5:4) content in the proper aspect ratio is perfectly fine... I'm okay with the resulting black bars (letterboxing... or rather reverse letterboxing??) on the left and right. What bothers me are the widescreen monitors that insist on stretching all content to fill the entire screen, which results in everything appearing 'fat'.

A stretch fill of 4:3 content onto a 5:4 screen (~7% too tall) isn't horribly noticeable, but a stretch of 4:3 content onto 16:10 (20% too wide) or 16:9 (33% too wide!) looks awful in my opinion.

I've found that lower end monitors made in the early 2000's tend to lack proper ASPECT settings, and often have shoddy pixel scaling as well. So for example, displaying DOS/Win9x content (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, etc) stretched to fill a 1440x900 monitor usually looks terrible.

I'd say, depends on the exact era for that XP machine. For anything 2006 and before (Radeon X1000 or Geforce 7) I'd go with 4:3. The games up until then don't necessarily scale well on wide screen. At least not out of the box. Some can get around that with config file editing (Doom 3 and Quake 4 for example), others need community patches/mods. Used 4:3 monitors are generally dirt cheap and make things hassle-free. Some games (the original retail F.E.A.R.) don't like 5:4 so I'd also skip that.

For post 2006 games you can go either way. I for myself would stay on 4:3. A 17" 1280x960 or a 19" 1600x1200.