First post, by hwh
So, I've been mulling over the shortscreen issue for a while now. It's not good to have letterboxing...and ATM I have a 5:4 screen, which is great on 4:3 letterboxing but does a pretty bad job on 4:3 resolutions like 1024x768. Not a bad screen, not a great screen, get to the point.
If I get a 1366x768 and run something in 1024x768, it should be centered, I suppose. But what I am wondering is will it be sharp? Technically there shouldn't be any "scaling" because the vertical pixels are 1:1 and there are plenty (171) of pixels on the side into which this 1024x768 container might fit. Evenly. But is that how it works? Will a screen vainly try to split this 342 pixel vertical bar somehow to make it blurry?
So, I decided to test this with my 5:4 monitor (1280x1024). I set a resolution of 1024x1024. Well...the screen and driver responded by zooming in on this 1024 width and then giving me areas above and below the screen I can scroll to. 😒 I tried 800x1024. Again, tower shaped blurry picture. I tried it in dosbox and it seemed to work - but I need this to work on any 4:3 software. So the drivers have to be able to do that, if software configured to ask for 1024x768 will just stretch the 1024 across 1366 pixels.
I'm using nvidia drivers on WinXP. So it might be a video card change. Does AMD allow you to toggle scaling? Pretty funny huh, big fancy nvidia doesn't show a basic option like scaling?