how to make full screen games black borders disappear

i think I am not going to bother i am going to try dxwnd and dgvoodo2 at the same time and see if they work perfect together just need to wait for an answer on the dxwnd discussion page

Winuser said:

That's how I setup my very first wide screen tv. In my mind, I paid for wide screen and I want what I paid for. It did take a little getting use to. Now it drives me batty when the videos are stretched.

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Today's 19" monitors are the same height as old 14" monitors (good old 19" 4:3 CRT monitors had the same height as a 24" 16:9 monitor). So naturally you want to make the most of it. Playing games or watching 4:3 movies with black bars is like using an old 14" monitor and very annoying. That's why I prefer everything stretched to fill the screen. Thankfully my Sony 19" TV has 1440x900 resolution (16:10) and I get more screen data than the typical 1366x768 19" monitors. Also stretching from 4:3 to 16:10 produces less distortion than stretching 4:3 to 16:9. Going from old monitor 1280x1024 to new monitor 1366x768 is very inconvenient and takes some time to get used to. You literally get 2/3 of the screen area you had before. Imagine the same resolution 1366x768 on an old 4:3 monitor with black bars top and bottom! Nightmare! Even worse, on a 16:9 monitor there are no black bars to expand the picture, it is cropped by the monitor frame! There is nothing you can do to get more screen area except to buy a 16:10 model or a more expensive 16:9 with higher native resolution.

Fun Fact: Good old MS-DOS games were at 320x200 resolution (CGA, EGA, VGA), which has aspect ratio of 16:10, but was stretched vertically to fill the 4:3 screen so it didn't look annoying, except of course of the lack of colors in EGA or CGA modes. Later some VGA games used Mode X (320x240 256 colors) which was 4:3 and looked nicer than standard VGA 320x200 256 colors. It also showed more game data at the same area.


Just in case you were wondering how Windows 11 would look like at EGA 320x200 16 colors (with dithering).



And here is VGA 640x480 16 million colors version (such as on an old 14" CRT 640x480 monitor). Difficult to use, but doable. At least until your patience runs out

i'm going to try DxWnd + dgVoodoo2 and see if they work and not get any problems with alt tab crash

Just curious. What games are you trying to play full screen and how? If they are old Windows 98 games you can create a virtual machine in Hyper-V or VirtualBox or other application and install Windows 98 there. Then stretch the virtual desktop to fill your screen and switch the virtual machine to full screen to hide Windows 11 interface. I use a Windows 98 virtual machine with Glide emulator (3dfx proprietary hardware acceleration) to play Rayman 2 and other old games.

theme park inc and theme park world going to try both programmes together like i said and see what happens

Bingo! Like I said it is a Windows XP era game that also runs on Windows 95 and 98. Try the utilities you said, but I think it will be better if you install it on a Windows 98 or XP virtual machine. Switch the virtual machine to full screen and then select to stretch to fill the screen. Some years ago virtual machines didn't support 3D hardware acceleration and performance sucked. Now they support DirectX and Glide (with a Glide wrapper) and games look perfect. They also support OpenGL for a few games that have it but most require DirectX. I use VMware Workstation with the VMware SVGA II drivers (part of VMware Tools) and 3D acceleration enabled. Last time I checked, VMware Workstation cannot automatically download latest VMware Tools (probably the servers changed), but you can download them manually and install them. They come as an ISO (CD image) which you open with the virtual CD-ROM and start Setup.

spapakons said:

Bingo! Like I said it is a Windows XP era game that also runs on Windows 95 and 98. Try the utilities you said, but I think it will be better if you install it on a Windows 98 or XP virtual machine. Switch the virtual machine to full screen and then select to stretch to fill the screen. Some years ago virtual machines didn't support 3D hardware acceleration and performance sucked. Now they support DirectX and Glide (with a Glide wrapper) and games look perfect. They also support OpenGL for a few games that have it but most require DirectX. I use VMware Workstation with the VMware SVGA II drivers (part of VMware Tools) and 3D acceleration enabled. Last time I checked, VMware Workstation cannot automatically download latest VMware Tools (probably the servers changed), but you can download them manually and install them. They come as an ISO (CD image) which you open with the virtual CD-ROM and start Setup.

Client Challenge

Index of tools/releases/latest/windows/

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will this work because I don't know how to use this programme as I have never used this programme before

All of methods that mentioned here can be work.
All you have to do is trying them.

VMware is an application that emulates an old computer and lets you define the amount of RAM (up to 2/3 your system RAM) and the size of a virtual disk. You can also open the Windows 98 or XP ISO and create the appropriate virtual machine automatically. Then the ISO is loaded on the virtual CD-ROM drive and Setup begins. Just follow the on screen instructions and type the Windows key when prompted. After installation is complete, select the VMware Tools ISO to install the necessary drivers and utilities. Then you can open the game ISO to install it on the virtual machine.

PS: Maximum RAM supported by Windows 98 without patching is 512MB. If you put more you will have incompatibilities and BSODs. Also maximum disk is 32GB formatted as FAT32, but this is done automatically during setup. Maximum RAM supported by Windows XP without patching is 4GB (usable only 3.25GB, the rest address space is reserved for the system).

i'm going to try dxwnd and dgvoodo2 together first and then if this doesn't work i will give VMwear a try

I hope they work because their use is simpler than creating a virtual machine.