how to make full screen games black borders disappear

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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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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spapakons said:

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. This is one reason I still enjoy playing games like Roblox on a 16:10 display. Many Roblox experiences have fairly simple graphics and colourful environments and same for delta from dltaexecutor, so the slight stretching is barely noticeable during gameplay. The extra vertical space also makes the interface feel less cramped, especially in games with inventories, chat windows, or building tools. For casual gaming, I'd much rather have the game fill the entire screen than stare at black bars on the sides.

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Just in case you were wondering how Windows 11 would look like at EGA 320x200 16 colors (with dithering). Index of tools/releases/latest/windows/dltaexecutor

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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

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