Playing games at 4:3 ratio on a 16:9 screen

[Sentient6]

Is there a way to make a game run a 4:3 resolution with black bars at the sides, instead of the game stretching to fit the screen? I'm mostly talking about old games that don't fully support widescreen resolutions, so they end up stretched and looking awful on a widescreen monitor.

I'm OK with the game working at 4:3 with black bars (if a 16:9 resolution is out of the question), as long as it's not stretched anymore. However when I select a 4:3 resolution in the game's settings, it stretches to fill the screen, and I have no idea how to keep it at 4:3 ratio with the bars...

Any help would be appreciated.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Depends on your screen, and your GPU.

The Dell 2405 and 2410 both allow aspect ratio scaling to be controlled by the monitor, or, if you prefer, by the GPU (if available).

However, a Dell U2311H I have has two settings for scaling - stretched, or 4:3. If set to 4:3, it'll squash any res into 4:3, even the panel native res of 1920x1080. At 'Fill' any res with completely fill the screen. Furthermore, there appears to be no way to get it to stop this behaviour and let the GPU do the work. Which annoys me. A lot.

[Sentient6]

Hm.. Looks like I found out how - in my Nvidia Control Panel, under "Adjust desktop size and position" I checked "Nvidia scaling with fixed aspect ratio". This way, when I set the game's resolution to 1024x768 (or a lower 4:3 res), it's centered instead of stretched.

However, it doesn't seem to work with higher 4:3 resolutions (1200x900, for example) - under that resolution, the screen's back to being stretched.. Maybe it has got to do with the default resolutions of my monitor (which is Chimei 20RD. Native resolution 1600x900). I added some custom ones in the Nvidia panel, but they don't seem to be registering with the game.