Widescreen Gaming Forum

As documented on this site, BGE's built-in letterboxing causes it to stretch the whole image at 16x10, which pretty much sucks. After a little sleuthing I discovered Powerstrip, whcih allowed me to create a custom 1440x1050 resolution, which, combined with "Maintain Aspect Ration" in the Catalyst Control Panel allowes me to play the game in the proper aspect ration, but letterboxed and pillarboxed, the image a bit smaller than I'd like.

My question - and I hope it's not something that's been covered already - is whether it's possible to now zoom, stretch, or crop my moniter's display while playing BGE, which would create the illusion of a non-boxed game. Kind of like how HDTVs let you stretch and zoom the picture. My moniter, a Samsung 226bw, doesn't have any horizontal or vertical stretch options in the control panel, and I can't find much in CCC.

Some tutorials like this one,
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/node/
basically go through what I did, but the ending bits about front porch/back porch are just over my head, and I dunno if that's what I'm after.

So, is there any third-party software that will give me the zoomed, non-boxed image I want, or can such a result be achieved from Powerstrip?

Edit : Overscan! That's what I'm after. But it's not natively supported by my monitor.

What works for some people is setting up a custom resolution that's actually taller than your screen.

E.g. see if you can setup a custom resolution of 1680x1260. What may happen is that your video card wil end up centering the image and black bars will essentially be drawn off the screen - resulting in you seeing just the letterbox section perfectly fitting on your monitor. However, your video card might just end up downscaling the image and squashing it to fit. Never know until you try though.

Unfortuantely, beyond that I don't think there's much you can do. I don't know of anything outside of driver options that allows you to control scaling, zooming, etc.

P.S. 1440x1050 isn't actually 4:3 - so the game would still be very mildly distorted as that resolution. 1400x1050 is 4:3.