My current monitor displays in 1360 x 768, which is a 16:9 ratio. I play a lot of older games from the early days of Windows DOS, 95, etc. These older games all run in 4:3 resolutions, and when I play them the image ends up getting stretched out to fill my screen. Up to now I've just put up with it, but recently I've been wanting to play them in their proper scale so the image quality will look the best.
After several hours of research and messing with all sorts of settings I figured out more or less how to get the results I wanted, but there were two little problems. One, even though I got my computer to display in 1024 x 768, a 4:3 resolution, the actual image goes just a little above and below the borders of my physical monitor. Even though the vertical number of pixels has stayed the same (768) it doesn't fit my screen quite right. The second problem I've got is that it's quite frankly a lot of hassle to switch around all those settings just to get a mostly correct image.
So now I think the best option is to get a second monitor. One which naturally displays in a 4:3 resolution, probably 1024 x 768, and play my older games on that by running dual displays. I already did the necessary research to figure out how to do that, but I'm still a little worried. I don't want to drop money on a second monitor just to find out that it has the same problems with the resolution not scaling to fit the screen properly.
Can anyone explain what might have gone wrong to make the image not display correctly on my current monitor when I got it running at 1024 x 768? Or at least can someone who knows better than me confirm that as long as I get a monitor that natively runs in a 4:3 resolution then I should have no problems with getting those older games to scale properly? And the exact size of the screen shouldn't make much difference, should it (meaning if it's 8" or 12" or 19" etc)?
Also as a small side question, I know that if I run dual monitors than I'll have to select one as my "primary display" in the control panel so that my computer knows which monitor to display the game on. But since I also play newer games which work better with my 16:9 screen, will I have to switch the primary display back and forth every time before I launch those games? Or is there a way to customize each game to automatically switch that perhaps?
After several hours of research and messing with all sorts of settings I figured out more or less how to get the results I wanted, but there were two little problems. One, even though I got my computer to display in 1024 x 768, a 4:3 resolution, the actual image goes just a little above and below the borders of my physical monitor. Even though the vertical number of pixels has stayed the same (768) it doesn't fit my screen quite right. The second problem I've got is that it's quite frankly a lot of hassle to switch around all those settings just to get a mostly correct image.
So now I think the best option is to get a second monitor. One which naturally displays in a 4:3 resolution, probably 1024 x 768, and play my older games on that by running dual displays. I already did the necessary research to figure out how to do that, but I'm still a little worried. I don't want to drop money on a second monitor just to find out that it has the same problems with the resolution not scaling to fit the screen properly.
Can anyone explain what might have gone wrong to make the image not display correctly on my current monitor when I got it running at 1024 x 768? Or at least can someone who knows better than me confirm that as long as I get a monitor that natively runs in a 4:3 resolution then I should have no problems with getting those older games to scale properly? And the exact size of the screen shouldn't make much difference, should it (meaning if it's 8" or 12" or 19" etc)?
Also as a small side question, I know that if I run dual monitors than I'll have to select one as my "primary display" in the control panel so that my computer knows which monitor to display the game on. But since I also play newer games which work better with my 16:9 screen, will I have to switch the primary display back and forth every time before I launch those games? Or is there a way to customize each game to automatically switch that perhaps?