Custom screen resolution for a VirtualBox Mac guest?

[Sambot]

TL;DR - How do I set a custom screen resolution for a VirtualBox Mac guest?

I'm in a situation where I need to keep Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6. alive in a VirtualBox setup to run some legacy software. The host machine is a 2013 MacBook Retina 13" running El Capitan (Mac OS X 10.11) Honestly, things are running pretty well... better than expected! The one irritation is that I can't set the resolution to something reasonable.

I've scoured the internet and followed lots of tutorials. The only thing that has been effective, has been this:

To control GOP, use the following VBoxManage command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" VBoxInternal2/EfiGopMode N

Where N can be one of 0,1,2,3,4 referring to the 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900 screen resolution respectively.

While this is useful, I need a custom resolution of 1440x856... which will allow me to put the VM on a 1440x900 display with VirtualBox's top and bottom utility bars exposed without having to scroll the window around.

Is there a way to set a custom screen resolution for a Mac host and guest in VirtualBox?

[loukingjr]

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09. ... 9075479856

[loukingjr]

actually that may not work without guest additions installed and OSX guests have none.

[Sambot]

Thanks! But this seems to have no effect. Here's what I'm doing (maybe I'm missing something?):

In Terminal, I run:

Code: Select all

VBoxManage setextradata "Snow Leopard" "CustomVideoMode1" "1440x856x32"

Then I boot the VM and there's no difference. Is there another step? Thanks!

[loukingjr]

see my last post. ^^^^

[Sambot]

Thanks. So it looks like, without the Guest Additions, I'm screwed?

[loukingjr]

well, you could always select the next smaller screen size. But basically, yes.