Need help with resizing game window in XP Guest

[Franknj229]

I installed XP on a Vista 64 host in order to run older games that won't play on Vista or my Ubuntu guest. Setup was fine. I then installed Myst 10th Anniversary DVD Edition. Installation of that went fine also and it plays fine. The problem is the window size of the game. It is way too small.

If you remember, Myst is played in a window, with it's own auto-hidden menu bar at the top. The window is supposed to be the same size as the display, but mine is barely a quarter of the size.

I have a 23 inch, widescreen monitor. I currently have the resolution at the highest setting for both my monitor (1920x1080) and the XP Guest (1280x960), but no matter what I change the resolutions to, it has no affect on the Myst window. (Well, that's not exactly true. If I lower the monitor resolution, the Myst window gets a bit bigger, but it becomes a distorted widescreen window.)

Any ideas? Thank you.

[Sasquatch]

I know what's wrong. The game uses a fixed resolution, and it won't blow itself up to fit the whole monitor like it would if you could play it on the Host. Instead, you get the same pixel 'size' as your Host has.

Some simple math to explain it a bit more. If you would have a monitor with the optimum resolution of 1600 x 1200, and the game you want to run has a limit of 800 x 600, it would have the same size for the pixels as the monitor has for it's best display. Now if you blow it up so it fills the whole screen, the pixel size would be 4x bigger (horizontal x2, and vertical x2).
Now, VB doesn't do this, it uses the native resolution of the Host to show it's own 'monitor'. Increasing or decreasing the resolution inside the Guest will result in a bigger or smaller VM window.

[Franknj229]

So there's not really much I can do? The image quality is terrible when I increase the VM window size by decreasing the resolution in the guest, but the image is too small if I leave it alone.

Thanks anyway for the explanation.

[Sasquatch]

That's the pain of these large sized digital displays, anything that's not it's native resolution looks ugly.