virtualbox.org

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?

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

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

In Terminal, I run: Then I boot the VM and there's no difference. Is there another step? Thanks!

see my last post. ^^^^

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

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