21. September 2014, 18:25:56

#5

JDoranQuote

I never saw/read about a fix, after the ones I tried and listed in this thread, but TBH I gave up ages back, as my laptop is fast enough to run anything I want on it at either stetched full screen, or 1:1 pixels at 1024x768 (the 4:3 setting that older games insist upon, and also the resolution I run DOSBox at), so I stopped looking. I did intend to restore the laptop to it's factory state, so that it should have the working enlarge-screen-but-keep-the-aspect-ratio function, and then I'd try to track down which Windows update (or possibly GFX driver update, but I'm sure I've never updated the GFX driver) caused the problem. Or else I'd do it manually, instead of using the built in Hewlett Packard restore-to-factory-default function, I might have formatted the laptop, and installed the drivers, checking at every step to see when the aspect ratio feature got disabled, but in the end I never bothered, as:

a) Knowing Microsoft, it was probably a critical (hah!) update, something mandatory that you *have* to install or Windows can't be updated further,

and

b)  I couldn't be bothered, as I'm sick of stupid problems that always lead back to Windows. The laptop works fine, at least with every game I use in it, so that's that.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. Maybe Microsoft/AMD/Hewlett Packard have released a fix for it by now, but I don't know of any. I'd be surprised if any of the three had actually formally admitted that it was even a problem. But it's put me buying a HP laptop in future, every laptop I've seen this problem on has been a HP laptop, is yours?

22. September 2014, 09:11:48

#6

NdrakeQuote

I found some people saying that the "Maintain Aspect Ratio" Feature was removed from the driver altogether. It's the most probable explanation I could gather. That's a definite "never again AMD" for me.
I'm on an acer laptop but staying away form HP is also a good idea as I've seen a case of inexplicable overheating when HP claimed two times to have fixed it after it was sent in to support.

1024x768 is no solution for isometric games like the infinity engine ones because that makes all the GUI and fonts way too small.

22. September 2014, 19:05:24

#7

JDoranQuote

Quote by Ndrake:

I found some people saying that the "Maintain Aspect Ratio" Feature was removed from the driver altogether. It's the most probable explanation I could gather.

That might well be true, but I can't for the life of me think why they would choose to remove a feature that is (a) useful, and (b) actually works. If it was something that was glitchy, then fair enough, but from what I can remember it worked very well.

And yes, it's a *huge* push for me towards nVidia, too.

31. December 2014, 10:23:22

#8

IvanDolvicQuote

With the latest Catalyst driver the scaling options are no longer greyed out in native resolution - hower it still doesn't work. The picture still gets stretched. What's even worse: the trick to set a low resolution and change the scaling options does not work anymore. -_-

It gets back to "normal" when you connect a D-SUB cable, but I don't really want to use them anymore. Sad times for old games.

For DOS games there a really simple resolution. You just need to change in the dosbox.conf file the following lines:
fullresolution=desktop
output=overlay

31. December 2014, 17:17:55

#9

JDoranQuote

Thanks for that, mate. What is a 'D-SUB cable', though, please?

Also, are you having this problem on a Hewlett Packard laptop (the only machines I've seen this problem on), or is it a different manufacturer, or a desktop?