Widescreen Gaming Forum

I'm relatively new to widescreen gaming. I've a 20inch Saumsung 204bw and I managed to get Doom3 running in widescreen (which is nice) thanks to this site.

But I have several games I want to play that cannot be widescreened (according to WSGF).

KOTOR
Max Payne 2
Thief 2

and probably lots of my other oldies I haven't installed on this new machine:
Vista Home Premium running on
Core 2 Duo E6600
2Gb Ram
nVidia 8800GTS 320Mb

Is there a way to force sidebars so that the games aren't stretched like you can get with TV shows that are not widescreen on widescreen TVs ?

If you use windows XP and latest versions of nvidia forceware drivers, then the only way to do it is to have a monitor that supports doing this on its own.
The nvidia drivers are busted for XP since about December and only if you have one of the older drivers, or if you are the one in 100 that has no problems for some reason, you can do the following:
Go to the Nvidia Control Panel.

Under Display, if you see on the left side something called Change Flat Panel Scaling, go there, click on Use Nvidia scaling with fixed aspect ratio. Then Click Apply, if the choice remains there after you click apply, you are set.

If under Display (always in the Nvidia Control Panel), you don't see a Change Flat Panel Scaling, then click on Manage Custom Resolutions, then clear the box that says Treat as HDTV. Click on Apply. Then you should have the previously mentioned Change Flat PAnel Scaling option.

Well I'm using Vista but I found out how to do it with the nVida control panel, thanks.

Yes, Vista has no problems with it.

You are welcome.

Note that there is a widescreen hack for KOTOR here.

That said it only works 100% with a select few resolutions. A lot of resolutions will just crash staight out, with some other resolutions the game will run but conversation text won't show up (which makes the game unplayable since you can't see your response choices). Of hand I know 1920x1080 works ok, but I'm not sure of other ones that work.