Keeping aspect ratios on widescreens?

Hi everyone! I'm new to these forums.

Anyway, I've got a problem that I hope you folks can help me out with. I have an Acer Aspire 2012 WLMi and it's res as you probably know is 1280x800. When I run games at lower resolutions, I notice I only have 2 choices if I run the game at 'standard' resolutions such as 1024x768, which are: Stretch the screen in all directions to fill the screen (which leads to horizontal distortion) or play the game in that resolution, pixel for pixel, which leads to a small screen size. Anyway, my question is: Is there a way to get vertical stretching occuring while maintaining the aspect ratio? I'd like to be able to play some games at 800x600 but still have a large screen (I don't mind having 2 black bars on the left and right side of my screen, but I hate having everything distorted by stretching it to all 4 corners).

Anyway, any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

 

Checkout the Display Properties. SInce this is ATI, it should have an option in the Advanced to disable Screen Stretching. This will give you black bars, but since you don't mind, it should be fine. If it's not there, check the BIOS.

-Vb-

 

Thanks for the reply! But nah, I know about that option already, but when I do turn it off, what it does is if I choose say, 800x600, it uses just that, 800x600 pixels, in a very small square on my screen. What I'm after is somehow to stretch it vertically to the top and bottom of the screen while maintaining the ratio.

 

Unfortunately ATi has very poor support for widescreen laptops. The option to scale image to panel size while maintaining aspect ratio is not on any of their cards, although I've seen a screenshot once of the option, nobody has reported it on any mobile card.

nVidia has this option on most of their mobile cards I believe. It's quite baffling why ATi does not. Maybe if enough of us start hammering them about it they'll include it in a future driver upgrade.