So I've recently been dabbling with virtual machines and have been playing some older games that I have on disc. I'm using a Windows XP virtual machine to play some Windows 95 games, namely 9: The Last Resort. Anyone remember that one? Haha. Anyway, I have to play the game in compatibility mode, using 256 colors and 640x480 display mode. Well when that happens, the game plays in a very small window. My question is, as someone who was too young to really remember playing on original W95 & 98 machines, is that how it used to be? Or was 640x480 a native resolution that would appear full screen on the monitor? I'm kinda new to retro computing so I'm curious about learning as much as I can. Do you guys have any advice on how to get a larger game window or even full screen? I want to play the games as close to the way they were intended to be played as possible. Thanks guys.

Graphics used to be much blockier. Screens also used to be smaller, which makes them look even more blocky on todays big screens. Many old games are in 640x480, and those that are older still still are often as low as 320x200. Your game is almost certainly intended to fill the screen.

However, the shape of the screen it is supposed to fill is 4:3. On a widescreen monitor it should be pillar-boxed, with black bars on left and right. Otherwise everyone gets stretched a lot fatter than is good for them.

You bastard! You just killed my weekend mood by making me feel like a diplodocus... (ಥ‸ಥ)

Well I had to google diplodocus, so perhaps you have been slightly redeemed. ;)

I was born in '92. I remember playing games on a Gateway from 98, but I don't remember details! I'm using a 4:3 monitor for this purpose, but the window I get is still tiny. I don't know if it's because I'm using Windows XP (with 95 compatibility) or if the monitor just won't support 640x480.

Robert DeNiro's game! It's like 7th Guest on crack. Definitely recommended to everyone who likes something "different".

And yes, I think 640x480 used to be the native resolution on most Windows 95 machines. Seems crazy now, doesn't it?

Right! I found The Last Resort a couple of days ago in a thrift store. It was in the jewel case with the manual and stuff, but it doesn't have any titles on the cover! The only reason I even knew it was a game was because it was published by GT Interactive and their logo was on the back. It wasn't until I got home and looked into it that I even knew what I had just bought. Haha. I haven't played too much of it yet, as I'm trying to figure out some technical stuff (hence thread). Luckily it does work on an XP virtual machine.

If the game supports full-screen mode, that should stretch it out (or the monitor may give an error for unsupported resolution, but it should work on a 4:3 monitor). You might also have to play with your monitor settings as it might currently be set to not stretch out lower resolutions (and this may be either through the monitor's menus, or through the driver settings, or both, or neither in the worst case).

What kind of software are you using to manage a virtual machine? Does it present a windows XP desktop inside a window? If so, does it resize the window to 640x480 when you start the game, or does the game appear as a window inside the window?

If it resizes the desktop, the virtual machine software might just be unable or unwilling scale it to your native resolution or to change the resolution to match for a proper fullscreen. There might be relevant preferences for this sort of thing, or maybe you just need to turn on fullscreen manually.

If it shows up as a window on the virtual desktop, the problem is more likely with the game. Don't suppose it has preferences with a windowed/fullscreen option?

I'm using virtualbox and it has worked quite well. I'm currently using vga out from my laptop to an older 4:3 monitor that I have. On that monitor, I can get the Windows XP virtual machine to go to fullscreen at 1024x768 I believe. When I boot up 9: The Last Resort, I have to use the Windows 95 compatibility, run in 256 colors, and in a 640x480 display mode. When I do this, The whole screen goes black and 9 appears in a pretty small window. I mean technically, the whole screen is taken up, but the game is displayed only in a small window. It may be because I am using that vga out, where if I was using a computer hooked up directly to that monitor, I would maybe be able to change the resolution of XP down to 640x480.

I think it's a virtualbox problem then. It has a scaled mode (Host+C) and a fullscreen mode (Host+F). What you want is both at the same time, but I don't know how to do that - it just switches between.

At least in the scaled mode you should be able to resize the window manually. Perhaps there is some external way to stretch it all over the screen?

Yea there is probably re sizable window. I guess I mainly wanted to know how those games used to really run. I guess they were full screen, it's just modern PC problems that prevent it.

So when you guys play older games, from GoG or otherwise, how do you guys play them? Do you guys use older monitors, or do you simply tinker with the resolutions? Do you try to get it just right, or do you just play them when you get something that works?

I have been almost an exclusive console gamer, so now that I'm starting to get into retro pc games, I feel like there are a lot of compatibility issues and it's kind of disheartening.

At least when I tried to play some older games with VMWare, I think normally the games would be in a small "window", unless I set my Windows desktop (the real one, not the XP running inside the virtual machine) also to some low resolution first.

I think those virtual machine applications are not really designed for retro-gaming in mind, so they don't care about such gaming-specific things like the ability to run an application on a lower resolution in full screen (zoomed). I didn't find the virtual machine apps (I've tried VMWare and VirtualBox) that good for retro-gaming.
GOG games are designed to run on modern Windows versions and modern PCs (that's the whole business idea for GOG selling those old classics, ie. so that you wouldn't have to tinker with them), so there is no need to try to run them on virtual machines. What Windows version are you using, and what kind of computer? Most GOG games should probably run fine on it as is.

For non-GOG games, or a few GOG games that do have issues on the latest Windows versions or modern graphics cards or the CPU speed (e.g. Interstate '76, Alone In The Dark The New Nightmare etc.), I might play them on some older PC I have, possibly running Windows XP. Quite often the problem is not necessarily the Windows version, but e.g. the graphics drivers.

I tried virtual machines before (mainly VMWare), but I feel they are not really that good solution for trying to get old games running, even if sometimes it might work passably (mostly not, in my experience). Maybe Wine running in Linux is a better solution for the problematic games?

Sorry, I should have clarified. I don't use virtual machines for GoG games, but sometimes you can still mess with resolutions and things, particularly games that used DOS.

Your issue here is with virtualbox, I don't think 640x480 as such should be a problem.

In any case it can always be scaled up. Scaling up 2x has no ill effects on the image quality. 320x200 is more annoying because its pixels are not square unlike pixels on any screen these days. Without any special attention the games in 320x200 look vertically squashed. Simply stretching it to 320x240 will look much distorted. Scaling further up helps some more. The best would be to scale them 5x horizontally and 6x vertically, but that will be as much as 1600x1200 then, and my screen isn't even that tall.

Widescreen also causes me grief because my screen isn't smart enough to display 4:3 modes pillar-boxed without manual interaction, I'm too lazy to do that, and I can't bear to watch them horizontally stretched to that extent. Fortunately I'm perfectly willing to spend a lot of effort to avoid a little bit of work.

My solution involves custom screenmodes for 856x400 and 856x480 and a modified SDL library under DOSBox and ScummVM that never picks a non-wide mode for a "best resolution". Instead of a perfect match it will then pick one of my modes for their correct height (320x200 scaled normal2x becomes 640x400). This pillar-boxes the graphics in the middle and the monitor does all the aspect-correcting scaling. I find this works out best, and the resulting aspect is less than 1% off.

Yes, I probably spend more time setting games up than playing them.

Some good.advice there. Getting old games working is an art in itself. The os, drivers, third party api's etc. Can be a nightmare. Don't be disheartened, consoles are a.snapshot in time, rarely having the ability to play anything before and after, a pc gives you a lot more flexibility, but does require that you put the effort in.

For vm's they are great in business environment, but for gaming I wouldn't recommend it. Depending on the game, and it might take some googling, there are solutions, glide wrappers, engine ports, mods, patches etc. There are options. As for this game, I don't know it so cant advise, but most older.games.do lock at lower resolutions, if your old like me you will remember 8 bit graphics, ega and such like before vga!

Good luck, if I get time might have a look myself at this one.