Is it possible to scale 640x480 window to full screen?

[Dwayne_Reid]

Good day to all.

I am running a Win98 guest on a Win-7 Pro 64-bit host.  This is to allow me to use some legacy apps that don't run on newer operating systems.

My current problem is that the app in question is hard-coded for a 640 x 480 VGA monitor.  This is no problem on my real Win98 boxes - the video card and monitor scale that small screen to full height.  Obviously, the width is not full screen on my wide-screen monitor and that just doesn't matter.

However, the 640x480 screen does NOT scale to full screen in VMware Player.  My native screen resolution is 1366x768 (Alienware netbook) and the resulting 640x480 image in the middle of the screen is just too small to work with.

Is there any way to have VMware Player expand that 640x480 image to full height?

Alternatively, does the VMware video driver support any VESA modes?

Any guidance or suggestions gratefully accepted.

Many thanks!

dwayne

PS - I can install the current release of Workstation if that helps in any way.  But I was hoping to stay with Player - I have only a single workstation license and want to deploy this to three machines.

dwayne

[gszoniec]

You need to install VMware Tools to auto-resize screen

in full-screen mode.

[Dwayne_Reid]

Many thanks for the suggestion.

I am using the most current version of VMware Player and had installed VMware Tools when I created the VM.  I did upgrade Tools to the most current version yesterday but that did not change anything.

Question: is there some way to tell VMware Player how to resize the screen?

The app is running in full-screen mode at 640 x 480 - what I see is that window in the middle of the display with a huge black border surrounding it on all sides.  I need to convince VMware to scale that window to expand to fit the available display area (at least, grow taller to fit the height).

Any guidance that you can give me is greatly appreciated.

Many thanks!

dwayne

[WoodyZ]

I just tested a Windows 98 SE VM with VMware Tools installed running under VMware Player, VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion and in both VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion, Windows 98 SE in Full Screen would scale to take up the full size at 640x480 with small black borders on the sides but not the top/bottom however under VMware Player the exact same VM would not scale and remained small, centered and with wide black borders all around.

So based only on that observation I'd say that VMware Player does not support scaling like with VMware Workstation (or VMware Fusion) and you're out of luck with VMware Player if you want it scaled.

There may be a .vmx parameter that would allow VMware Player to do as it does in VMware Workstation however I do not know it, if it does exist, so maybe someone else that knows will either confirm my observational conclusion or provide additional steps that need to be taken.

[Justinian]

Hi, I have the exact same problem as dwayne. How I wish Vmware Player would include this scale mode feature in the near future. It is found in VirtualBox but unfortunately Win98 guest addition is not supported and it runs slowly and somewhat less stably.

[WoodyZ]

The last time tested this was with VMware Player 3.1.4 and I have not tested it with VMware Player 4.  If it's still the same with the latest release of VMware Player then I'd assume that VMware has no intention of allowing this functionality in VMware Player and wants Users to purchase VMware Workstation when needing this feature.  IMO that is the only logical explanation for disallowing it in VMware Player.

[ed168]

Player 4.01 does not scale the guest resolution up.

With VM Tools installed it automaticly readjust the guest's desktop resolution to match the host's window size, wether full screen or window mode.

But if an old program which hard codes the full screen resolution as 640x480, black bars are used to fill the full screen display or if in window mode the display is automaticly adjusted to 640x480.

Workstation 8 has a "stretch guest display" option to upscale the image but does not maintain the aspect ratio if the host display is a different ratio making the result unappealing. Previous versions may have preserved the aspect ratio but the devs decided to change it then.