Display resolution problem on all guests

[wila]

Hi,

I have been using Fusion 6 for a while, ever since the first preview version was released. Works great.

Yesterday however I made the mistake to upgrade to Mavericks, had to do it anyways right?

Background info:

My setup is a mid 2012 Macbook Pro (no retina) with an external screen where I have set the external screen to mirror the laptop screen, external keyboard, external mouse so that my laptop is my workstation. All guests are normally setup to run in Full screen mode. Again works great, have used the setup for years.

I've got pretty bad eyes, so on the big external screen I normally use 1024x768 as a screen resolution, that worked very well over the years.

Enter Mavericks. This no longer works and Fusion 6 ain't helping me either.

Mavericks says my laptop screen now has the option of "Best" - which translates to "Worst" for me or the alternative is the scaled options:

     1440 x 900

     1280 x 800

     1024 x 640

missing in action here is.... 1024 x 768

Mavericks now says my external screen only can do:

     1600x900

     1080p

     720p

As I mirror the screens, the other screen will just match either of what I decide to choose as my main screen.

I've pretty much tried everything. As you can see the internal screen actually does have a 1024 x 640 which comes close, except that - in windows at least - you will run into many applications that no longer fit on the screen as about every developer assumes you have at least 1024 x 768 to work with.

Hmm...

At the long last I found that the best out of the above was to use the 720p resolution.

However for windows that translates into 1280 x 720 as a screen resolution and that's a problem.

Trying to scale windows down to 1024 x 768 gives me black bars on both left and right sides of the screen.

Rebooting the guest with that resolutions makes it force itself back to 1280 x 720, so it seems the guest is forcing itself to take the host screen resolution.

In the past older versions of Workstation and Player could scale the screen to the resolution you wanted to use. It seems that nowadays this no longer works. I tried a few vmx parameters, but no success so far.

Any tips  are welcome.

PS: No need to tip me with "buy a bigger screen" as I sit rather close to the screen and moving my head up/down all the time to oversee the whole screen isn't very ergonomic.

PPS: I'm currently using the windows feature to scale up the text fonts while at 1280 x 720. It "sort of" works, but that's a crude workaround as a lot of the applications that I have to use are not high DPI aware.

--

Wil

[dariusd · Accepted solution]

Hey Wil!

I found a few forum posts discussing magical things that Mavericks will do when the user holds the Option/Alt key down while doing various things in the Displays pane of System Preferences.  Try holding Option when selecting "Scaled", or holding Option and choosing "Detect Displays"... see if either of those get your preferred resolution back and avoid having to reconfigure Fusion.

(Sorry, I don't have a multi-monitor Mac setup that I can try this with, so I'm just posting it as-is and crossing my fingers that it might help.)

Good luck!

--

Darius

[wila]

WoooHoooo!!!!!

Hi Darius,

That works.

Actually I had tried holding down the option key, but not when selecting the "scaled" option, my laptop screen did now offer a lot more resizing options including the 1024 x 768 one.

I owe you big time for that

A very happy camper.

--

Wil