Can WinXP guest have higher res display than my monitor?

[wplate]

I only have 20" (1680x1050) displays connected to the MacPro that is running Fusion 3.0.1 but I would like to test an application in my Windows XP guest that wants to have a larger display. How can I set my guest's display to be higher than my physical display, for example 1920x1200? I know I have seen Linux guests have higher res displays and they appear nice and scaled down in vmware, but my Windows XP guest's display takes on the dimensions of my vmware window and always displays pixels one for one.

[WoodyZ · Accepted solution]

The image of the Virtual Machine window below was taken with Grab and is 665 × 460 pixels (the actual size of the Virtual Machine window) however the resolution in the Windows XP Guest is set to 1920 x 1200 and I turned on Magnifier so I could show you the Display Settings dialog box showing you the higher resolution and native resolution of my MacBook Pro is only 1440 x 900. I was able to accomplish this by adding the following lines to the Virtual Machine's .vmx configuration file and the Virtual Machine must be shutdown, not suspended, and Fusion closed when you edit the .vmx configuration file.

monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = "TRUE"
monitor.virtual_exec = "hardware"

Note that you will not have use of some of the VMware Tools functions with these parameters added to the configuration file however it will allow you to achieve a resolution higher then the Host's native resolution and with the Virtual Machine windowed.

Now if you can work in Full Screen view then you should be able to achieve the higher resolution without adding these parameters however I got the impression you wanted it windowed hence why the information being presented.

As to where is the .vmx file search the VMware Help File for Virtual Machine Package or look at

Note that the status bar in the image says VMware Tools is not installed however they are and that message is a result of adding the two parameters so don't try installing VMware Tools because the message is misleading in this case use.