Stretch VMWare Player guest OS to fullscreen

15,461

I figured out a not-ideal-but-effective-nonetheless solution/work-around: use Unity.

(Use a third-party tool to) set the host OS resolution to 640x480 (ignoring the Optimal Resolution warning)
Enter Unity in the guest VM
Launch the game from the Unity Start menu

Note: the order of steps is important.

(Optionally auto-hide the taskbar.)

Yay! The game runs at full-screen on the guest OS instead of a tiny letter- and pillar-boxed screen. Now the only problem is that the 16-bit game uses 100% CPU, but there’s not much that can be done about that.

Fullscreen host capture of guest VM running in Unity mode:

Fullscreen host capture of guest VM running in Unity mode

15,461

Synetech

Sadly, I’ve become soured by the SE network. It started great, but went downhill. Some mods are too aggressive/bias, policies are arbitrarily/capriciously/selectively applied, and some users treat the sites as MMOGs, “rep-whoring”, copying others’ work, and posting random guesses to game the system by abusing and exploiting auto-bounty assignment. I care(d) about the integrity of the site, so I feel anywhere that allows such disreputable behavior isn’t somewhere worth staying. My OCD not withstanding, I won’t be contributing much here anymore and will find somewhere else to help people. I apologize to all of the people I would have helped here in the future. Press the chemise key to continue… 😈 Images As a visual-learner, I often add images to my posts to make them more effective. Sometimes I take photos, sometimes I create them with software, sometimes I find them through Google Images or Wikipedia. Mod I’ve been asked hey bro, y u no b mod? get u POWR! impr0ve site (or some other variation). I had considered it and was even tempted to run a few times, but I just have too much to do already, so I can’t take on that kind of commitment when I know I won’t be able to do as good a job as I’d like, or as Sweet Brown would say, ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat. Besides, as the behavior of the other mods became more and more apparent, I realized that it would be pointless.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Synetech almost 2 years

I’m using VMWare Player to play an old 16-bit Windows game. Unfortunately the game uses only 640x480 and I cannot figure out how to stretch the VM window to full-screen on the host. I set the guest OS to 640x480, but the screen is still small, in the middle of the screen as seen in figure 1.

I even tried setting the compatibility mode to Windows 95 and 640x480, but it has no effect (figure 2) and looks exactly the same as when I set the VM to full-screen (1366x768 on the laptop) and start the game normally.

There are few references to stretching a VM. One page mentions setting a Stretch Guest option, but there is no such option, at least not in VMWare Player 4.0.3.

^{I know that VirtualBox has a stretching option, but I’m trying to find a solution for VMWare (Player, not Workstation).}

Figure 1: Guest OS is pillar-boxed

Figure 2: Using compatibility mode
- nixda over 10 years
  
  Interesting! Has something changed in this regards with newer VMware Player 6 (and new Vmware Tools)? Also, I can assure that you can stretch 16-bit applications to fullscreen using Stretch guest + VMware Workstation 7.xx and above + VMware Tools. When back at work I will try it with a Player too.
- Synetech over 10 years
  
  This was with VMPlayer 4; maybe they’ve enhanced it since then.
- nixda over 10 years
  
  Have checked it. Unfortunately they haven't added the "Stretch guest" option in VMware Player 6
- Synetech over 10 years
  
  I guess we’ll have just have to use the work-around below until they do. ◔̯◔
trip0d199 over 7 years

Unfortunately, Unity is not supported for Linux guests.