Telika: I did try it. It's a decent solution (I'm keeping it by default), but it still displays the older games in a very tiny square, middle in the screen. Depending on the game, it's not much better than a stretched fullscreen. At least not for the likes of Master of Magic. Maybe more recent games, with higher resolutions, look better on that mode.
But I am still trying to find a way to enable the proper "maintain aspect ratio" mode.
Master of Magic is a DOSBox game and that should be an easy fix. You can get DOSBox to scale the game (and maintain aspect ratio) instead of trying to get the GPU to do it.
Edit the .conf file(s) in the game's directory so that "Fullresolution=0x0". 0x0 is shorthand for "whatever resolution Windows is at right now".
You should also change output to something like ddraw or opengl (whichever works better for you, ddraw performs better on my laptop).
Finally, scroll down a bit and change it so that "aspect=true". Optionally, you can also change the scaler to something like normal3x. This will reduce the blurring caused by the bilinear scaling a little bit.
FloKaj: Actually there is no major difference between "maintain aspect ratio" and "scale image to full panel size" as far as i know.
Apart from the fact that maintain aspect ratio
maintains the aspect ratio.
FloKaj: Lets say your game has a max. resolution of 800x600.
Your screen is 1366x768.
Now you would like to get the game stretched to 800x768 so you have only black borders at the left and right side ?
Correct ?
No, incorrect. Maintain aspect ratio would scale an 800x600 game to 1024x768 on a 1366x768 display. This is because 1024 is the correct horizontal resolution if the vertical resolution is 768, the ratio between the numbers remains 4:3.
800x768 is some kind of bizarro nearly but not quite square resolution and has an aspect ratio of 4:3.84 (or 25:24) according to the calculator.