When GOG revitalizes these old games, is there any thought to creating an applet or shell for them that would force them into widowed mode or otherwise account for widescreen monitors?
I swear I'd pay $100 if someone could create a program that would window mode any game out there and/or allow old games to be viewed correctly on widescreen.
What I mean is a real, commercial, stoopid-simple professional program.
And yes, I have some applets (such as used for Battlefield 2) and have tried that weird little Japanese program called Windower. Yes, I have an ATI video card and understand that letterboxing (for my card at least) is not possible. Yes - I have tried EVERYTHING out there.
Why oh why have I spend YEARS waiting for some genius to do this?!
Anyhoo - back to my original question: does GOG have some method for accounting for these games to be played widescreen AND/OR could you at least post in the descriptions what the graphics settings are for each and if they can be viewed in widescreen.

Could you clarify what exactly you want? Letterboxing is usually provided by drivers (at least for NVIDIA chipsets) and can be forced by DOSBOX on any hardware (but only for DOS games). Or do you want the picture to be upscaled and then cropped again? In theory, at least Vista and 7 could also provide for other forms of stretching, but I don't know about any tools that actually offer this functionality.

Unfortunately, the methods for patching widescreen support into games varies so widely that it would be very time-consuming for GOG to implement them; there is no one program that will magically work for all games. In some cases the widescreen fixes cause problems on non-widescreen resolutions, so applying them to GOG releases wouldn't be a good idea anyway.
Check out the Widescreen Gaming Forum Wiki; it has fixes for a huge number of games. If a game isn't listed there or you can't get the fix to work you can ask on the forum itself.

ATI has this as well..not sure what made you think it wasn't so.
Go into your ATI control center, then look for the Digital panel tab. Expand it and click on the Attributes tab.
Then in there you should see an "Image Scaling" section, enable GPU scaling and select maintain aspect ratio.

Here's what you do, get yourself two sheets of black construction paper, measure the length of your monitor. Cover up the bottom third of your screen with the construction paper and tape it to the side of your monitor. take the other piece and cover the top third of your monitor and tape it down.
INSTANT LETTERBOX.

Since he specifically talks about forcing windowed mode, my guess is that stretching the image to widescreen is precisely what he wants to avoid. I know the feeling, as I have a widescreen monitor myself. Don't the majority of people have one? They hardly make any 4:3 screens anymore.
Anyway, I too hate to have a 4:3 image streched out to a 16:9 (or in my case 16:10) aspect ratio. It just looks wrong. Fortunately, my monitor has built-in scaling function. When it detects a resolution in 4:3 ratio, it renders it in 4:3, rather than stretching it. This means I have a black bar on either side of the screen, but I'm fine with that. If it's 4:3, I want to see it in 4:3, thank you very much.
Unfortunately, some games work differently. When they run in fullscreen, they simply stretch the image to the Windows resolution, which means that my monitor can't detect that it's actually a 4:3 image. (I'm guessing that's what happens. All I know is that some games aren't detected correctly, and so are stretched anyway.)
I should say that I have a Samsung SyncMaster 226BW, and it's connected via DVI.

My assumptions would actually be the other way around: Gamer with special gaming machine: 4/3, normal person with "multimedia laptop" (like me!): 16/10, which would also explain the results of the Steam survey.
Anyway, haven't we found out by now that both Ati and NVidia offer "correct AR scaling"? What hardware are you using that can't do it?
Edit: About FEAR2: The funny thing is that there are also many console players left with 4/3 CRT TVs. Should that restriction apply to consoles too, it will suck for them as well.

I guess I just made assumptions. I figured I was one of the last people to switch from CRT to LCD, which was about a year ago, and there were hardly any 4:3 LCD displays around then. What I left out of my assumption is that plenty of people of course switched long before I did, and at that time, 4:3 was still the standard for LCD displays.
Still, it would be worse if it did the same stretching thing as we widescreen owners experience all the time. That would look even worse. Imagine playing an FPS where all the opponents were stretched vertically? Stick figures! *shudders*
I have to agree with your opinion of lazy console port programming. The worst thing is that some developers use it as an argument to leave the PC platform. "Look, we made this great game for the PS3, and it sold really well. Then we made it for the PC, and it bombed. Probably because of PIRACY!" No, it was because you made a shitty console port :-(

Hah, yeah. Another excuse is one that all the fanboys are making on the official Fear 2 forums: "it was an artistic decision to give the game a more cinematic feel!!!".
Gimme a break!

Didn't bioshock have basically the reverse of that? It didn't have PC widescreen till a patch or something? Seems lazy to not offer different resolutions, then again they may have just made the 'everyone's got widescreen now' assumption and were surprised by the backlash that could have been avoided with a basic website poll...
That seems excessive when he could get some old specatacle frames and tape strips of black paper to the top and bottom of the lens frames, that way the entire world would be letterboxed widescreen!

It wasn't quite the same with Bioshock, though the public backlash was. With Bioshock, they supported all resolutions and aspect ratio's (as far as I know) but it was the FOV that they disliked. With their implementation widescreen was vert- as opposed to horizontal+. So basically, both screens could see the same amount horizontally, but 4:3/5:4 screens could see more up and down. They claimed it was a design decision, many didn't believe that and got very pissy. I got the impression widescreen people didn't like the idea of having less to see than square screen users, though when you really think about it it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.
The Fear 2 thing with the letterbox, well that's clearly a screw-up on the dev's part, as if they'd really wanted a decent cinematic experience they could at least make it perfect for 16:10 screens on the pc. As it stands, even they get letterboxed albeit to a lesser extent than 4:3/5:4.

Thanks for all the feedback, some of it great... some of it immature. *sigh*
Anyhoo...my ATI card does NOT have this aspect scaling. I've checked. And yes, I am very familiar wih the widescreen gaming folks. They do a nice job.
I have a Viewsonic VX2235 22" 16:10 widescreen monitor than must be set at 1680 x 1050. I have an ATI Radeon 4800 Pro. I do not see either in Catalyst Control nor in the ATI Tools (which admittedly I am a novice at using) a way to fix issues with widescreening (except for a few cases).
Yes, I have used DOSBox for many years...I am mostly referring to Win95 and Win 98 software....
Seriously folks, I've looked through dozens and dozens of forums. I was hoping an actual programmer might answer. Especially one regarding my idea of a software application that solves all this.
Surely there is a serious market for a ... virtual machine (yes, yes I'm aware of Virtual PC - a buddy of mine worked on it) that takes any program, and shoves it into a window. THAT would answer most problems, especially if the window could be dynamically scaled.

Here is a pic showing it in the Control Center (This is not my pic, as I have an nvidia card)
http://img509.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gpuscaling948cd8.png

If that could run games to be compatible with whatever OS & hardware you specified (presumably equal or below what you currently have or it'd be magic), I'd be buying it in an instant. Not sure how practical that'd be though, lots of hardware to licence or a very limited set of options
I shouldn't think that a windowed container app would be THAT hard to make, I think it'd be a case of creating a windowed application with a single directdraw surface that software would render to. There's doubtlessly something small but unbelievably complicated stopping it from being that simple.