Strijkbout: Is it just Syndicate Wars or are other Dosbox games affected too?
I can't remember a single DOSbox downloaded from GOG doing this. Anyway, to be certain I wasn't mistaken, I downloaded Tyrian 2000 and fired it up, only to see that the screen is perfectly stretched and with no black bars.
UPDATE:
Since Tyrian 2000 was perfectly working, I copied the settings of "dosboxT2K" directly into the Syndicate config txt, "dosboxSWARS", after making a backup copy of it obviously. The result is in the attached picture.
TL;DR: If you have a problem setting up a certain DOSbox game, try recycling the CONF file of another (working) DOSbox game. For now, this should work. In the very next days I'll try to understand which line or which set of lines was creating the problem. Thanks, Strijkbout, for forcing me to think this through.