I've never owned a widescreen monitor yet but with a new computer coming up soon I will be.

For my older games that don't support widescreen resolutions I'm wondering how they'll display on a widescreen.

What I would like in each case is for the game to run in its normal resolution, stretched to occupy the pixels from top to bottom of the screen with black bars at the sides where it isn't wide.

I did have a little experience playing with this on a laptop which had a small but 16:10 screen on it that would do up to 1280 x 720 I think it was. The game I tried running on that computer was Heroes of Might and Magic (the first one), so running in DOSBox. I forget what I did now but I recall some fiddling around before it would display "right." I think at first the bottom of the picture was cut off a little. I did not mess with any DOSBox settings.

Generally speaking, it is relatively easy (I hope) to get the kind of simple display I am looking for where the whole top to bottom displays and there is black bars on the sides for stuff that doesn't work widescreen? Any tips for how this is accomplished both for DOSBox and Windows GOGs would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

It depends on the screen, your display connector (digital or analogue), and the drivers for your graphics card.

The graphics driver usually does have an option to keep the aspect ratio (and pillarbox the image with black borders left and right), but maybe only if you use DVI (or other digital connector, I guess). If you (for whatever reason) decide to use VGA instead (you shouldn't), it probably depends on how the screen handles the signal.

Then, of course, another variable is the application itself (DOSBox, for example) that may have an option for stretching to the desktop resolution, in which case nothing of the above matters and it'll be stretched anyway.

I should have been specific about the computer, sorry. I am getting an iMac with a 27" screen. I assume it's a digital connection. I wouldn't want to see a 640x480 MS-DOS game stretched across that. It would look like I was playing in a house of mirrors or something.

Is there a way to force a pillarbox display of a game with DOSBox on a widescreen so it looks decent, given the type of screen I've described now?

Maybe running certain games in windows of specific sizes where stretching still looks okay is an answer?

To add to what Maighstir says, DOSBox should be relatively easy to set up for pillarboxing or anything else you want it to do. Windows games can behave in all sorts of ways (including fooling them into using widescreen resolutions they were never designed for) and have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis; the Widescreen Gaming Forum is an extremely useful resource there.

Thanks. I have that site bookmarked now actually and was just there before posting here. I will have to check them out case by case I guess. I was mostly hoping I'm not going to run into problems where there's no good way to display an older game on a widescreen. I don't care if it is pillarboxed. That is okay.

Well, no one can guarantee that, obviously, but I can safely say that I have not yet come across I game I was unable to force to display as I wanted it to. At the very least, stretching can be prevented pretty much always -- in Windows at least; I'm not familiar with Macs, but it should be the same there. As Maighstir said, that's down to your monitor and video card, not really the game itself.

That's good to know and what I was hoping to hear. I know you can never really guarantee anything across the board with PC gaming generally speaking. But it's good to know this should work much of the time. I can live with that. I am planning to run a Windows 7 partition with bootcamp on that Mac but I'll first be trying to run games using DOSBox, WINE and native where possible before resorting to a boot into Windows.