Hello! So, I'm having trouble getting my laptop to NOT maintain aspect ratio of 4:3. The result is that I have black bars on the left and right of the game image while in full screen. I do not have this problem on my desktop. It automatically stretches Pirates! (and other games) to full screen without any mouse issues.

My laptop specs are:
CPU: Intel(R) Core™ Processor i7-9750H 2.60GHz Turbo 4.5GHz 12MB Cache Processor (Coffee Lake)
MEMORY: 16GB (8GBx2) DDR4/2666MHz SODIMM Memory
MOTHERBOARD: Intel(R) HM370 Chipset
VIDEO: NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) GTX 1650 4GB GDDR5 (Turing VR Ready}

Native desktop resolution is 1920x1080 and I have tried the "fix" of editing the config to use 1440x1080 and then adding Fullscreen = 0 to the config. This marginally works, but while in the ESC menu, the icons across the bottom do not mouse highlight properly and are off by an icon away. So, this is not a true solution for me. I have tried to directly address why my machine is not stretching to fill the screen and have seen several tutorials pointing to the Nvidia CP, and to look for, "Adjust desktop size and position" and setting scaling there to, "Full-screen". I do not have an "Adjust desktop size and position" option in my Nvidia CP on my laptop. It is there on my desktop. I have also seen similar tutorials to look in the Nvidia CP under, "Manage 3D settings" for "Image Scaling" and turn it on for Pirates!. Alas, I do not have "Image Scaling" option under "Manage 3D settings" on my laptop, but again, it's there on my desktop. A final guidance I've read on this is to look at your Intel video driver CP for scaling and aspect ratio settings. I opened the Intel CP on my laptop and there is a scaling option, and the ONLY selectable option in the dropdown is, "Maintain Aspect Ratio" and of course it is selected since it is the only option.

I also saw several random forums out there pointing to various Github full screen forcing apps, but most seemed sus and later replies in the same forums said they don't actually work, etc.

Alt-Enter does not work at all. I use the, "Intel® Driver & Support Assistant" on this laptop so I'm running the latest Intel Video Driver. Also running the latest Nvidia driver.

Interestingly enough, on this laptop, when quitting the game, the screen flashes a few times before it fully exits to desktop. On the final flash, for a split-second, the game is stretched full screen just like on my desktop.

Any ideas anyone? I'm out of ideas and have no clue what to attempt next. This has to be a semi-common issue with some solution?

It can be a hundred things, man.

Try these to begin with:

1.
WindowedAttributes = fullscreensize
Resolution = h:1920, v:1080 (put to your desktop resolution)
VRAM = 1GB

Then in documents config go for
WindowWidth = 800
WindowHeight = 600

2.

Set your windows desktop resolution to 1280x720

set Resolution = same as your desktop resolution

Then in documents config go for

WindowWidth = 1280
WindowHeight = 720

If neither works, and both have worked as workarounds for people I know, use window mode but with a window so big its almost covering the entire screen.