How to custom scale to get rid of black bars in video games?

Hi there,
I'm a relatively new mac user and I am trying to play a windows game on my macbook using vmware fusion. The game I am trying to play is called navyfield which does not support widescreen monitors and runs at 1024x768 which produces black bars on the side when i play it on my macbook. My PC monitor is also widescreen but there is an option for me to scale it to fit the screen. My question is how do i do the same for my mac? Is there a way to use my nvidia 320m graphics card to do this? This is the macbook that i have

MacBook - Buy MacBook notebook computers - Apple Store (Canada)

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thank you

The problem is you're running the game via a Fusion VM and that limits you to using the video driver provided by Fusion. As far as I know, there is no way to scale the screen to get a full screen effect in Fusion as long as the game does not support wide screen. Have you tried changing the resolution in Fusion to see what happens?

Regards.

yea i tried doing that and it gave me black bars before i even start the game
would it work on another windows emulator such as parallels?

I'm not really understanding the problem. If the game runs in 1024x768, and you're seeing the whole screen of the game, what is the issue exactly?

i appologize if i wasnt clear, the issue is that im getting black bars on the side of the monitor and i want the picture to fill the whole screen so that i dont get black bars

I am also considering crossover games, would that be able to solve my problem?

couchpotato1159 said:

i appologize if i wasnt clear, the issue is that im getting black bars on the side of the monitor and i want the picture to fill the whole screen so that i dont get black bars

Click to expand...

Again, I'm just dense, but ... if the game is 1024 x 768, you can't get it to fit the whole screen without either "stretching" the image or cutting off part of the game screen. I wouldn't have thought either of those options would be attractive.

yes, stretching the image is exactly what i am trying to do. That is how i play the game on my pc and would like to do that on my mac. The resolution on my macbook is 1280x800 and my external monitor that i will use to play the game is 1440x900 19".

couchpotato1159 said:

yes, stretching the image is exactly what i am trying to do. That is how i play the game on my pc and would like to do that on my mac. The resolution on my macbook is 1280x800 and my external monitor that i will use to play the game is 1440x900 19".

Click to expand...

Ah, okay. Sorry to be pest, now I understand. For the sort of games I play (which is rare), stretching would be a detriment to the experience, but of course not all games are like that.

Crossover Games is *definitely* worth a tryout if it supports the game you want to play. It should be able to offer you better options video-wise.

So i checked my old windows laptop which also runs at 1280x800 but when i played navyfield there were no black bars on the side so it must have something to do with vmware.

I think, when you install the virtual PC under VMWare, that somewhere you define the size of the screen (in pixels) that you want to use in the VM. I don't think, once it's installed, that you can change it, but I'm not at my iMac to look. But you could check it out, anyway.

You can change the resolution of the Fusion VM after it's installed. The problem he's having is that the game does not support a wide screen format and the video driver that Fusion uses is limited. He can't get the game to display full screen.

Running the same game using a Windows Boot Camp installation would provide more flexibility with resolution and full screen.

Regards.