I have found several [url=http://www.overclock.net/t/1161605/preserve-aspect-ratio-flat-out-doesnt-work-hp-dm1-e-350-hd6310]threads on the internet with people having the same issue, but unfortunately they didn't find a solution.

If preserving aspect ratio actually works on your father's DM1, try checking what version of the ATI display driver he uses and see if installing that version solves your problems.

His dm1 model simply uses some intel graphic thingy. My newer moder had the ATI catalyst. Today's HP pavilion dm1 are much better than yesterday's. Which makes this issue all the more frustrating...

Lets say your game has a max. resolution of 800x600.
Your screen is 1366x768.

Now you would like to get the game stretched to 800x768 so you have only black borders at the left and right side ?
Correct ?

Then i cant help you...another solution would be a VM where you can resize the image like you wish.

Hmm... well, as far as Master of Magic and other DOSBox games, DOSBox includes a scaler if the options are set properly. I very surprised the GOG version doesn't do this by default, actually. Basically, if you set the resolution in the conf file to your native resolution and then set it to maintain aspect you should get what you want.

Yes. That's actually what my father's laptop does by default. And what the "ratio" option is supposed to do, when it actually works...

Drennan's link makes me quite pessimistic.


Yes. I think, indeed, that DosBox games can be tweaked for that (thogh I didn't investigate much). It's more annoying when we play newer games (for instance the frogware holmes adventures - we often play the same game in parallel).

Wasn't much of an issue so far : I mostly play on my desktop. But I'll probably be abroad for most of the year, in 2013, and will only have my laptop if I ever find some free time for gaming...

Master of Magic is a DOSBox game and that should be an easy fix. You can get DOSBox to scale the game (and maintain aspect ratio) instead of trying to get the GPU to do it.

Edit the .conf file(s) in the game's directory so that "Fullresolution=0x0". 0x0 is shorthand for "whatever resolution Windows is at right now".

You should also change output to something like ddraw or opengl (whichever works better for you, ddraw performs better on my laptop).

Finally, scroll down a bit and change it so that "aspect=true". Optionally, you can also change the scaler to something like normal3x. This will reduce the blurring caused by the bilinear scaling a little bit.
Apart from the fact that maintain aspect ratio maintains the aspect ratio.
No, incorrect. Maintain aspect ratio would scale an 800x600 game to 1024x768 on a 1366x768 display. This is because 1024 is the correct horizontal resolution if the vertical resolution is 768, the ratio between the numbers remains 4:3.

800x768 is some kind of bizarro nearly but not quite square resolution and has an aspect ratio of 4:3.84 (or 25:24) according to the calculator.

Yeah, most of GOG's configs seem to use "fullresolution=original" in conjunction with a normal2x scaler, which usually gives a resolution of 640x480(or 400). I guess this is for maximum compatibility, since pretty much all video cards and monitors support those resolutions, but since 0x0 uses the desktop resolution it would always be one that that computer supports... Silly GOG.