Monitor woes

When I purchased a new computer, I bought a separate system and monitor. Now, in my infinite wisdom, I went for a widescreen monitor. Unfortunately, this has had unforeseen consequences.

Being towards the bottom end of the monitor market, it doesn't support proper letter-boxing. Usually, non-widescreen television owners will see this as a problem with the almost ubiquitous use of widescreen broadcast these days; the black strips at the top and bottom of the screen. For me, it is a different issue. When the computer is outputting an image in the good old fashion 4:3 ratio (1024x768 for example), the monitor stretches it across its full width, distorting the image. Some monitors will put vertical black strips to the sides, so the image is shown in the correct proportions.

I play quite a few games, a large proportion of which are of quite an old vintage. Most of them only support resolutions in the 4:3 ratio. Some of these games (Doom 3 for example) will run in a window rather than full screen, so I can play them undistorted, but with the Windows desktop partially showing. However, a lot of my games won't run windowed, so if I want to play them, I have to do so with a stretched image. Which isn't very nice.

I have tried a number of devious solutions (virtualisation for example), but none have been successful. So now I am teetering on the edge of buying a second, 4:3, monitor. I have always wanted to run dual monitors, for the toy factor as much as anything, but it seems an expensive way to solve this problem. I also lack physical space.

The trials of geekdom.