Newb - Wide Screen LCD

[Marty]

Can anyone lead me in the direction that talks about how to use a wide screen LCD in the correct aspect ratio?  Or if that's even possible.  Thanks - Marty

[MonMotha]

Most of those LCD monitors will have an OSD menu.  There's usually an "aspect ratio" option in it that will barn-door (aka "pillarbar") the displayed image.  This puts black bars on both sides of the picture, reducing the area to 4:3.

[Blanka]

It has nothing to do with the screen and its OSD. If you use DVI, you drive it in 1:1 pixel mapping by default.
So you need to tackle this at the computer side, for example in the MAME setup.

[MonMotha]

OK, I guess I had assumed that this wasn't a PC monitor.  If you hook a PC monitor up to a modern PC, it should hit it with native res (including on the analog VGA input) by default, assuming the EDID data is correct (which seems to be a big assumption).  This is how you SHOULD drive it if using a PC and emulator since it avoids repeated scaling.  If you are unable to do this, many, though not all, PC monitors do have an aspect ratio option.  Some will automatically set the aspect ratio based on detected horizontal resolution on the assumption that the pixels are supposed to be square (since Windows makes this assumption, anyway - much to the chagrin of people like myself who have 16:9 TVs with a native resolution of 1024x768).

I was operating on the assumption that this was a TV or arcade monitor being fed something from a console or arcade board.  In those cases, you'll need to do what I said.