I’m using VMWare Player to play an old 16-bit Windows game. Unfortunately the game uses only 640×480 and I cannot figure out how to stretch the VM window to full-screen on the host. I set the guest OS to 640×480, but the screen is still small, in the middle of the screen as seen in figure 1.
I even tried setting the compatibility mode to Windows 95 and 640×480, but it has no effect (figure 2) and looks exactly the same as when I set the VM to full-screen (1366×768 on the laptop) and start the game normally.
There are few references to stretching a VM. One page mentions setting a Stretch Guest option, but there is no such option, at least not in VMWare Player 4.0.3.
I know that VirtualBox has a stretching option, but I’m trying to find a solution for VMWare (Player, not Workstation).
Figure 1: Guest OS is pillar-boxed
Figure 2: Using compatibility mode
Best Answer
I figured out a not-ideal-but-effective-nonetheless solution/work-around: use Unity.
Note: the order of steps is important.
(Optionally auto-hide the taskbar.)
Yay! The game runs at full-screen on the guest OS instead of a tiny letter- and pillar-boxed screen. Now the only problem is that the 16-bit game uses 100% CPU, but there’s not much that can be done about that.
Fullscreen host capture of guest VM running in Unity mode: