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Comment by app4soft | Hacker News Reader

Hm, why screenshot resolution (1152×864) is different from 1920×1200, as it set in "Display Properties > Settings > Desktop area"?[0]

[0] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/boxv...

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This is interesting because I have direct experience with this on real hardware recently. I have a GeForce 4 MX440 graphics card connected via DVI to a native 1920x1200 display. Windows 98 will let me set the native resolution, but if I move the mouse outside the bounds (maybe 1152x864?) the whole screen will "pan" with the cursor and wrap to the other side of the screen. It's almost like 98 can display 1920x1200 but can only interact with a subset of it. I thought it was just some strange driver limit or an issue with my hardware, but maybe it's a limit in the core of the OS.

That's probably something to do with the GPU driver. Win98 doesn't really have any intrinsic limit on display resolution beyond the 16-bit limit (32k in each dimension, although I suspect you'll run out of address space for the framebuffer first) --- I've personally used 98se on a CRT at 2048x1536.

An update in case anybody comes across this. I found you were correct and the issue was my graphics driver, an Nvidia Detonator driver in this case. I installed a Voodoo3 (AGP) with stock drivers and enabled native 1920x1200x32 resolution under Windows 98 SE with no panning. A little fuzzy over VGA, but usable!

Maybe Windows9x doesn't get along with non-4:3 aspect ratio screens?

if i remember correctly it's a feature of the driver, basically you can set resolution higher than what is supported by your screen and it will create a sort of virtual screen that is "mapped" to the real one via panning.

Probably the gpu/driver don't recognize the resolution as supported by your monitor. It's should be possible to override that and set a custom resolution but i don't remember how... Sorry.

My memory could be wrong here but I had a 20“ CRT which could output 2048x1536 with no panning.

It's in the comments:

    Michal Necasek says: 
    June 6, 2022 at 10:30 pm

    Sure, the screenshot is of a 1152×864 desktop, 
    showing the maximum resolution available in 
    the dialog. I didn’t see the point of wasting 
    space with so many boring pixels

They don't think that anyone was interested in a screenshot.

> It's in the comments:

I see.

JFTR, It seems like it was a reply[0] to my comment[1], but they don't think anybody would be interested in replies, so not enabled threaded comments in WordPress, which makes their replies not so clear connected to guests comments:)

[0] http://www.os2museum.com/wp/windows-9x-video-minidriver-hd/#...

[1] http://www.os2museum.com/wp/windows-9x-video-minidriver-hd/#...

[2] https://www.collectiveray.com/wordpress-threaded-comments

The 'apply' button is active so these are unapplied changes.

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