Syberia I on 1680x1050 (widescreen) problem

[oase]

After a few years, my appetite for adventure genre has lit up again, I shoved the dust off my game CDs, and reinstalled the game.

Problem is I got a widescreen LCD monitor, working best on 1680x1050. The game works just fine (I got 64bit Windows 7, Enterprise Edition), only with the downside (that is getting on me) that it won't cover the full monitor screen, the game looks as if played in 1280x1024.
No matter what I tried, I just can't get rid of the 2 black columns on the side of the game window.

Is there any way to solve / workaround this? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks in advance for any provided help.

Yours, Oase.

[doomer]

Unfortunately, games that were not designed to support widescreen resolutions simply cannot output display at a resolution like 1680x1050. Actually, it is better that you have those two black columns for older games/non-widescreen resolutions since the alternative is to let your video card or monitor do a stretch to widescreen, but that makes the game look very unpleasant since everything (like characters, backgrounds) would be unnaturally "stretched" and make it look grotesque.

As a side note, some older games have the option of letting the user manually specify a resolution, and, if you are lucky, you get no stretching or other problems. But not all games have that option, and that is particularly true about adventure games from the past where you just have to play it old school. And it's fun.

[oase]

Thank you for your reply.

I, indeed, found somewhere, that aspect ratio can be corrected via monitor / video card settings. I'm yet to try this, as I thought about what you said myself, but then there's another thing that puzzles me:

Last time I installed and played the series on my machine, I had Windows XP Professional Edition, plus the very same 1680x1050 LCD monitor, and the game ran in fullscreen, on widescreen resolution, with no problems whatsoever. Why would it change on Windows 7, is beyond me.

I did some digging on Nvidia and some Tech Support websites to find out some clues, hints about this issue, but to no avail.

That's pretty much why I posted here: maybe to get some "first hand" response from Tech Team, but I don't know whether they are still offering or not.

Yours, Oase.

[doomer]

You see, Syberia does not support widescreen resolutions. Most likely on Windows XP, your Nvidia drivers had scaling enabled by default in the Nvidia Control Panel, and that was causing the game to stretch to a widescreen resolution. It's actually better that now you don't get auto-stretching. If you want, you can go to Nvidia Control Panel by right-clicking on your desktop, and control the scaling options in Adjust desktop size and position, but I would advise against that as you would not be getting the true Syberia experience. You would get it all stretched up, but it's up to you.