In article <3e2sd2-gja.ln1@nyx.chaos.it>, Hekaton Keires wrote:

> is there any way to start X in 640x480 mode resized to a 1024x768 lcd
> monitor? unfortunately i don't have resize function in bios so when i try
> to start play starcraft i always get a horrible tiny black box in center of
> screen and playability flown away...
>
> if someone just could tell me how to use resize/magnify 640x480 desktop to
> physical 1024x768 resolution...
>
> ... any suggestion is appreciated

I don't think X can do that. From what I've read, Starcraft will only
draw 640x480. Your display hardware wants to run 1024x768 and if you
try anything less, it simply centers the smaller image in the middle
and fills in a black border around it, right?

X doesn't seem to support any settings that would make it smart enough
to scale a program's drawing request to another size. Well, not that
I've been able find, anyway. The only area where it does anything
remotely similar is for scaling fonts (trying to preserve point sizes
at different screen resolutions).

You might try "xrandr -q" to see which settings your display hardware
will do, and then try each of them in sequence; use "xrandr -s 0" to
put it back to normal.

If none of that works, the theoretical brute force method is to create
a virtual X display that is 640x480, map it to the side of your LCD
display using the ServerLayout section of xorg.conf so you can get the
mouse and keyboard over there, direct the output of Starcraft to that
virtual X display, and on your real LCD screen run an X application
that runs in the background and periodically reads from the virtual
display buffer and stretches it in software to fill your LCD. Given
the fixed sizes of the respective screens, you could probably optimize
and unroll the copy/stretch code enough to get a couple of frames per
second on a low-end laptop. If you were good at assembly code you
might improve that further. You can look at the source code to xwd to
see how to grab an image from another X display. This is--of
course--all completely theoretical, but you DID ask for "any
sugggestion" ;-)

L