Hi everyone, I've just started playing Baldur's Gate The Original Saga (not the Enhanced Edition) and I can't figure out how to display the game in its original resolution (640x480) with black bars on the side. The game always appears stretched, filling the whole screen.

It's by no means unplayable but it messes with the proportions and makes the graphics look off to me (I would love to share a screenshot to demonstrate the problem but those are actually in 4:3 resolution for some reason...)

Would anyone happen to know how to force the game to display in 640x480 (or any 4:3 resolution) by adding black bars to the side instead of stretching ?

Here's what I have tried so far to no avail :

- Using the widescreen mod : trying any resolution above 640x480 with the mod results in the game appearing in a tiny box in one corner of the screen, and 640x480 itself is still stretched.

- Changing any display settings on my laptop, such as setting my resolution to 640x480. And I don't appear to have any option to 'Keep aspect ratio' or anything like this in my Control panel.

- Messing with baldur.ini.

- Trying out a lot of different properties when launching Baldur.exe ('Run in 640x480', 'Disable fullscreen optimisation' etc), nothing seems to have any effect.

- Running on integrated graphics or dedicated GPU ; makes no difference


System info :

System Name MSI
Desktop resolution ; 1920x1080
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz, 2801 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Integrated graphics Intel(R) HD Graphics 630

Thank you in advance for any help

You need to enable 'Keep aspect ratio' in your graphics card settings. I don't have the NVIDIA card, so won't be able to tell you where that setting is exactly, but I don't think it should be too difficult to find.

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately this is what my NVIDIA Control panel looks like (see picture). According to what I read online there should be a 'Display' or 'Aspect Ratio' menu on the left-hand side but it's just missing... Is there any other way to access my graphics card settings ?

Now I remembered my old LG 1942W monitor. That thing had an Aspect Ratio button and could change it between 4:3 and 16:10 (the native aspect ratio of the monitor) just pressing that. No need to mess with GPU settings or anything like that. It was a thing of beauty... Don't know why that's not a feature anymore in current displays :( The monitor was simply compressing the sides of the image so 4:3 would look as it should instead of stretched.

Take your "preferred graphics processor" off auto select and select your GTX 1050 Ti .
If you then don't get the display options like in the attached pic, update the drivers for your GTX 1050 TI.

I've tried that and reinstalled the lasted driver just in case. But no luck, my Control panel stills looks the same...

That works, thank you so much ! I can finally enjoy the game in glorious 640x480 resolution. I was getting used to everything looking s t r e t c h e d but this is definitely much nicer.

And thanks to everyone else who tried to help in the thread, it's nice to see such an active an helpful community for a relatively old game. Cheers !