I can't seem to run any of these old games in full screen.
I have a res of 1366 by 1024 and whenever i run a game like baldurs gate, arcanum or one of the two fallouts the game is smaller and appears to have this wide screen affect like when you play a wide screen dvd except the black part is vertical. kinda bugs me so I was wondering if I could get these games to use my full screen. any help would be appreciated

That resolution is kinda odd so it's probably going to be hard to run stuff in non stretched fullscreen at that res I think.

That seems like an odd resolution... is this a laptop or something?

Not sure how you would get that working, some games (or more likely mods for those games) allow you to set your own resolution which would help...

I'd suggest checking out the Baldur's Gate forum for the widescreen mod. That might be what you need, and other games may have similar tools.

yeah its an ASUS G50 Laptop. does it do this for you with a higher res monitor as well? I mean I can deal with it. just kinda bugs me , you know?

I know that laptops can be tricky, and one work-around is to use mods.

Some widescreen mods will only accept standard 16:9 or 16:10 resolutions though, but others will let you specify the resolution.

I use 1680x1050 myself, so tend to need widescreen mods for older games (or just accept the black bars, or play in a window).

Actually, I do prefer playing in a window for some games (currently have NWN like that).

baldurs gate is also kinda laggy during fights. and I have a 9800 gs 512 mb and 4 gigs of ram. know why that would happen? especially during the fight between your father and the other guy in the prologue

I think you mean 1,366x768 ;)

As for the scaling, you need to look in the nVidia control panel and either disable scaling or set it to maintain aspect ration while scaling.

When there's vertical bars, it means the game runs in fullscreen ie 4:3 resolution. The vertical bars are there to maintain a proper aspect ratio. Don't confuse widescreen with fullscreen or fullscreen with actually filling the entire screen. Fullscreen is 4:3 like the old crt tv's and movies made before the 60's.

I think he has it set to maintain aspect ratio already since he only complains about bars at the side. OP, could you double check it's not 1366x768?

EDIT: It's definitely 1366x768.

I have the same resolution and the black bars at the side are because your monitor is widescreen (16:9) and the games you mention are 4:3. As Kabuto says, the bars are perfectly normal and are there so that the game ISN'T stretched.

To get rid of the bars you'll have to enable full scaling on your graphics card. The games will fill the screen but everything in the game will be fat. This doesn't bother some people but it bothers the hell out of me. It might not bother you though so it's worth a go.