I recently bought and have also posted on, the Panzer General 2 forum about this. I'm not too confident about getting a reply because someone else made a similar question days ago and didnt get one.

So why not try here, surely this issue affects most older games.

On a 16:9 large monitor the graphics and sprites look a bit stretched and they were never designed to be run on a 24 inch monitor. It's not a disaster but i feel that being able to either make the aspect ratio 4:3, or changing the size of the screen to a smaller one would give it a better look.

Now in Panzer General 2 there doesnt seem to be any kind of text file i can alter the resolution in but i'm wondering if amongst the GOG community theres anyone who knows of a useful third party software or something like that, that may be able to help?

the easiest solution would be to go into your graphics card settings (catalyst for AMD cards or Idon'tknow for nVidia cards) and set the resolution override to always use the original aspect ratio (or something like that)

unfortunately I can't help you more, and it's also possible that it won't work if the game doesn't use 3D graphics...

Either change settings in software provided with drivers for your graphics card (but I can't provide you any details here...) or you could check if your monitor OSD has an option to keep aspect ratio (my Benq panel has it).

This is what I did and it worked for me. It keeps the original aspect ratio in widescreen monitors for any game or aplication that uses full screen, but if you can't see that option available in your graphics control panel, it is because you need to use a resolution that support such override for that option to be available. If that's the case, lower (or increase) the resolution of the desktop to see that option available, and then after you enable it you can go back to your favorite resolution. In AMD's CCC the option is found in "My VGA Displays" —> "Image Scaling (VGA Display)" —> "Image Scaling" —> "Enable GPU scaling". There you can choose from 3 options.

Thanks for feedbacks i'll look into those options.

Try to find a way to play it in a windowed mode, that will take care of the ratio problem and make older games look better, as they won't fill the full screen area.

Here's a nice tutorial page, even showing settings for the game you asked for:

http://www.ghacks.net/2014/05/04/force-fullscreen-games-play-windowed-mode/

it's often the best thing to do, but not on games with resolutions lower than 640x480, those are unplayable on 27+ inch monitors :)

Knowing absolutely nothing at all about this game and generally being technical incompetent - I can only do general thingys, like saying that when I look into widescreen gaming my first stop is always the WSGF site (http://www.wsgf.org/) and Flawless Widescreen (http://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/). But I do not think either of them have anything on PG2, so please feel free to ignore this post.

On the Catalyst Driver Enable GPU scaling fixed it, my main concen was to set it back to a 4:3 ratio and it's looking better now, thanks all.

I'm betting it's a monitor setting issue. You can force the video card into the proper aspect ration all you want, but if the monitor is set to stretch the picture to fill the screen, it won't matter.

Different monitors call it different things. The Dell monitor I'm on right now lists it as an option under "Image Settings" called "Scaling" and gives options of "1:1", "Fill" and "Aspect". Aspect would be the option desired in this case.

This works for me for most games. There are several however that are run in wrapper windows (see: DOSBox and the like) where the wrapper prevents scaling (since the wrappers aspect ratio is properly widescreen). In these cases you just have to configure the wrapper to display properly which isn't ALWAYS possible, but at least it usually works ok. The rare game where I can't fix it is fine.

That's why I don't want to change monitor. I have an LG Flatron W1942S. Is a regular 19" Widescreen 16:10 monitor (resolution 1440x900) with VGA port. But the beauty of it is that it has a "4:3 in Wide" Button right there in the panel which makes everything 4:3 (widescreen resolutions look bad, obviously). So if a game doesn't support widescreen, I just set 1024x768 in-game and press the magic button =) Works wonders.