It's great that you're adding support for wide screen. It's becoming standard these days.
Here are some thoughts from another developer who looked into this:
1. it is custom to consider the native resolution of a LCD monitor to be the one currently selected in Windows.
If you want max quality, the game should be able to run at this resolution.
Maybe for a game the difference in size, between the game's resolution and this native LCD resolution, is not so big. A player might want it this way, instead of having an intermediate resolution set, that would produce bad scaling on most of the LCD.
2. It would be great if you could have screen scale inside the engine. With an additional filtering option, this can be a blessing to low resolution games. You could run a 320x200 game in the huge native resolution of a 24" monitor, and keep the sharp pixel aspect of the original resolution. In my engine this was a must, to keep the retro look. It was a bit tricky to do the right pixel perfect rendering, but it works great.
An idea with the engine scaling is to render the game in a render target and show it as a post process step, with scale, filter, tv effects and whatever one wants. This may be tricky for old video cards, but it could be an option.
3. Another thing I have in my engine is a "fake full screen". I keep the game windowed, but I resize it on the whole desktop (no borders). Then I scale the content as much as possible, maintaining the game's aspect. This is fast, and somehow better integrated with Windows (no flickering changes on CRT, no smart background popping messages, like Yahoo messenger does to some games, easy alt+tab, etc)
4. top quality LCD monitors have hardware scaling options and they can set any resolution, with or without scale or filtering, keeping the monitor in the native resolution. But these monitors are quite expensive and I don't think we'll see such features in common monitors soon.
5. dual monitors are a real pain, and you can't predict how they work on every system. Some things can be fixed from the driver, though. Best thing is to try to stick to the official DX and WinAPI guides and recommend driver solutions.
Good luck with it!
Alex
[EDIT]
P.S. cool idea: users donate some money and you buy yourself a big wide monitor
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Topic: I need brave testers with wide screens (Read 50835 times)