Adding Custom Graphics Modes on Widescreen Displays

[dhionix_admin]

The graphics mode required to run DrivingHealth Inventory is 800x600 pixels, 16-bit color and 60 Hz refresh. On widescreen displays, this mode can stretch DHI horizontally in an attempt to fill in all the space on the display which is not desirable for running DHI. If this happens, you have a few options to deal with this problem.

Option 1 - Horizontal Calibration: The easiest option is to just perform a horizontal calibration in addition to the vertical calibration. You can access the calibration from the Welcome page by holding down the left and right mouse buttons simultaneously for a few seconds and then selecting "System Setup".

Option 2 - Create a Custom Graphics Mode: Another option is to create a custom graphics mode. The two typical aspect ratios of widescreen computer displays are 16:9 (1.778) and 16:10 (1.6). To find your aspect ratio, read the product manual or measure the horizontal and vertical size of your physical display and take the ratio.

To display 800x600 on widescreen displays without horizontal stretching/distortion, we need a mode that matches the aspect ratio of the display but also has 600 lines vertically. For 16:9, a resolution of 1066x600 is needed and for 16:10 it's 960x600. Unfortunately, these modes are rarely defined by default. Fortunately, these custom graphics modes can be defined. This is particularly easy to do if you have an nVidia graphics card. Follow these instructions for nVidia:



If you have an ATI graphics card, it is a little more difficult to create a custom mode but it is still possible by following these instructions (Please Note: Don't try this on ATI unless you have had success editing the registry. If you don't know what the registry is, stop now.)



If you have Intel graphics, please read the instructions here:



Once you have defined and set the display to this mode, you may need to open the graphics card control panel to enable scaling which will fill the screen.

The final step is to bypass the graphics mode switch built into the software. You do this simply by opening the DHI folder and double-clicking on the file DHI.EXE. You can make a shortcut to DHI.EXE to simplify this step in the future.