Forcing Small Screen Resolution

[jo-shadow]

Hello, I am wondering if there is a way, built into the system or via 3rd party apps, to change the display's resolution from its default (1440x900 for me) to something smaller, but keeping the same dpi as with the default. This would ofcourse create a black border around the screen.

The reason for this is because I am converting my old first gen Macbook Pro into a Cintiq-style screen tablet using a Wacom tablet I already own.

The tablet's active area is smaller than the mac's 15'' screen, and because it is necessary to have 1-to-1 pen to cursor mapping for a tablet pc to work correctly, there is an inherent dead zone around the edges:



A larger tablet would be too expensive, especially because the current one works fine, the only problem is the size of the screen.

I'd be willing to give up screen real-estate for the sake of usability, since at the moment I need an external mouse to access the menu-bar and the dock, as well as any elements outside of the tablet's active area.

In Short,
I want to go from seeing THIS
To seeing THIS. (Curtesy of Photoshop)


Alternatively if one could somehow run the system in a window, and then scale that window to match the active area I would basically achieve the same goal.


I have found a previous topic that deals with a similar issue, but none of the linked applications seem to have the functionality I want.


Does anyone have any ideas as to how one might do this?

 

[kasakka]

I think there would have to be an option for turning scaling off either in the drivers or the display itself. Since the drivers offer absolutely no options, I think you're out of luck here.

 

[jo-shadow]

I think there would have to be an option for turning scaling off either in the drivers or the display itself. Since the drivers offer absolutely no options, I think you're out of luck here.

Aye, I figured that would probably be the first response, and of-course you're right, however there might be other ways around this that allow you to achieve the same effect without going directly into the driver.

As a side note I had similar responses when I tried to find a way to rotate the display of my mac laptop. My first gen MBP with the ATI card had a simple ATI display utility that allowed you to do it, but my newer nvidia based one didn't have such a utility, but then I stumbled across the Display Rotation Menu, a tiny 3rd party app which has worked on every mac I've tried it on so far. I realize that probably this just accesses part of the built-in driver, but there didn't seem to be any instructions anywhere how to do rotation with code or other apps that could do the same, so I'm not gonna give up that easily.

What about the idea of running it in a Separate window? is there a way to basically have an external screen being simulated in a window, or heck, even another instance of the OS running in a window at a smaller resolution?

 

[kasakka]

You could probably run OSX in a virtual machine but that would be just nuts. Have you considered just using the menus etc on keyboard and then the rest with the tablet? Don't know if there's shortcuts for the Dock.