Adding screen resolutions

I use a virtual machine for testing my application running on a netbook with a screen resolution of 1024x600.

Is there any way in Parallels Desktop 5.0 for Mac to add this resolution to the virtual driver? I tried the knowledge base, but the advise it gave (Configuration->Video->'+') did not work (could not find the '+' sign to add a resolution. I even edited the XML configuration file and changed "<ScreenResolutions><Enabled>0</Enabled></ScreenResolutions>" to a value of '1', restarted Parallels.

 

Can you run in Window mode and just change the virtual machine window size to 1024x600 by dragging the window grow box (lower right corner)?

The list of resolutions in the Windows virtual machine is affected by the list of resolutions on the Mac side. You can create a custom resolution on the Mac side using SwithResX.

SwitchResX modifies a file in /System/Library/Displays/Overrides/ so it may be possible to add a resolution without using SwitchResX. My Apple 30" Cinema Display has VendorID 610 and ProductID 9232 so the file DisplayProductID-9232 in the DisplayVendorID-610 folder is modified.

The file looks like this:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>DisplayProductID</key>
	<integer>37426</integer>
	<key>DisplayVendorID</key>
	<integer>1552</integer>
	<key>scale-resolutions</key>
	<array>
		<data>AAAEAAAAAlgAAAAB</data>
	</array>
</dict>
</plist>

Each new custom resolution gets added as a data element in the array. If you open the file with Property List Editor, it shows that AAAEAAAAAlgAAAAB is actually <00000400 00000258 00000001> where 00000400=1024 and 00000258=600.

To figure out which file is used by your display, try the following command:

Code:

ioreg -l -w0 | grep IODisplayPrefsKey

On my computer, the result is:

Code:

    | |   |     |   |       "IODisplayPrefsKey" = "IOService:/AppleACPIPlatformExpert/PCI0@0/AppleACPIPCI/NRP5@5/IOPCI2PCIBridge/PXS1@0/ATY,Motmot@0/ATY_Motmot/display0/AppleDisplay-610-9232"

If your display is not an LCD or similar digital display, then you'll probably need something other than a scale-resolution.