Windows High Resolution Monitor Scaling Issues

MegaphoneThere is sometimes a display compatibility issue when RailOS is used on high resolution monitors.  It can be corrected by right clicking on the railway.exe icon on the desktop or in Windows Explorer, left clicking ‘Properties’ in the submenu, then selecting the ‘Compatibility’ tab and ticking the ‘Disable display scaling on high DPI settings’ box, then clicking the ‘OK’ button.  On some versions of Windows the box says ‘Override’ instead of ‘Disable’ but the effect is the same. That should fix the problem but the display might then be too small to use effectively, in which case the screen resolution should be reduced appropriately in Windows display settings.

Background:

When high resolution screens became available many applications became too small for them to be used effectively.  Selecting a lower screen resolution made them bigger, but often text appeared fuzzy.

To try to remedy this Microsoft introduced display scaling first in Windows 8 and then in all subsequent versions.  This led to other problems which Microsoft have been dealing with in updates ever since, but issues still remain in many applications, particularly 32 bit applications such as RailOS.  Hopefully in time the RailOS compiler (Embarcadero Community Edition) will allow 64 bit applications that aren’t subject to scaling problems, but for the present the best way to avoid them is to disable scaling as described above.

Of course changing screen resolution isn’t ideal, because it’s inconvenient to have to change back again to run other applications.  It would be far better to have the operating system look after all display issues automatically without user intervention.  Unhappily we aren’t yet in that position, but perhaps we shall be in due course.

Thanks are due to Mark Jones for originally reporting and finding the solution to this issue, and to Josco for reporting additional problems in later versions of RailOS.

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