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This is not a bug, but a request for a new feature, based on mail threads here <http://www.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl/2006-August/075802.html> and here <http://www.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl/2006-August/075863.html>.

It would be useful to have a way to set the display window size independently of the physical hardware display resolution.  I.e. an API function something like this:

SDL_Surface *SDL_SetVideoModeCustom(int physicalScreenWidth, int physicalScreenHeight, int displayWidth, int displayHeight, int bpp, Uint32 flags);

This would use displayWidth and displayHeight for the dimensions of a
display window, to be centered on a fullscreen hardware resolution of
physicalScreenWidth by physicalScreenHeight.

Access to physicalScreen(Width|Height) through environment variables could also be useful to the end user.

There are at least 2 use cases:
(1) To maintain the correct pixel aspect ratio for widescreen or tall LCD's, e.g. to always use the LCD's native resolution.
(2) To make the display window smaller for massive displays at normal desktop viewing distances, e.g. for fast action games where it could be hard to see all parts of a massive display at once.

While there may be workarounds for these use cases, mouse-cursor handling becomes very kludgy---it would be very nice to take advantage of SDL's automatic constraining of the mouse cursor position to stay within the display window in these cases.