scaling/zooming a wine virtual desktop
 

I'm trying to run StarCraft in wine 1.0 in a virtual desktop but the problem is that SC is very stubborn about sticking to a resolution of 800x600 and so the window looks rather small on a 1680x1050 screen.

Is there some facility in wine or X that can blow up the window to some bigger size? I don't want to let the game run in non-virtual desktop mode so is there any alternative?

StarCraft is locked at 640x480. You can resize the Virtual Desktop, but as far as I know, the game will still run at 640x480 points. So either you change your screen resolution or you run StarCraft in fullscreen.

Not in X nor wine (other than running fullscreen).

However, with compositing enabled this can be done (and in fact, I think that there's a zooming plugin for compiz that allows you to zoom the contents of a given window).

Another solution is to run some kind of nested server. For example, you could run tightvnc to a local server, or even xnest (not recommended), and run wine fullscreen on that nested xserver (which would still allow you to multitask on your main x server).

Yet another solution is to launch a second xserver into another vt. For example, you start your first x server, then do control+alt+f2, you login there, start another server, and launch the game fullscreen there. That way, you can have your normal x server on control+alt+f7, and an alternate one for games on coltrol+alt+f8, and change back and forth from one to another.

You decide which one you like best. The later is probably the easiest one.

I was originally thinking along the lines of your first suggestion --
getting the window manager to fudge the window size and stretch the contents.
The only snag is that I'm using Xfce which combined with compiz implies painful confguration!

I like your last suggestion though, I was under the impression that you can only have one X server launched a a time. And this should be interesting because I have a dual head setup so I'll play around with that. The only thing that concerns me is how to redirect the keyboard and mouse input...

The main problem is not xfce+compiz (might be a big one, I don't know). The main problem is that lots of programs that use intensive video i/o or 3d will have problems to run in compiz. And those that will run, will suffer a big performance penalty.

You can have as many as your machine can run. In different vt's, nested, via vnc, or whatever.

Hehe, this changes everything. If you have a dual head setup you shouldn't need anything else. If you DON'T configure X to use twinview/xinerama, one separate x server should be spawn on each screen. That means that whatever you do on screen 1 (including fullscreening a program) is not going to bother you in screen 2. The downside of non-xinerama setup (or the advantage, it depends) is that you can't move programs from one screen to another (since they are separate x servers).