You dork!
P)
Played Quake or Doom? Those games are split up in two, basically:
1) the 3d rendering
2) the HUD
(The same goes for Descent. It is split up in a 3d area and a 2d hud area)
The 3d rendering can be natively (without stretching) rendered on pretty much any resolution. 200x200? Possible and it would NOT look stretched or distorted at all, since the 200x200 area isn't the same image as the 320x200 or whatever image. The 200x200 gives you less horizontal viewing range.
Same aspect ratio means different image quality (640x480 has better quality than 320x240).
Different aspect ratio means different area of view (200x200: less horizontal viewing range than on 320x200).
The best way of looking at this is actually by defining the 3d display as a raytraced image. For every pixel, you send a ray outwards and check where it stops, what color that should be, and plot it on the screen. More pixels means more rays (hence the reason why 1280x1024 has slower rendering times than 320x240)..
Now, about Quake and Doom: you can resize the area of the 3d rendering in those games, too. The effect doesn't look weird at all. It just makes the rendering area a bit smaller or bigger. The HUD won't be stretched at all, since the HUD doesn't use the same renderer as the 3d rendering.
With Descent, you can basically add 40 vertical pixels to the 3D RENDERED image, so that you can see "just a bit more up and down", and pull the HUD (the cockpit) down a bit. And voila! 320x240 image with nothing that looks distorted or weird, because NO scaling is used AT ALL, because NOTHING is rendered at, say, 320x240 and then stretched. 3d games generally don't use stretching at all, unless you want a high resolution HUD with a fast, low native resolution 3d rendering. For example, Zdaemon, a doom port, has the ability to render the window of the game in 640x480 and render the 3d rendering at half of what it should be at 640x480, and then stretch it. This makes the 3d rendered area look blocky in comparison to the high resolution HUD, but it is really neat for when your PC or monitor doesn't support low resolution displays, yet when your PC isn't powerful enough to handle the higher resolution 3d renderings.
In other words, if you haven't understood a clue of what I was saying: Have you ever toyed around with 3ds MAX? Rendering an image in 3dsmax in 400x400 is possible, and it does not look stretched at all, because it doesn't render the thing in 320x240 first and then stretch it to 400x400. It instead renders the thing in 400x400. There is no 'uneven' stretching AT ALL because there is NO stretching AT ALL. Same goes for 3d games!
So, instead of STRETCHING:
you RENDER the BLUE pixels on this image:
