The SNES was built for a 4:3 television; your monitor is not one. Snes9x’s display settings exist to bridge that gap — cleanly going fullscreen, keeping the picture’s proportions right, and choosing how the small original image is scaled up. This guide covers the fullscreen toggle, the output methods underneath the picture, and the aspect-ratio and filtering choices you will find in the display settings, with honest notes on what each trade-off costs. For the wider picture see the best settings guide, the setup hub and the download page.
Going fullscreen: Alt+Enter
The fullscreen shortcut is Alt+Enter, which toggles between fullscreen and windowed mode — it is a fixed menu accelerator in the Windows build rather than part of the remappable hotkey table. Two companion keys matter in fullscreen: Esc shows or hides the menu bar (your way back to the menus without leaving fullscreen), and the standard gameplay hotkeys — save states on Shift+F1–F10, screenshots on F12, pause — keep working; the complete list is in the hotkeys reference. If you use a controller exclusively, map your workflow so state saves happen from the pad side via the controller setup, and keep Alt+Enter itself on the keyboard.
The output method under the picture
Fullscreen behaviour sits on top of the chosen output method — DirectDraw, Direct3D, OpenGL or Vulkan, the four the Windows build registers. For fullscreen play on a current PC, OpenGL or Vulkan remain our recommendation: they are the modern paths, they scale the image with the current filtering and shader options, and they are where slang and GLSL shaders live (the shaders and filters guide maps which formats each driver takes). Direct3D is the fallback with Cg shader support; DirectDraw is legacy compatibility only. If a fullscreen image looks wrong in one driver — distorted, offset, or not filling as expected — switching output method is a legitimate first diagnostic before touching anything else.
Aspect ratio: the setting that changes how games look
The SNES’s output was displayed on 4:3 CRTs, and games were drawn with that in mind. Snes9x’s display settings let you keep the correct aspect ratio — black bars at the sides on a widescreen monitor, picture proportions as designed — or stretch the image to fill your screen, which removes the bars at the cost of visibly wider sprites and circles that become ovals. Neither is a moral choice, but only one is the picture the artists drew; our strong default is to keep the correct ratio. Version 1.63 added an aspect-ratio hotkey to the program (one of that release’s genuine hotkey additions, alongside the cheat keys) — its current binding lives in Input → Customize Hotkeys, which is where to check or change it rather than trusting a printed combo. Whichever way you jump between ratios, do it mid-game with the hotkey once, see both on your own display, and then settle.
Filtering and scaling choices
In the display settings you will also find the filtering options that decide how the low-resolution image is enlarged. Left unfiltered, SNES pixels scale into large, hard-edged blocks — exactly accurate to the source, and the look many players prefer. Bilinear-style filtering smooths those edges into a softer picture, which some players find easier on a big modern screen and others find blurry. There is no performance argument that matters here on any current machine; it is purely taste, it changes nothing about emulation accuracy or your saves, and it can be flipped freely — including per mood, since it touches no game data. Combined with a shader preset from the shaders guide, filtering is the second layer of the look; adjust one layer at a time.
Windowed play is not a failure mode
Nothing in this guide should read as “fullscreen is the correct way to play”. A window has real advantages: it sits happily beside a guide or a chat window, it makes the Esc menu-bar toggle and the preview dialogs feel natural, and it is the better choice on an ultrawide or unusually tall monitor where a fullscreen image would leave most of the glass empty anyway. Snes9x makes the choice reversible with one keystroke, so the sensible workflow is to start windowed while you set up — mapping a controller, checking saves, picking a shader — and press Alt+Enter when you settle in to actually play. If you run more than one display, keep the emulator on the screen you intend before toggling fullscreen, and if the picture lands somewhere unexpected, Alt+Enter back to the window and move it rather than fighting the settings. The display dialog’s job is to make both modes look right, not to recruit you into one of them.
A calm fullscreen checklist
- Output method on OpenGL or Vulkan before judging picture quality
- Alt+Enter to toggle fullscreen; Esc reveals the menu bar inside it
- Aspect ratio kept correct unless you deliberately prefer the stretch
- Filtering set by taste (crisp vs. smoothed), changed one option at a time
- If the image is wrong in one driver, try another output method before deeper fixes
One more combination worth knowing: fullscreen, correct aspect ratio and a CRT-style shader preset together reproduce something close to the original living-room picture, while fullscreen with the ratio stretched and no shader is the furthest point from it. Most players land somewhere between — ratio correct, filtering to taste, shader optional — and there is no prize for landing at either extreme. Choose the picture you enjoy looking at for a whole game, not the one that wins an argument.
Display sorted, the remaining tutorials — settings, saves, cheats, netplay — are gathered in the setup hub.