I just got a new Dell laptop and its got a 15.1'' WXGA display. The native resolution is 1200x800. I just tried playing BF1942 and the game looks amazing, but it won't show on the whole screen. I went to the games Video settings and found that it had a max resolution of 1024x768. The screen size gets larger, but a considerable portion of the screen is cut off on each side.

Is there any way around this problem? To be able to play games full screen on my laptop, are the games going to have to support 1200x800?

Out of all the games I have tried on my PowerBook, only one knew of the 1280x854 resolution of the widescreen display. Specifically Warcraft 3. All others I have had to edit a settings ini or plist file to manually enter the resolution.

So far the following have worked:
Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 - including non distorted widescreen support
Shadowbane - Including flawless widescreen support, no interface distortion either
Warcraft 3 - Displayed widescreen, but clearly just stretched
Halo - Can't remember how it dealt with it, since the game is so sluggish
Command And Conquer Generals - Haven't tried a widescreen resolution. 800x600 and 1024x768 stretch to fill the screen