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I just bought a shiny new Mac Pro, and I'm trying to set up a VirtualBox VM on it. The OS of the main box is OS X Yosemite, and the VM is running OS X Mavericks[1]. I would like to have the VM run at a better resolution than the 1024x768 default. My monitor has 2048x1152 as a valid resolution, so I figured I'd go with that.

I did some poking around the internet and made the following changes:

  1. Edited my .vbox file and added:

    <ExtraDataItem name="CustomVideoMode1" value="2048x1152x32"/>
    <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/CustomVideoMode1" value="2048x1152x32"/>

  2. Edited /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist and added:

    <key>Kernel Flags
    <string>"Graphics Mode"="2048x1152x32"
    <key>Graphics Mode
    <string>2048x1152x32

  3. Copied com.apple.Boot.plist to /Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist, which meant creating /Extra.

  4. Copied com.apple.Boot.plist to /Extra/com.apple.chameleon.plist.

This did absolutely nothing. The only resolution available on the guest is still 1024x768. Now I'm sad and confused. I found similar instructions on multiple sites on the web, but I'm not seeing any results. I did also see this link, but that seemed to be throwing stuff against the wall just to see what will stick, and I'm not sure if it's applicable to my problem. Does anyone have any thoughts?

[1]: If I understand the licensing correctly, I must either pay for a Yosemite license or run an older version of OS X. If I'm wrong, please correct me!

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  • I couldn;t get it working on Mavericks either!
    – Mukus
    Commented Aug 8, 2015 at 9:27
  • Anybody had any luck with this?
    – Klaus
    Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 3:55

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

Mavericks resolution fix

Chipset -> PIIX3

EFI provides two distinct video interfaces: GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) and UGA (Universal Graphics Adapter). Mac OS X uses GOP, while Linux tends to use UGA. VirtualBox provides a configuration option to control the framebuffer size for both interfaces.

To control GOP, use the following VBoxManage command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" VBoxInternal2/EfiGopMode N

Where N can be one of 0,1,2,3,4, 5 referring to the 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1920x1200 screen resolution respectively.

The video mode for both GOP and UGA can only be changed when the VM is powered off and remains persistent until changed.

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