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I want to play Half Life 1 on a borderless window. If I enable "Run in a window" on the Video Options, the taskbar is still visible for some reason.

How can I play Half Life 1 (or any GoldSrc game) in a borderless window?

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Lemon
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  • does "auto hide taskbar" option solve your problem? – arghtype Jan 21 '20 at 19:58
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    I need the taskbar visible for my second monitor. Other games just disable the taskbar for the primary monitor and leave the other monitors as-is. – Lemon Jan 21 '20 at 20:00
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    "Other games just disable the taskbar" -- they generally don't. Windows figures out when it should get out of the way; see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050505-04/?p=35703. Running in a bordered window breaks this. – Roger Lipscombe Jan 22 '20 at 10:25
  • "Running in a bordered window breaks this" actually no, as long as the total size of the window matches the current monitor resolution (example: Grand Theft Auto V). – Lemon Jan 22 '20 at 22:07

2 Answers2

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You can set the game to run in a borderless window through Steam:

Right-click the game in your library, go to 'Properties...', select 'Set Launch Options', type in -windowed -noborder, and click 'OK'. Twice.

Steam Set Launch Options to -windowed -borderless

This should logically work for all Goldsource games.

Joachim
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For all games that can run in windowed mode (including Half Life 1), you can also consider using fullscreenizer, an open source tool that forces a chosen window to become fullscreen borderless.

This is especially useful for games that do support windowed mode but don't support fullscreen borderless. But as Joachim pointed out, this specific game does. I personally use it for certain indie titles.

Erik A
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