Apart from the standard VESA resolutions, the VESA BIOS enables you to add up to 16 custom video modes which will be reported to the guest operating system. When using Windows guests with the Guest Additions, a custom graphics driver will be used instead of the fallback VESA solution so this information does not apply.

Additional video modes can be configured for each VM using the extra data facility. The extra data key is called CustomVideoModex with x being a number from 1 to 16. Please note that modes will be read from 1 until either the following number is not defined or 16 is reached. The following example adds a video mode that corresponds to the native display resolution of many notebook computers:

$ VBoxManage setextradata VM-name "CustomVideoMode1" "1400x1050x16"

The VESA mode IDs for custom video modes start at 0x160. In order to use the above defined custom video mode, the following command line has to be supplied to Linux:

vga = 0x200 | 0x160
vga = 864

For guest operating systems with Guest Additions, a custom video mode can be set using the video mode hint feature.