So after playing around, I can confirm that the fewer vertical pixels you toss at the game, the more useful the wider horizontal viewport is.
At 512 vertical, everything worked fine except the "end of trip summary". Even at 600 vertical, you only get one line of items, and cannot look thought the whole thing in 60 seconds.
Can the "fixed" part of this -- showing the various knights in the party -- be made smaller? 600 is an officially supported vertical resolution, and this is the one place I've seen where it just doesn't work well enough.
People still play games on screens that small?
And it wouldn't take more than 60 seconds to see what you got at the end of a run, even if you could only see one item at a time, unless you were going to read the description of every item on every run.