VOGONS


Fullscreen, yeah right!

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First post, by sentenced

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Hi everybody!

When I play games in fullscreen, I am left with thick black bars obscuring the left, top and bottom of the screen. The bottom bar is particularly thick and intrusive.

I have sifted through the many similar threads here, and I have experimented on and off for a few weeks with different combinations of DOSBOX.conf commands. For the past hour I decided to have another stab at getting around this problem. Absolutely nothing seems to remedy this annoyance. The only time I have changed the look of the screen is when I tweaked the output settings, which made the games look even worse.

I own an LCD monitor, and it has an Autoconfig button, but this does absolutely nothing helpful. I have tried resetting my monitor and unplugging it, but to no avail.

As of now, I am currently using the Omega 2.6.75a drivers for my Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb graphics card.

I hope somebody can help me here, as I really am at my wit's end; desperately wanting to get this thing up and running properly.
Thanks in advance.

Reply 1 of 15, by eL_PuSHeR

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Try

Fullfixed=true
Fullresolution=0x0

Save changes to dosbox.conf and see what happens.

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Reply 2 of 15, by sentenced

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Thanks for the quick reply.

All that has happened is that the game runs in fullfixed. I haven't noticed an actual resolution change everytime I configure it to do so. Fullscreen or Fullfixed, the resolution remains the same.

Is there any way to get around this, or is the resolution changing and I haven't picked up on it? This could well be my problem!

Reply 3 of 15, by DosFreak

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Well your LCD isn't able to set the resolution that the game wants.

Fullresolution=0,0 simply sets DosBox to use the same resolution as your Desktop. In theory assuming that your Desktop is running at your LCD's native resolution.

Have you tried using the scalers?

Also exactly what output methods have you used? You cannot use "Surface" in your situation since it won't scale, and you can't use openglnb since you have an ATI card...so your options are:

Overlay
OpenGL
OpenGLHQ
ddraw
direct3d.

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Reply 4 of 15, by Guest

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Well, changing the scaler and output settings makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. Nothing changes, much like with the resolution problem!

Is it my monitor that is to blame here? It all worked fine and dandy a few months ago before I reinstalled WinXP - same monitor and all.

Thanks for the help so far.

Reply 5 of 15, by sentenced

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^ That was me, by the way.

Reply 6 of 15, by eL_PuSHeR

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You could also uninstall Omega drivers and test the latest official ones, but don't blame me if they don't make any difference.

HINT: Create a System Restore point first.

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Reply 7 of 15, by DosFreak

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Something just occured to me. You say that whatever changes you make to your .conf that they have no effect? How exactly are you running DosBox? Is the .conf that your modifying in the same directory as dosbox.exe or are you specifying the location of the .conf with the "dosbox -conf c:\Whatever\dosbox.conf" command?

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Reply 8 of 15, by Guest

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Installing the Omega drivers was an attempt to get rid of this evil problem. I followed your advice however, and went back to the original Catalyst drivers and the black bars still cut off the screen.

My DOSBOX.cfg file does make some changes! The Fullfixed command and several output options change the quality and appearance of the window, so I know I am doing the right thing. The resolution seems to have no affect whatsoever, though.

Any other ideas? Thanks a lot for all the help this far.

Reply 9 of 15, by sentenced

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^ Again, sorry for not signing in properly... though I thought I did.

Reply 10 of 15, by sentenced

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So I'm screwed, then. Bugger.

Reply 11 of 15, by augnober

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Hey sentenced,

I had the same problem in the past, on my mom's LCD. I think the cause was in the BIOS (strange as that may sound..). Look for any options in there that imply that the display image will automatically be upscaled to fill your display. If you find such an option, disabled it. Once this is changed, you will notice that the Windows bootup (assuming that's what you're using) no longer fills the screen, and now rather fills a small rectangle in the centre of the screen. This will also allow you to get different results from the different DOSBox settings. Hope this helps..

Reply 12 of 15, by sentenced

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augnober,

You, sir, are the greatest guy that has ever lived. I would never have thought of venturing into the BIOS offhand, but it seems like such a good idea now should I ever run into problems again.

Now Wolf3D runs fullscreen and plays like a dream. I haven't touched it in about a year!

Thank you so much.

Reply 13 of 15, by DosFreak

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heh. Should have thought of that but since I rarely used LCD's I totally forgot about it! Thanks for posting back that it fixed the issue. Might help in the future with other people.

You haven't touched it in a year? Shame on you!

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Reply 14 of 15, by Guest

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augnober,

You, sir, are the greatest guy that has ever lived. ...

Got a good laugh from that 😀 As DosFreak sort of brought up, that BIOS setting issue is something that should be noted more widely -- would be a nice addition to a "Troubleshooting" document shipped with DOSBox, FAQ, and/or sticky on these forums. The upscale BIOS setting is the default for many (most?) BIOS's -- a very common and baffling problem. I just happened to change the BIOS setting out of curiosity months later (when I bought an LCD of my own), and I got a horrifying flashback to DOSBox 😀 I didn't know for certain that it would actually work. Glad it does.

Reply 15 of 15, by Guest

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Oh, great! I found this thread just when I faced the same problem today... 😀

Thanks you all !