Do you have a DOS program that runs in a non-standard resolution like 500x500?

Not exactly. What I have is a DOS program that runs in 80x50 textmode at 720x400, however, it's difficult to read some of the text since it's all squashed, and it looks even worse in fullscreen on a widescreen monitor!

I would like to run it at 720x800 windowed. All of the text is double high and easier to read.

TheAlmightyGuru wrote:

and it looks even worse in fullscreen on a widescreen monitor!

so configure dosbox properly

Well, that's the whole point of this topic; I don't know how to configure it properly! 😀

I've tried setting windowresolution=720x800 and output=overlay, but the resolution won't change.

I don't think you can make Dosbox distort the image into the wrong aspect ratio.

Try windowresolution=original

windowresolution=original just keeps the default resolution of the program. I need to stretch it to an non-standard res. I know this wouldn't work in fullscreen mode, but I figured the aspect ratio wouldn't matter in windowed mode.

DOSBox refuses to stretch textmode apps. You might have a shot of getting it to stretch or scale a graphics mode app, but I haven't even been able to get the standard text mode to vertically fill the default 640x480 window..

Pretend you aren't on DOSBox but on a real machine, and you might be able to get the text to render in a more easily read mode using some utilities or by using the mode command.

The MODE command came up in my searches, but I was unable to get it to work. Is it an external program that I have to download separately?

TheAlmightyGuru wrote:

windowresolution=original just keeps the default resolution of the program.

Exactly!

Now use your display adapter to the rest of the scaling (stretching as you call it).

Nvidia and ATI have scaling options in their drivers.

On my machine I have full screen text with correct aspect ratio no problems!

GPU hardware scaling only functions on fullscreen apps, he specified windowed mode. Also, DOSBox scales strangely - if set to "original" in fullscreen mode it will put a 1920x1200 (or whatever your native) fullscreen window up with a centered 320x240 (or whatever the original resolution was) box in the center - the hardware will detect that as native 1920x1200 (or whatever you have) and not scale it.

If you want to get the thing to hardware scale your image you'd have to fullscreen it and set it explicitly to a resolution below native, i.e., 1024x768 in the case of a 1920x1200 screen to achieve a 2x or so stretch.

TheAlmightyGuru wrote:

The MODE command came up in my searches, but I was unable to get it to work. Is it an external program that I have to download separately?

As a component of FreeDOS, you can indeed download it on its own:
http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=mode

However, I imagine if the DOS program you're trying to run sets the mode on its own, the only solution is to try to hack the bytes in the code that change the mode in order to get what you want. I doubt it's all that difficult if you know what you're doing - not that I would.

I fear you're right - if the program changes to 80x50 mode (the standard is 80x25) then there's little you can do along the line of changing the program's mode. You can, however, change the surface size that DOSBox renders that mode to, the virtual screen resolution, as I mentioned as well.

It may also be possible to modify some bytes on the virtual GPU to make it report that 80x50 text mode isn't available. This would either cause the program to run in 80x25 (much larger text vertically) or cause it to not run at all. I've only ever done things like that for graphical modes, so I'm not sure what (if any) tools exist to block modes, or modify the list of available modes for text.

TheAlmightyGuru: Are you trying to just scale the size, or change the aspect ratio as well?

Try these settings together:
windowresolution=720x800
aspect=false

If that doesn't work, try also setting scaler=none and/or cycling through *all* of the output= settings in combination with the windowresolution and aspect settings above. Some of the output= modes may not allow scaling of text modes, but I'm pretty sure some of them do.

you can change your desktop resolution the way dosbox window will look the way you want