First post, by goldeng
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi there everyone!
I'm having an irritating issue which I couldn't find a solution here over the forum. But if I missed it please accept my apology in advanced. 😀
Please note that I'm using DOSBox for many years by now and familiar with most things you can do with the dosbox.conf file. But yet it doesn't say that I can't use some help from you guys.
A bit of background:
I've been working on a funny dubbed project of mine for the recent years, based on the classic 'Prince Of Persia' 1 & 2 games. And every a few months or so I publish new episodes for my fans at my channel on 'YouTube'. The projects are basically a video-capture of the game play + extra animations that I draw by myself, like Mortal Kombat moves for the Prince and guards and many more. And above all that I'm dubbing the Prince arguing with the guards and complains about anything you can imagine.
• Technical details: I capture the game-play with 'Camtasia Recorder' along with the 'Lagarith Lossless Video Codec' - highly recommended codec by the way.
Here are links to the playlists if you wish to know what it's all about. The dubbing is in Hebrew, however you may find English subtitles in the videos as well:
Prince of Persia - The Dubbed & Photographed Version:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5C1A40A75C855891
Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow And The Flame - The Dubbed & Photographed Version:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0A619A7830813914
Now the problem I'm having is with the color palette that doesn't match my previous game-play captures, which also includes all the animation sprites I cleaned from the background pixel by pixel. I've noticed this since I replaced my ATI Radeon 5770 with a new nVidia GeForce GTX 770 very recently. So when I video-capture the game-play now, the color palette looks brighter than my previous captures.
I encountered this issue once when I re-installed DOSBox after I formatted my PC and noted this down. I found that if the output under the [sdl] section in the dosbox.conf file is set to surface, then the entire appearance of whatever you play in DOSBox looks a bit brighter. But when I changed it to overlay, then the brightness seems to be a little darker - which is equals to the colors I've captured in my previous video-captures. In both surface and overlay settings, the machine under the [dosbox] section in the dosbox.conf file is set to svga_s3.
Now when I try to change the above settings now, equipped with my new nVidia GeForce GTX 770 graphic card, it doesn't seem to affect DOSBox whatsoever. So basically both surface and overlay settings looks brighter than my previous video-captures, and I can't seem to find a way to fix it. That is where I wanted to switch between the graphic cards again to see if there's a difference, but then remembered that my laptop is equipped with an ATI graphic card. And that way I could do the comparison LIVE screen aside to screen.
I copied the entire DOSBox folder with the dosbox.conf file along with the 'Prince2' folder which I'm currently working on, and tried to switch between the surface and overlay settings, and what do you know - I could see the change instantly! When the output was set to surface the entire level looked brighter, but when I changed it to overlay and re-launched DOSBox, the entire level's color palette was darker and identical to my previous video-captures and ripped sprites. And now I come to the question - Does any one of you knows why the overlay setting seems to work fine on ATI chips and doesn't work on nVidia?
Please see the attached screenshot that I took from my laptop (ATI chip), where you could see the brightness difference.
I usually save to PNGs and not JPEGs in order to avoid distorted artifacts.
On my nVidia workstation both settings looks like the right picture in the screenshot (brighter).
I circled the rectangle image where on the left picture looks black (darker), while on the right looks grey (brighter). Same thing is very visible on the floor tiles. You get the picture. 😀
Any assistance would be very appreciated.
Many thanks for reading and for trying to help!
Best regards,
goldeng