I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I know, the scalers apply to all modes, but multiply them by 1x, 2x, or 3x (depending on the specific scaler) and do fancy smoothing effects.

Hi HunterZ,

In fact I tried the VESA version of Gabriel Knight and scaler option does'nt affect the 640x480 mode, only the VGA one.

Sorry, Guest was me.

Strange. It could be that you can't, for example, apply a 2x scaler affect to a 640x480 game unless you're either running in a window, or in a full-screen resolution that is at least 2x the size of the game resolution (which would be 1280x960).

Thank you very much for your assistance, it helped me to find the solution.
The fullfixed option was the source of my problem :
- With fullfixed=false, 2x scalers don't affect 640x480 mode,
- With fullfixed=true, they do.

scalers don't affect 640x480 games at all. Only 320x200 and similar low-res modes are scaled in software. What you have encountered is hardware scaling (enabled by hwscale and/or fullfixed), that applies to everything.

If I can find the resources to buy a Dell 2405 Flat Panel TFT LCD with a native resolution of 1920x1200, then I could need to apply a 6x scaler to the 320x200 resolution and achieve a full screen resolution with pixels as square as they come.

Dell 2405 is a Wide Screen. None DOS game was made for a wide screen. So all of them will not look properly - they will be squashed.
Other thing is that even the smallest LCD (1024x768) uses it's own monitor scaler that scales any lower resolution to 1024x768 and the result is very nice. The higher LCD's native resolution, the better result. Actually only really high resolutions (800x600) doesn't look nice on 1024x768LCD. And it is 1280x1024 that is a standard for LCDs now. So almost every dos game (up to 640x480) should look nice on it. 320x200 looks almost perfectly.

So there is absolutely no need to worry about the future of DOS games with modern LCDs.

[Edit by Snover: 768, not 786 😀]

Moe, thank you for these precisions.
I did some tests and, in ddraw mode, whatever scaler I choose, antialiasing applys when fullfixed option is activated.
Things are more clear now.

Everything will look wrong on nearly all 1280x1024 scaled LCDs because they have the wrong aspect ratio! Death to VESA, who decided on this mode instead of 1280x960 years ago! (I want a 19" 1280x960 LCD dammit. Grumble.)

I am with you on this. My stupid TFT native resolution is also 1280x1024.

Snover wrote:

Everything will look wrong on nearly all 1280x1024 scaled LCDs because they have the wrong aspect ratio! Death to VESA, who decided on this mode instead of 1280x960 years ago! (I want a 19" 1280x960 LCD dammit. Grumble.)

I fully agree. I would love to see a 19" 1280x960 LCD monitor. My old CRT is on it's last days, and it seems like I have to get a more expensive 20" 1600x1200 soon instead.

FWIW, some 320x200 games look really nice on my 1280x800 widescreen panel - even though it's not scaled "correctly". It seems that some programmers didn't realize that 320x200 at a 4:3 aspect ration doesn't have square pixels, and programmed their game as if it were square pixels. That makes them look worse when run natively (like, circles look like ovals) and they appear correctly on a widescreen panel. (Nice example: Earth in X-Com)

Personally, I like my pixels razor sharp and all the same size, especially when they are less than a foot from my face. Thats why I like MobyGames, which generally uses lossless-compressed screenshots. LCDs are superior to CRTs for text displays. Imagine being able to cleanly trace the pixels of a font.

I think for 640x480 materials, a 1280x1024 panel might be best, although 1280x960 panels would be more suitable but tough to find. Essentially, you would have to suffer lettboxing of 32 pixels on the top and bottom of the screen (or a 64 pixel bar on the top or bottom of the screen) to rid yourself of interpolation with a scaling factor of 2x. Otherwise, the closest you will get to full screen non-interpolated 640x480 goodness is the QUXGA resolution of 3200x2400.

For 320x200 materials, two LCD resolutions beckon. The WUXGA resolution of the Dell 2405 is 1920x1200 and would essentially sqaure the pixels. The UXGA resolution of good 20" flat panels, 1600x1200 also has its charms, namely a 4:3 screen resolution. That resolution is closer to what the graphics artists had in mind when they drew their graphics. A 5/6 scaler would give an acceptible resolution. Consider that for all VGA and better cards, the 200 line modes are double scanned to 400 line modes. In essence, the true screen resolution is 320x400.