Your monitor pictures aren't visible to guests on that forum FYI.

Great Hierophant wrote:

DOSBox just spits out the "Cannot run on a Color Card" error message. Just in case you wanted improve the EGA monochrome accuracy

DOSBox is emulating a color monitor for EGA/VGA, not a mono monitor, and to run this game on such hardware you have to change to monochrome mode. Technically, it is changing the BIOS equipment list word to indicate monochrome instead of color and then setting mode 7, and this is easily done with the external MODE program from DOS (e.g. "MODE MONO").

If you switch to monochrome mode with machine=vgaonly then you will get 9-dot characters; and with machine=vgaonly in a recent SVN build you will get the 14-line font and 9-dot *wide* characters. However, the particular game in question uses MDA/Hercules text attributes in a way that EGA/VGA does not completely emulate, so machine=hercules is preferred for proper attributes. The Hercules emulation might be reworked for 9-dot text drawing at some point, but the current 8-dot drawing is a cosmetic issue at most.

ripsaw8080 wrote:

If you switch to monochrome mode with machine=vgaonly then you will get 9-dot characters; and with machine=vgaonly in a recent SVN build you will get the 14-line font and 9-dot *wide* characters. However, the particular game in question uses MDA/Hercules text attributes in a way that EGA/VGA does not completely emulate, so machine=hercules is preferred for proper attributes. The Hercules emulation might be reworked for 9-dot text drawing at some point, but the current 8-dot drawing is a cosmetic issue at most.

I tried this after compiling the latest SVN, but the height of the screen remains in 400 line mode after using MODE MONO in vgaonly machine type. The game will run and the attributes will be off in vgaonly. It will still complain about the color adapter in ega machine type. It does look like the EGA card did on my 5151.

I suppose that any emulated graphics that do not look as they should are "cosmetic issues" 😉 Aren't those 9th-column lines as sexy as tan lines?

Here are the main photos for those who are not VCF members :

You'll need to switch to EGA lines mode before switching to monochrome mode if you really want the 350-line mode with the 14-line font, but the attributes aren't going to become any more like MDA. And by cosmetic I mean that playability is not compromised; and some may even prefer not having the gaps between characters, seeing it as an eyesore rather than a point of historical accuracy. 😉