That is one of the first scalers to become widely popular. Eagle/SuperEagle is another. I think the advmame scaler in DOSBox is a more modern descendant of 2xSaI and friends, but I bet it wouldn't be too hard to add 2xSaI to DOSBox.

I think hq2x is nicer than 2xSaI 😀
http://www.hiend3d.com/hq2x.html

And a hardware hq2x (which require a graphic card with PS2.0 support) have been incorperated into DOSBox by `Moe`. Read more about it here: [DOSBox-only version] Hq2x / Hardware OpenGL-HQ scaling

Software hq2x would be a nice addition to DOSBox too, but I just looked at DOSBox's scaler source and ran away in terror. I'm assuming all that black magic with code-in-header-files, goto's, etc. is for efficiency...

ah? Moe's patch includes both software and hw hq2x scalers. And I do have 2xsai hw filter for d3d sitting on my harddrive...just haven't got around to supporting it since it requires multiple passes over the image.

Cool!

gulikoza wrote:

ah? Moe's patch includes both software and hw hq2x scalers. And I do have 2xsai hw filter for d3d sitting on my harddrive...just haven't got around to supporting it since it requires multiple passes over the image.

Oh, I wasn't aware of that 😀 And good luck with the 2xSaI HW filter! 😀

Well...seems like it wasn't that hard to add 2xSaI support to D3D 😀. But I must say I don't like it very much...it's much too blurry for me (that is, unless I made a mistake somewhere which is blurring the final image). The speed is quite acceptable, somewhat slower then scale2x.fx on my ati 9600. But then again...the quality of hq2x blows it away 😁

Yeah I don't care much for 2xSai or (Super)Eagle compared to hq2x or even advmame2x either...

yea hq2x looks nice but makes everything look too "perfect" imo.. 2xsai maintains that pixelized look of older games to some extent 🤣

Well, thanks for advertising my work wihle I was ill 😉
I've always been a fan of "looks so cool, could be a remake" look. But yesterday I decided to play through Kult (it's not as if it that takes long 😉 ) without scaling and was surprised how nice it looked. If you really like some pixeling and some smoothing, you could try a custom scaling table for the hardware HQ-scaler (note, I call it OpenGL-HQ or just HQ, since it looks different [better, of course 😉] than hq2x). Look at the patch files to get an idea how to do that - not for the faint of heart, sorry.

I hope you're well now 😀

I know openglhq and hq2x are not the same, but it's simpler to call them hw and sw hq2x (my fingers are kinda used to typing hq2x 😁). I usually prefer the original look if I remember the game. If I'm playing a game I don't know only then I consider using some scalers. I'd really love to understand the mistery behind openglhq, but I'm afraid it will take quite some time 😀

Funny thing... I've played M&M3 over and over again (back then and from then on until today, even though it's the buggy original disk version), and these days I hate the original look. OTOH, I barely knew Kult (never played it myself back then, only watched my brother giving up on it countless times 😉 ) and somehow enjoyed the retro-feeling. Strange, really.

As for the adaptability of hw HQ scaling, I've written a tool (using PyQt, you need Python and Qt - probably not yet freely available on windows, but should be soon) that makes adapting the table easier: you set up pixels and specify how these should be smoothed (or not - your choice). Of course it's completely undocumented, but drop me a line if you would like to give it a go. That way you could even give each of your games it's own optimized look.

I think Trolltech releases old versions of Qt for free on Windows for non-commercial use.

They even used to release current versions, but not free (as in speech), only free as in beer, which has been problematic to combine with other open source components. With the 4.0 release, they want to release the windows version as real open source, as far as I know. I just don't know if they already did 😉