VOGONS


First post, by Giuliano

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Hi all,

DOSBox has a plethora of configuration options regarding image generation, allowing us to play our favorite retro games. For my taste, the best DOSBox options are:

[sdl]
fullscreen = true
fulldouble = false
fullresolution = desktop
windowresolution = original
output = opengl

[dosbox]
machine = svga_s3

[render]
aspect = true
scaler = none
glshader = sharp

What are your preferences?

Reply 1 of 5, by leileilol

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At least have scaler=normal2x because VGA was doublescanned. Similarly, there's situations where machine=vgaonly is important to get games to render properly (and at this point, looks the most accurate for VGA it can be but doesn't have any of the VBE in there).

There's no one best rendering config. The default DOSbox config covers a lot of common use bases and the best performance, but doesn't reach the exotic demos, VGA scanline trick games or the early CGA palette trickers.

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long live PCem

Reply 3 of 5, by buckeye

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I usually keep to the default settings but there is one game I wish there was a way to spruce up the visuals and that's Front Page Sports
Football Pro 95 by Sierra/Dynamix. Maybe later on another post I'll attach a screenshot and perhaps someone can offer some insight.

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Reply 4 of 5, by Giuliano

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leileilol wrote on 2022-09-18, 20:53:

At least have scaler=normal2x because VGA was doublescanned.

Hi, leileilol, I've changed from scaler=none to scaler=normal2x, and I didn't notice any improvement in the images. I've attached two images of a 1990's game called Red Baron, one for each scaler.

Should it have improved?

I am not a developer, so I don't understand the inner workings of DOSBox. I may be completely wrong in the next statement, but I believe that when I choose fullresolution=desktop and/or glshader=sharp, the scaler option is ignored.

Cheers!

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Reply 5 of 5, by Giuliano

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BardBun wrote on 2022-09-20, 22:26:

output=openglnb

aspect=false

Hi BardBun, I haven't tried openglnb yet. Will give it a try next week.

As for aspect=false, I don't like the distorted image it generates. For instance, in the Red Baron game, the original image is 320x200 px, and the VGA card transformed it to 640x480 in orther to fit it correctly in a 4:3 monitor screen. So, with aspect true, the cockpit's dials appear correctely round. But with aspect false, they appear oval.

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