Aspect=true is not dependent on the game, but, rather, whether you, the user, want square pixels or round circles.

Well, it's not needed for games that use a graphics mode that has square pixels. Let's say a game that uses 640 x 480 resolution all of the time.

As for a list, it's really mostly the 320 x 200 DOS games that benefit from this setting.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that; you're right. Some games use 320x240 too right?

But either way, it's still kind of a personal preference thing.

Yes it is. Though having it enabled, never, at least I can't thing of anything, causes any issues.

All of them. You'd really need it set to false if you plan to output to a real CRT that would 4:3 them gracefully without a stretch

Thanks people. I expected it to be only for some games from a reading of the wiki on the option (it mentions that doom is distorted on its resolution without it), but i didn't expect it to be true to all modern monitors resolutions and DOS games).

As mentioned, for all of the 320 x 200 games. Essentially the pre-VESA games. It really is not a matter of personal preference. A 4:3 game displayed at 16:10 will have distorted graphics. It is not how the graphics of those games were meant to be displayed.

@collector, you're right, but on the other hand it is possible to imagine someone who always played these games on an LCD screen (on a laptop, for instance) and never knew how they were "supposed" to look, and therefore prefers square pixels.

collector wrote:

As mentioned, for all of the 320 x 200 games. Essentially the pre-VESA games. It really is not a matter of personal preference. A 4:3 game displayed at 16:10 will have distorted graphics. It is not how the graphics of those games were meant to be displayed.

Well i always setup dosbox games to not stretch the games into non-aspect ratio resolutions when the graphics driver stretches to fullscreen, that is the main cause of distortion i know, and that option doesn't help at all with that (i know those that do ).
BTW i was *really* confused when i first saw the 'aspect' option in dosbox and it didn't help with that. Maybe clarify it in the readme/wiki?

leileilol wrote:

All of them. You'd really need it set to false if you plan to output to a real CRT that would 4:3 them gracefully without a stretch

If you play on a real CRT then the only "correct" setting is fullscreen=original and aspect=false.

Serious Callers Only wrote:

collector wrote:

As mentioned, for all of the 320 x 200 games. Essentially the pre-VESA games. It really is not a matter of personal preference. A 4:3 game displayed at 16:10 will have distorted graphics. It is not how the graphics of those games were meant to be displayed.

Well i always setup dosbox games to not stretch the games into non-aspect ratio resolutions when the graphics driver stretches to fullscreen, that is the main cause of distortion i know, and that option doesn't help at all with that (i know those that do ).
BTW i was *really* confused when i first saw the 'aspect' option in dosbox and it didn't help with that. Maybe clarify it in the readme/wiki?

All 320x200 games are 4:3 aspect ratio. This is the CGA resolution that was also compatible with NTSC composite output.

Pretty much all games up till 1996 were designed for 4:3 CRT's. LCD monitors only started to be a thing around 1996, but it would be a few years before they had good refresh rates to warrant playing games on them. Most people kept their CRT monitors around until about 2006, some people still do. Since the VGA and LVDS (DVI-I) ports are "depreciated" and not likely to be kept around for much longer, we're going to run into an era where nobody remembers what these games are supposed to look like on a CRT.

Other than 320x200, there's other display modes (Hercules, Monochrome, EGA, etc) that have high-resolution modes that are also 4:3 that are non-square. Even VGA itself isn't square. Only SVGA 800x600 actually has a defined 4:3 square pixel resolution. VGA has a 640x400 and a 720x400 mode that is rarely seen, EGA has 640x350, Hercules has 720x348.

Now what screws things up in the present is that 320x200 and 640x400 map directly onto 16:10 monitors (1920x1200) as square pixels, so if you have aspect ratio correction turned off, and you opt to run these games at full screen, the GPU and the Monitor are not going to agree on the aspect ratio, and the monitor will likely fill the monitor. Unfortunately to get a 100% pixel-perfect scale, you actually need a larger than full HD monitor since you need an 8X pixel scale. (2560x1600 WQHD -> 2560x1920), this only matters if you're doing pixel stretching in software. If you use a hardware scaler you can tell the shader to multiply each pixel into 8x8 blocks and then scale up by 1/3rd vertically. Then if you don't have a large enough monitor you can scale it back down because 3D rendering allows for sub-pixel precision.

That said, the ultimate solution for displaying correctly on LCD screens is to run in a window with aspect ratio correction on, because you have no guarantee that the full screen resolution will be stretched correctly. But when you run in a window, that means the CPU has to do more work instead of letting the GPU or Monitor stretch the image.

So really what needs to happen is utilizing OpenCL to do the 2X->10X math or offload it directly to GPU shaders.

There are plenty of games where it's less-than immediately obvious that there is something wrong. Sierra SCI games actually look "OK" until you see an actually correct screenshot or video. Where as Wing Commander has targeting circles that are "not-circular" if you don't have aspect-ratio correction on. Some games may have been designed to have square pixels and the developers just went "to hell with it" (eg Elite Plus)

I'd actually be pretty satisfied with a fake fullscreen option that scales up correctly as much as it can leaving everything else blank without these complications of messing with monitor commands or mesa weird runtime configs. Something like that wouldn't help with those with a need for speed, but would at least not be as distracting as a window manager peeking out from behind the game you're supposedly immersed in. That's why i can't take it seriously when someone suggests 'use windowed mode'.

Kisai wrote:

All 320x200 games are 4:3 aspect ratio. This is the CGA resolution that was also compatible with NTSC composite output.

No, not all, and Lure of the Temptress is a notable exception. It should be played with square pixels. Observe round objects in the game, such as the Moon in the introduction, to convince yourself. The game is perfectly proportioned with unity par. See also this post on Reddit.

Edit: I have just attached a few screenshots.

well yeah, there is of course those amiga-developed multiplatform games which desired square pixels from the start - but it's not how DOS enjoyed them then.

This would have different if Abrash's ModeX technique were more popular and computer monitors were more tolerable

leileilol wrote:

well yeah, there is of course those amiga-developed multiplatform games which desired square pixels from the start - but it's not how DOS enjoyed them then.

But one could adjust the analog controls on one's CRT monitor for unity PAR.

well yeah that's true. but remember, not all earlier VGA monitors then had the knobs, and you can't expect the end user to adjust the screen every time they wish to play a certain game.

I have heard some games had a calibration menu to aid the user in adjusting the pixel aspect ratio.