Tried the demo and getting what appears to be the same glitch. Horizontal shimmering lines, similar to tearing artifacts.

Window mode seems to work fine though...

I tried "double buffering" which usually helps but not in this case.

Tried on my Pentium 133 and smooth as butter.

I noticed that on my Retro PC the image was a bit off center (pressing the auto button on the LCD resolves this), so it appears to use a different resolution or refresh rate or something different to my other 320 x 200 games.

Thanks for your reply. But maybe a stupid question (DOSbox is completely new to me):
Does your answer mean that something is wrong with the version I bought ? Or has it to do with Pinball Fantasies itself (played in DOSbox) ? In other words should it be possible to solve it ?

Mau is saying that he sees the same issue in the demo as you are seeing in the full game, but only when DOSBox is run fullscreen instead of in a window. He's also saying that the issue you mentioned does not occur on a real retro PC, so it may indeed be a DOSBox problem.

What happens if you set machine=vgaonly or machine=svga_et4000 in your DOSBox options?

HunterZ wrote:

What happens if you set machine=vgaonly or machine=svga_et4000 in your DOSBox options?

Same problem with both settings.
So it has nothing to do with Pinball Fantasies itself, but with Pinball Fantasies in DOSBox ?
Btw, for me playing in windowed mode goes fine as well.

I checked the screen shots and it appears that pinball fantasies runs at 320 x 240 whereas most other Games run at 320 x 200. Maybe this is causing difficulties for DOSBox?

This explains why on Retro PC the image on my LCD monitor needed auto adjusting for this particular game. The game runs at a higher resolution.

You've paid money for a game so please bug the people who sold it to you if something doesn't work as expected.

wd wrote:

You've paid money for a game so please bug the people who sold it to you if something doesn't work as expected.

Do you mean that I shouldn't have posted here and that you are a bit irritated that I did ? If so, I don't understand. I was not complaining about the game. Being new to DOSBox, I only wondered if it had to do with DOSBox and if there was a way to solve it, i.e. a certain setting in the configuration.
If not: I apologize for misinterpreting your reply.
Btw, I did write to the seller of the game but did not get a reply (yet).

I only have a problem if people who make money with dosbox expect that we're doing
full product support for them (which means unpaid free time for us).

Of course it may be a bug in dosbox.

Try fixed cycles

I think I have solved it. Trying different resolution settings for full screen I suddenly had a setting with which the lines disappeared. Thanks for the help and the hint with regards to the resolutiuon.

rijnton wrote:

I think I have solved it. Trying different resolution settings for full screen I suddenly had a setting with which the lines disappeared. Thanks for the help and the hint with regards to the resolutiuon.

Can you be more specific? Others may come here looking for a solution to the same problem, possibly including Mau1wurf1977 who reports seeing the same issue. Thanks!

P.S. I think wd's irritation is more with the companies who are selling games bundled with DOSBox and forcing customers to come here when they need help instead of offering decent direct support.

After posting here, I also found this forum thread:
http://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=246&letter=P
and started to try various combinations of the settings mentioned there and fullresolution settings. I don't know what did the trick (I am completely new to DOSBox), but I think it was the "fullresolution" setting. As I wrote above, I use my tv as monitor and it has a resolution of 1920x1080.
Anyway I ended with the following:
fulldouble=true
fullresolution=1680x1050
output=ddraw
machine=vgaonly
aspect=true
scaler=advmame2x
The lines are gone and it plays quite smooth.
Btw, one more question:
I have a folder Pinball Fantasies and DOSbox is in that folder, as well as a subfolder Dll's. In the Dll's folder is a script.conf which is apparently used for full screen and that is the one I changed.
But where should a conf file "normally" be put ? I mean when using DOSBox and for instance a folder Dosgames ? Is it in the specific game folder or in the DOSBox folder ?

Install the official 0.74 release and read the readme.

When you install recent official standalone DOSBox releases on Windows, they put the .conf file in one of your special user folders that you'll never find without digging. However, a shortcut is created in your Start Menu that opens the .conf file for you so you can edit it.

If you want per-game .conf files, you can either create DOSBox shortcuts that specify which .conf(s) to use via additional parameters to DOSBox.exe (see DOSBox's readme), or you can use a frontend application.