*hands vasyl a bear*

You earned it! 🤣

avatar_58 wrote:

*hands vasyl a bear*

You earned it! 🤣

you already give my beer away? 🙁

anyway, what will happen to the red border missing now?
and avatar, when I run crystal caves without dosbox, the red border is in place.

Cerberus_e wrote:

anyway, what will happen to the red border missing now?
and avatar, when I run crystal caves without dosbox, the red border is in place.

Its not there for me.... 😮 I wonder what causes it to vanish? It doesn't seem to only be dosbox related if it happens to me in xp... 😕

uhm well your videocard in XP might not follow the specs as well. (either one of you)

My GeForce4 shows the border, but I have to deliberately misalign my LCD monitor to get it to appear.

Kippesoep wrote:

My GeForce4 shows the border, but I have to deliberately misalign my LCD monitor to get it to appear.

I tried to use "center output" on my LCD to get a small game window but the border wasn't there...just black. 😒 So I guess whatever causes dosbox issues happens to me in xp (Geforce 6800 GT)

Any way for those who see the border to get the resolution? It would be nice to know if the game adds pixels to the side or what.

It could actually be a feature of my monitor. The game itself runs in 320x200. Anything outside that shows the border colour (of course, only if I run it under Windows' NTVDM, not in DOSBox).

Don't use XP, boot from a 98 bootdisk and see if it works.

Kippesoep wrote:

It could actually be a feature of my monitor. The game itself runs in 320x200. Anything outside that shows the border colour (of course, only if I run it under Windows' NTVDM, not in DOSBox).

Its odd because everything outside (if I put it into centered mode) is black and doesn't change colours when I grab all the crystals.

Maybe Kippesoep is using VGA and you're using DVI?

Yep, I've an old model LCD with VGA only.

HunterZ wrote:

Maybe Kippesoep is using VGA and you're using DVI?

Yea, but if I set it to centered nothing is being scaled....shouldn't the border (if its part of the game) be there? I think whatever this games does in dos isn't standard.. 😵

I use a Geforce FX 5200 and I get the border if I don't use dosbox.
so... is there a solution to get the border in dosbox? because I don't feel like playing the game when I have to guess when I have all crystals.
maybe you can "resize" the game itself, so there is room for a border around it? 😀

It's only analog VGA signals that get overscanned to put that border information outside of the normal viewing area, and apparently the VGA-to-digital converter in Kippesoep's monitor is designed to display all pixels outside the normal viewing area of a smaller-than-the-screen picture as being whatever color the VGA signal is using in that overscan zone.

If you're using DVI, on the other hand, the data is all digital and only information on normally viewable pixels is sent to the monitor.

At least that's my theory (based on nothing but what you've both said).

Also, borders are a standard feature of DOS I think. I remember being able to set them (at least for text modes) in Borland Turbo BASIC - I think with a second parameter to the same SCREEN command that is used to set the video mode.

In most cases lowres modes are scaled up on user's screen so one pixel border will work without obscuring any game pixels completely. Besides, it really needs to be drawn only when the default (0) color is changed which does not happen in many games. I don't see a satisfactory solution for hires games but I don't remember any of them actually doing it. As for overscan in DVI mode, HunterZ is correct, there is no such thing.

I just tried Crysal Caves and it works fine in Windows XP Pro. Sound and border is correct. It does seem to kick me into some kind of full screen dos mode. It does not work under DosBox as far as the border goes. I also get the shakeing hud but my CVS version is a few weeks old.

So does this prove its a scaling issue rather than a VGA error? 😒 I'm just wondering if Dosbox is scaling the game incorrectly and cutting off the borders much in the same way my DVI LCD seems to be doing. Is there a quick fix or is the complicated considering no other game really has this issue...

maybe you can change the background of DOS, because now we have black around the screen? 😀
you can let it change to what the game wants, for crystal caves: red, and after picking up all crystals, green 😁

Avatar, it is no scaling issue. That border is _outside_ of the normal display area. There is nothing to be scaled since it is an area of CRT tubes that is not used. That's the reason why LCDs don't show it (unless analog input is wrongly adjusted): They show exactly the usable display ara and nothing else.

But I think vasyl's proposed solution is quite elegant: Overlay a 1px wide border onto the existing picture so that the output resolution doesn't change, and hide that border if color is black (which it almost always is).

That's actually HunterZ's idea, I just proposed not to show the default color. I've tried this idea last night (not as working solution, just hacked scalers to see how it looks). It does work but there is one problem. On hires monitor it is very difficult to tell the color of single-pixel border. Wider border will start covering game pixels. I came with another possible solution: interlined border (use 1st, 3rd, and 5th pixels from the edge) but did not try it yet. It sounds weird but it might just work.