bushwack wrote:

Yes, the stretch setting will make any resolution fill the entire screen.

Yea that's what you want!

YouTube is FULL of wide-stretched DOSBox recordings. It's because you need to fix the ratio and most aren't aware of this.

Non fixed intro of SQ4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKE4YExWcy8

Fixed intro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIZhFbOH_9U

Yeah with DOSBox you can set the output to 1920x1200 but keep aspect=true and you're good to go. With actual DOS gaming though and Windows games with only 4:3 rez options, you'll be out of luck.

That's crazy though that the screen lacks aspect ratio stretch. That's not a budget monitor.

swaaye wrote:

and Windows games with only 4:3 rez options, you'll be out of luck.

Not anymore!

Nvidia and AMD have these scaling options in their drivers now! And this works very well...

E.g. on a 1366 x 768 screen (most notebooks have this one) you can play all the old-school games in 1024 x 768 😁

Oh yeah that's true. You have to be on DVI though I've noticed or the options go away for some reason. This is annoying with TVs cuz TVs look better on VGA than HDMI usually. There's less ugly processing used. But then TVs usually have 16:9 or 4:3 choices.

swaaye wrote:

Oh yeah that's true. You have to be on DVI though I've noticed or the options go away for some reason. This is annoying with TVs cuz TVs look better on VGA than HDMI usually. There's less ugly processing used.

Ahh I se...

Never tested it with VGA 😁

Regarding TVs. HDMI "can" work very well IF your TV has an option to configure the HDMI input for a PC.

Often TVs have one out of three HDMI ports "PC aware" or there is an option in the menu.

I take it you refer to the issue of overscan? Getting black bars around or the image being too large?

This can also be compensated for in the driver, but ideally you confiure the HDMI to be "PC aware" if it has that option. I know Panasonic most certainly do.

If you play on a TV, make sure the ouput is 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080. But yea, I can see how a 800 x 600 signal would look weird via HDMI because it's not a digital TV resolution.

Nah it's not overscan. At least not with the TVs that I've used. I've noticed that some TVs have different color / sharpening settings on HDMI that aren't truly adjustable in the menus. Text gets messed up and saturation isn't right, etc.

swaaye wrote:

Nah it's not overscan. At least not with the TVs that I've used. I've noticed that some TVs have different color / sharpening settings on HDMI that aren't truly adjustable in the menus. Text gets messed up and saturation isn't right, etc.

Gotcha!

These filters can usually be disabled.

There are things like removing noise or even motion compensation. Configuring the HDMI input to "PC mode" usually does all of this. Some TVs call it "Game mode" because these filters can introduce some delay.

So yea, don't give up on HDMI just yet 🤣

Yeah I have experimented with menu settings a ton. You should try out VGA yourself and see if the image looks better. I was skeptical and annoyed at having to use VGA instead of DVI/HDMI but the image quality is simply better. I also found that, with VGA, TVs usually support DPMS and go into standby when the PC is off while they won't on HDMI.

I think the reason is that they set up VGA with PC levels and signal in mind and PC power management features. It behaves like a monitor. The HDMI input assumes different things.

I just bought a 1080p 32" Samsung LCD/LED TV to use as my main monitor (:D). It has one HDMI input labeled DVI/HDMI but it still has clearly better quality on VGA for PC. I love this set though. It has breathtaking color and plasma-like black! It embarrasses the 2405FPW.

Yep, I just witnessed this HDMI problem myself at a friend's place... there's definitely some wacky sharpening / filtering going on, even at TV-native resolution. Annoyed the heck out of me, so I grabbed the remote and tried all menu options, to no avail... there was a "game" setting, but it only seemed to affect color and contrast.

Said friend is visually impaired so he doesn't really care, but he still wants HDMI, since he's using it for audio too and it goes through his amplifier to the TV.

Hey swaaye, text mode looks real crisp in your photos. Can you tell which resolution the monitor renders it as, and whether or not it's integer-scaled? plain VGA text mode should be 720x400...

bushwack wrote:

I bought a Dell 24" U2410 1920x1200 widescreen last year and unfortunately everything under 640x480 gets stretched to widescreen, no matter what setting I use. 🙁

That is unfortunate. I wonder if all widescreen LCDs do this?

It seems that at some point DOS scaling simply isn't a feature that's worth implementing 🙁

That is unfortunate. I wonder if all widescreen LCDs do this?

Not all LCD are like that.
Samsung are the way to go there has an option know Image Size by set it to Auto

shspvr wrote:

That is unfortunate. I wonder if all widescreen LCDs do this?

Not all LCD are like that.
Samsung are the way to go there has an option know Auto Source by set it to Manuel

Can you tell me the name of any models please? Thanks.

retro games 100 wrote:

shspvr wrote:

That is unfortunate. I wonder if all widescreen LCDs do this?

Not all LCD are like that.
Samsung are the way to go there has an option know Image Size by set it to Autol

Can you tell me the name of any models please? Thanks.

By way I wrote down the wrong option it called Image Size
I have Samsung SyncMaster 2233SW
Just check the User Manael off there web site for that option and if it there then it will not stretched to widescreen