How about just scaling up by a factor of 8 (2560x1600) and specifying a Display Aspect Ratio of 4:3?

Youtube seems to deal fine with the latter, and I don't see the benefit of pillarboxing DOS footage within something wider *during* the conversion process. That actually makes the windowboxing even worse when your screen does not match the target ratio.

The next supported resolution is 2160p, so a scale of 10 (3200x2000) would still give you borders/

Often I double to 640x400 and then stretch that to some 960x720 (black areas expanded on 1280x720)

My method is to do a nearest neighbour upscale to the closest resolution to my target resolution which is an exact multiple of the source resolution, then rescale to the proper aspect ratio whereby the vertical resolution matches the target resolution. This method is known as "pre-scaling" and DOSBox can actually do this automatically by setting its scaler to normal2x or normal3x (possibly along with the "forced" option), though this only affects what you see, not what it records, and you still need to use DirectDraw or OpenGL to get the scaled image to stretch properly to fill the screen.

No, this doesn't produce PERFECT results, but it's so close to perfect you'd have to have extraordinarily good vision to notice.

The reason pre-scaling works is because if you just do a linear stretch between a source image and target image, you're interpolating the values of each pixel drawn based on the coordinate between two real pixels. So if one pixel is all black and the other is all white, and you double the scaling, the pixel between these two is going to read as 50% grey. If you quadruple the scaling, you have three new pixels between these two, equating to 25%, 50% and 75% grey.

So, when you pre-scale by an exact multiplier without interpolating, more of the source pixels will be the original solid colour and when done correctly, at most, only ONE new pixel will be interpolated between two of the original pixels.

This even works when altering the aspect ratio. So what I do with 320x200 footage which I want to fit into 720p is first upscale by 3x with nearest neighbour filtering, resulting in 960x600 footage, then to get it to the right aspect ratio, I just increase the Y resolution by 20%, which brings it up to 960x720.

Ideally, it would be nice if the YouTube system could just run the source material at whatever resolution and framerate it was made in, but converting footage to specified norms and building the system around that was likely a LOT simpler. :P

The way I see it, the whole aspect ratio fiasco (95% of screenshots and videos in the wrong aspect ratio) is really more a "human" issue. You can tell people that their aspect ratio is wrong and you usually get:

- a very defensive response
- but I like it that way
- all the other videos are just like mine
- I hate the black bars
- But it's 320 x 200 so it must be right!

Now where to aim the M60 at? Emulator writers 😊

They know best. Have the built-in screenshot and video capture features do the aspect ratio correction and the issue will sort itself out.

Otherwise: There is no hope 🤣

You can already see new generation of retro gamers using widescreen footage as a reference 😢

Not all 320x200 games take aspect ratio into account, though. At least certain aspects of The Dig are in 16:9 (like the cutscene videos). I'd argue DOTT is 16:9 as well, but that's easier to argue seeing as the art style is so whacky and disproportionate anyway. However, things like the hamster wheel in the basement looks like a perfect circle in a square pixel aspect ratio. It'd be nice to have a list distinguishing all 4:3 and 16:9 320x200 games.

Pedantic note: 320x200 is 16:10 with square pixels. 😉

Honestly I'd rather have even scaling than perfectly "corrected" aspect ratio any day. AR was a bit of a nebulous concept before HDTVs and DVI got common. 16x10 is well within the adjustment range of old VGA monitors (especially ones with knobs for v-height control) and IIRC some games & gfx programs back in the day explicitly told you to adjust them so.

Another pet peeve: I quite frequently use 4:3 or 5:4 monitors on my modern systems. Deliberately adding black bars to the sides of the video forces the whole thing into a center box window on those when it should be displaying in full-screen. It's like playing an old C64 game with the massive underscan border. Maddening.

xjas wrote:

Pedantic note: 320x200 is 16:10 with square pixels. 😉

Honestly I'd rather have even scaling than perfectly "corrected" aspect ratio any day. AR was a bit of a nebulous concept before HDTVs and DVI got common. 16x10 is well within the adjustment range of old VGA monitors (especially ones with knobs for v-height control) and IIRC some games & gfx programs back in the day explicitly told you to adjust them so.

Another pet peeve: I quite frequently use 4:3 or 5:4 monitors on my modern systems. Deliberately adding black bars to the sides of the video forces the whole thing into a center box window on those when it should be displaying in full-screen. It's like playing an old C64 game with the massive underscan border. Maddening.

Yup it IS 16:10 😀

Now with the black bars, that is a pet peeve of mine also. YouTube actually has guidelines about this. What you do is simply produce a video at 1440 x 1080 for example. It will then be a 4:3 aspect ratio video and YT fully support this.

I do often have videos though that feature a mix of 16:9 footage as well as 4:3 footage. So here you will get the bars, not much can be done.

But if it's a video showing only 4:3 footage and the YouTuber has rendered it at 16:9 > Where is that M60 again?

🤣, another maddening thing is when I tried CIRCLE statement on GW-BASIC/QBasic in CGA graphics mode and wondering why the circle look like an oval when I specify the aspect parameter as 1.
Later I find out that default aspect (if you ommit them) aren't 1.

xjas wrote:

Another pet peeve: I quite frequently use 4:3 or 5:4 monitors on my modern systems. Deliberately adding black bars to the sides of the video forces the whole thing into a center box window on those when it should be displaying in full-screen. It's like playing an old C64 game with the massive underscan border. Maddening.

Yep - I'm in that exact same boat. Hence my earlier comment that pillarboxing DOS footage to "fit" a widescreen container has no purpose, and only makes the windowboxing *worse* unless your monitor has the same aspect ratio as the uploader's.
(If anyone could bring up a valid reason for doing that, I'm all ears.)

I have to do that to get 720p at all or it'll just 360p on me 😒

To get best results, first upscale by an integer factor with nearest-neighbour (i.e. no filtering) scaling, and THEN rescale vertically to 4:3 (height goes times 1.2, width not changed) using the filtering of your choice.

For example:
320x200 --[x2]--> 640x400 --[4:3]--> 640x480
320x200 --[x3]--> 960x600 --[4:3]--> 960x720
320x200 --[x4]--> 1280x800 --[4:3]--> 1280x960
320x200 --[x5]--> 1600x1000 --[4:3]--> 1600x1200

Or, if you want exactly 1080p

320x200 --[x5]--> 1600x1000 --> 1440x1080

Do NOT add bars anywhere.
Especially non-black bars, with a kind of blur effect. Distracting and ugly as hell.

Azarien wrote:

To get best results, first upscale by an integer factor with nearest-neighbour (i.e. no filtering) scaling, and THEN rescale ver […]
Show full quote

To get best results, first upscale by an integer factor with nearest-neighbour (i.e. no filtering) scaling, and THEN rescale vertically to 4:3 (height goes times 1.2, width not changed) using the filtering of your choice.

For example:
320x200 --[x2]--> 640x400 --[4:3]--> 640x480
320x200 --[x3]--> 960x600 --[4:3]--> 960x720
320x200 --[x4]--> 1280x800 --[4:3]--> 1280x960
320x200 --[x5]--> 1600x1000 --[4:3]--> 1600x1200

Or, if you want exactly 1080p

320x200 --[x5]--> 1600x1000 --> 1440x1080

I don't agree this is the "best" way to do it. I would rather watch a 320x200 video upscaled evenly on my 1280x800 laptop than unevenly "corrected" to 640x480, and further unevenly scaled to 800p when I maximize it - yick. There's no guarantee that old software was even written with any "aspect ratio" in mind, half the time the devs just drew as if X pixels by X pixels would be square and were done with it. (And of course, the other half the time, they didn't... 😠 )

Also why wouldn't you just scale 320x200 to 1600x1200 directly? It's an exact multiple.

I *distinctly* remember the startup screen of at least one old game or demo where it put some shapes on screen and said "please adjust your monitor until the square is square and the circle is a circle", presumably wanting the viewer to shrink their screen until 320x200 had square pixels - anyone remember what that was?

BTW if you're watching with VLC at least (probably most other players besides Youtube) there are aspect ration correction options built in that you can set to whatever you want.

Current VLC does not like DOSBox's compression at all.

Wait, Youtube has enabled 1440p60 for everyone now? It used to be limited to only some uploaders.

IMO, best way to scale: Integer scale as far as possible, then bilinear scale to output resolution.

Though preferring perfect scaling at the cost of black bars is equally valid to me.

Distorting AR or using some other scaling method all the way though... if you do that you're a monster.

xjas wrote:

Yep - I'm in that exact same boat. Hence my earlier comment that pillarboxing DOS footage to "fit" a widescreen container has no purpose, and only makes the windowboxing *worse* unless your monitor has the same aspect ratio as the uploader's.
(If anyone could bring up a valid reason for doing that, I'm all ears.)

Not a valid reason now, but Youtube used to use lower bitrates for 4:3 videos. That might be where people got this habit from. I was actually planning on uploading 1080p videos to Youtube, because I knew 1440p videos would be downconverted to 30FPS. Uploading the ideal source isn't always preferable for Youtube, sadly.

YT does 4K60 for everyone now 😀

xjas wrote:

I don't agree this is the "best" way to do it. I would rather watch a 320x200 video upscaled evenly on my 1280x800 laptop than unevenly "corrected" to 640x480, and further unevenly scaled to 800p when I maximize it - yick. There's no guarantee that old software was even written with any "aspect ratio" in mind, half the time the devs just drew as if X pixels by X pixels would be square and were done with it. (And of course, the other half the time, they didn't...

The idea behind two-step scaling (I agree that 1600x1200 can be done in one non-square step) is to get blocky pixels. Scaling directly from low-res like 320x200 up to 1080p or more will give you very blurred image, which is not how the game looked originally. And the final step of fine-tune scaling when the window is maximized (what you said is "yick") will actually give you a bit of a blur, just like things looked on a CRT monitor - not ideally sharp, but certainly not 320x200 blurred into 2K.

The aspect ratio is another matter, but my opinion is that because on PC a 4:3 monitor was the norm, this is what should be simulated because this is how the game looked like when people played it on original hardware.

I guess my point, which I haven't made explicitly yet is, leave the capture footage as close to original as possible (i.e. upscale if necessary only by integer multiples of pixels without interpolation) and let the viewer decide what the aspect ratio should be.

xjas wrote:

I guess my point, which I haven't made explicitly yet is, leave the capture footage as close to original as possible (i.e. upscale if necessary only by integer multiples of pixels without interpolation) and let the viewer decide what the aspect ratio should be.

The viewer can't decide with Youtube though. If you upload a video to Youtube, 99.9% of viewers are going to watch it the way you uploaded it.