It should. Dosbox is free so it wouldn't hurt to try. BTW does anyone know if Earthworm Jim 2 had a PC release?

Depending on which card you have, it's possible to add this resolution.

I think it's up to GPU drivers to support resolutions, not Windows itself. Both ATI and Nvidia supports custom resolutions (and I've tested 320x240 on a Nvidia card).

Some old games do have broken fullscreen, but that's what borderless window utilities are for.

There's also wrappers that will resize the rendering window (ddhack, DXGL, DxWnd, D3DWindower). Compatibility is not perfect, but that's a workaround you might want to try. For pixel games you might want to try them on modern monitors anyway since most GPU driver scaling solutions and monitor scaling solutions are pretty bad in comparison.

ZellSF your name seems familiar, are you on Shmups forum too?

Right, yes Earthworm Jim 2 had a DOS release, it's on GoG.

As for adding the resolution, that's an interesting idea. Wouldn't my monitor need to support it too? As I understand it 320x240 PC isn't the same as 320x240 15khz that you typically get from a retro console, right? Saying that I do like how you can scanline these games in DOSBox even if it's not authentic.

320x240 is doublescanned so to your monitor it's no different than 640x480.

Low resolution support is usually dropped by more recent video drivers than the OS itself. I've had a verying lack of 320x240 on XP before with several different cards...

320x240 is doublescanned so to your monitor it's no different than 640x480.

Ah yes that's what I thought. With EWJ SE I've had some good luck using 640x480 and Fullscreenizer. It's not perfect and you still get the menu bar at the top but pretty playable. I even pushed it through the XRGB Framemeister and got the scanlines looking half way decent 😀

BuckoA51 wrote:

ZellSF your name seems familiar, are you on Shmups forum too?

Right, yes Earthworm Jim 2 had a DOS release, it's on GoG.

As for adding the resolution, that's an interesting idea. Wouldn't my monitor need to support it too? As I understand it 320x240 PC isn't the same as 320x240 15khz that you typically get from a retro console, right? Saying that I do like how you can scanline these games in DOSBox even if it's not authentic.

I'm on the shmups forum too. Somehow talking equally much about this subject there as here lately (very old games on newer operating systems and display/gpu scaling).

CRTs should support 320x240 (I don't think it's a common resolution though), with LCDs you can just tell your GPU to do scaling to whatever is the native resolution of the LCD.

BuckoA51 wrote:

320x240 is doublescanned so to your monitor it's no different than 640x480.

Ah yes that's what I thought. With EWJ SE I've had some good luck using 640x480 and Fullscreenizer. It's not perfect and you still get the menu bar at the top but pretty playable. I even pushed it through the XRGB Framemeister and got the scanlines looking half way decent 😀

ShiftWindow is the best alternative for games where you can't hide all window elements (menus...). It's a bit complicated to set up since you need to set exact window positions and such. Worked wonderfully last time I wanted to play the PC version of Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure fullscreen.

On the subject, for some reason my Nvidia card won't do 640x480 to my TV. In the list of modes it lists 640x480 as 720p and always scales it with the GPU. I can't add a custom resolution and override it either. Closest I can do without the GPU scaling is 720x480. Weird and kinda annoying.

Important to mention that if you add resolutions below 800x600, Windows and Nvidia resolution settings will not allow you to switch to them. Third party applications will.

If that's your problem, add the custom resolutions and then try something like HRC. You'll need that if you want to run 320x240 and your application doesn't switch to it by itself.

If you only need 640x480, right click the game's exe, properties, find compatibility modes and select 640x480 (sorry if this isn't your problem and this all sounds obvious to you).

I can switch the desktop to 640x480 in Nvidia just not with Windows, but I always have that problem of it scaling to 720p when I output on my TV, idk why.

Nope all good advice and very useful, keep it coming 😀

BuckoA51 wrote:

I can switch the desktop to 640x480 in Nvidia just not with Windows, but I always have that problem of it scaling to 720p when I output on my TV, idk why.

Nope all good advice and very useful, keep it coming 😀

Before installing the driver, just edit nv_dispi.inf, find where the resolutions are and simply write 320x240 there just like the others. You'll need to disable driver enforcement if you have a 64 bits Win before installing the modified driver. I do that everytime before updating my video drivers 'cause I really need some modes they dropped many years ago (specially 960x600 for DOS Box to propper go in fullscreen mode using 3x scalers).