VOGONS


Understanding Scaler

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First post, by caejr73

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I'm having trouble understanding the scaler and was hoping someone more knowlgeable with DOSBox could shed some light.

Bascially when I'm playing older DOS games such as the SSI goldBox games (pool of radiance etc..) if I make the scaler normal3x, I get a nice sized window to play this classic.

When I play Windows 95 Era DOS games, such as Interplays Blood and Magic or Decsent to Undermountain, which I assume has support for better resolutions (640x480 etc), changing the scaler has no effect at all.

The definition of the scaler is that it enhances low resolution modes.. what is considered a low resolution?

Thanks

Reply 1 of 6, by MiniMax

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I don't know what the definition is, but you can add a 'force' (or perhaps it is 'forced'?) to the scale selection, and it will kick in even for 'high res' games.

Or - if it is high-res enough, use windowresolution and an output method that supports hardware scaling.

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Reply 2 of 6, by HunterZ

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Personally I use output=opengl and scaler=none, then set whatever resolution I want DOSBox to scale the game to. DOSBox' scaler support is too limited for me to find useful.

Reply 3 of 6, by swaaye

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The builds with D3D support have some interesting pixel shader scalers. But I actually usually keep it simple like HunterZ. Or I will even go for pixel perfect authenticity. Pixelation doesn't bother me. It's how the games looked anyway.

Reply 4 of 6, by ih8registrations

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I always thought actual anti-aliasing might improve things. There's a couple "anti-aliasing" pixel shader scalers but they look like the same output from eagle/sai/hqx/etc.

Reply 5 of 6, by gulikoza

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Scalers are mostly to enhance low res (being 320x200 or 320x240) not to resize the picture. I find normalXx scalers usefuls, since then all the games have roughly the same size (640x400 games are left untouched, 320 games are doubled to 640). At least that's the idea. Adding 'forced' makes scaler run all the time, but for resize operations it is much better to select a hardware output, that can resize the image with no cost to the cpu.

http://www.si-gamer.net/gulikoza

Reply 6 of 6, by caejr73

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I chnaged the output to ddraw and changed the windowresolution to 1024x768. I can now play Blood an Magic in a large enough window size to make it fun to play.

Thanks for the help!