First post, by Gagster
- Rank
- Newbie
There are certain older games and even emulators that's either not maintained much nowadays, or maybe still maintained but with rather "ancient" video-support. What I have in mind, is the good old Dos-emulator DosBox, OpenTyrian, and the freeware game Giana's Return.
What all of those games/emulators have in common, is that they use the old SDL 1 API. They can all scale the image to some degree, but they are not 4K/8K ready to put it that way. Giana's Return can scale the image to fill some of the screen while using a 1080p monitor, but not all of the screen-space. OpenTyrian on the other hand have its source code available, so I manually added a 5X scaling mode (from 4X), but I could not run any higher scale than 4X in fullscreen mode somehow (while the 5X mode works in windowed mode). That may because of limitations of the SDL 1 API, but it can very well be due to my lack of programming experience (most likely that). Regarding DosBox, I have for some time used a special build (SVN Daum by ykhwong) for the sole reason of it having a normal 5X scale mode included (usually DosBox only has normal 4X scale as max), so I can use all the screen-space of my 1080p monitors.
When I get a UHD/4K TV/monitor some time in the future however, even the scaling in the SVN Daum by ykhwong DosBox build won't be enough.
There is some confusing way to somehow use dgVoodoo2 with SDL I was told, as quoted here by Dege from the "dgVoodoo 2 for DirectX 11" thread:
SDL should work but its default renderer seems to be OpenGL even on Windows.
(see https://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.15/doc … sdlenvvars.html, for more, at least for SDL 1.x)
When I set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=directx environment variable in a command box and launched Giana's executable from there, then it worked for me:
As I'm using Windows 10, I have tried various ways to do this (even googled quite a lot without understanding how I switch the SDL_VIDEODRIVER to directx in Windows). I'm not that familiar with Linux and such, and I had to use way too many hours to even successfully compile the source-code of OpenTyrian with MSYS2 in Windows (because of a missing sdl 1 installation in MSYS2) to even add that 5X scaling mode in OpenTyrian.
Well, enough of my rambling. Is adding more SDL 1 support something that's in the future scope of dgVoodoo2?
(I got some success in making dgVoodoo2 to work with DosBox, by changing the "output" value in dosbox.conf to ddraw)
CPU: i7-4790K
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 1080
OS: Windows 10 64 bit