First post, by Chilly Willy
- Rank
- Newbie
I noticed something about the way DOSBox scales windows and why people have issues getting their games to look good. DOSBox only scales by 2. For example. If your game is 320x200, then you only have two options to scale the window on a 1080p monitor. At least if you want "pixel perfect" scaling. That would be 640x400 and 1280x800. You can not go higher than that, or else the next "pixel perfect" scaling would be 2560x1600. Anything in between would create blurry edge pixels.
Now why DOSBox can not scale by integer values other than 2, or continuously doubling by 2 each time, is beyond me. One should be able to make a 320x200 game look good at 960x600, 1600x1000, etc., scaling by integer 3 and 5. Anything beyond the last figure would require a screen/display higher than 1080p. As 1600x1000 would render a window size of 1606x1023. At least in classic mode on Windows XP.
As for fullscreen scaling, that's another issue too. And I'm not saying this out of experience. I'm a long time programmer myself and have done this before. The math is really quite easy.
Anyways, that's my DOSBox rant and hopefully it may help someone on understanding and scaling their games in DOSBox. Plus, I hope it gets fixed/added in a future release. It may save some headache just to add a feature that states to scale by 2,3,4,5,etc. Instead of writing in window dimensions because anything else is going to be blurry and/or distorted.