No.

leileilol wrote:

No.

I disagree, found something that makes me pretty happy so far.
31st_dos_hq2xoff by pl-destroy, on Flickr

31st_dos_hq2xon by pl-destroy, on Flickr

That's one of the scalers. It doesn't know the edges, it guesses.

Nope, it's not a scaler. My screenshots are of a shader; gives a similar effect of SMAA.

forums: places where one can observe in natural surroundings some wisebutts asking, getting a proper answer and correcting then all those who tried to help them 😀
btw: auzner and leileilol were right and you are wrong

mrau wrote:

forums: places where one can observe in natural surroundings some wisebutts asking, getting a proper answer and correcting then all those who tried to help them 😀
btw: auzner and leileilol were right and you are wrong

First: rude. Second: How do you figure?

In the 3D graphics pipeline anti-aliasing filters are part of the raster process. A scaler is after the raster, it doesn't have the vertex data to work with. You have saw tooth lines like on the left of the second image because that's the nature of the hqx algorithm. The xbr algorithm is the best I've seen so far and it's relatively new.

Thanks, Auzner.

This thread indeed shows many pics of both shaders at work. Both very close but I agree xBR does appear better.

I'd try xBR but I'm not sure how to implement it as the needed .fx file for Dosbox. I don't see a .fx file for download anywhere?

All those HQX, Eagle, 2xSAI etc are scalers, specifically "pixel-art scaling algorithms" as Wikipedia calls them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel-art_scaling_algorithms

They can be considered fake anti-aliasing algorithms but all data they have to work with is the low-res output image, which is upscaled with some edge-detection to avoid blurring.
Personally, I rarely use those kinds of scalers, but that's a matter of taste.

On the other hand, proper anti-aliasing is more like rendering the whole image with higher resolution and then downscaling to screen. For performance reasons it is usually some kind of approximation of this process, but literally downscaling high-res image is a very good anti-aliasing algorithm.

I really recommend a nice CRT shader instead. It's true to the original pixel art, and the masking/sub-pixelation of CRT has a good faux-interpolation effect. It tricks your eyes into filling in information - fullscreen this shader preview for an idea.

When these games were playing in their own day, they looked a lot better than how low-res raw pixel art renders on a modern LCD panel. I run this shader combined with the RGB2x scaler and it's essentially perfect for 2D games. I really recommend shying away from all the awful AA/Eagle/SAI type effects for pixel art, though they can start to look good with later, higher-resolution and texture-mapped 3D games.