That's why I was thinking of blending the border color with color of the underlying game pixels. It wouldn't look very pretty, but it would scale well. You could even get fancy and make it appear as a colored haze effect around the edges of the picture.

Another idea: is there a way you could make the thickness of the border dependent on the size of a game pixel? In other words, could you code it to draw the border as 50% or 25% (or whatever) of the thickness of a game pixel, rounded up (so that it's still visible in low resolutions)?

well, then you are making the border of the game invisible, is that not "unhandy"?

Huh?

It would appear when needed, if I understand correctly.

HunterZ wrote:

Huh?

well, because you can't see the GAME borders of the game then, because it's replaced by the COLOR borders 😀

But we've been discussing ways of dealing with this: either blending the border color with the game color, or drawing a color border around the edges that is thinner than the game pixels around the edges (which is of course can only be done without obscuring entire pixels if the game pixels are being scaled to bigger than one real pixel)

Well, single pixel does not work well -- not very readable. Interlined pixels was just too odd. OTOH, blending was not nearly as bad as I expected. See the example. Three pixels are used for border. Blend ratio of border to game color is 2:1 to make border more pronounced. Right now I have only normal scaler working this way and it is still 50% a hack but it can be done properly with not too much effort. It has to be switchable from dosbox.conf as well. The performance overhead is there but it's not very bad.

You have 3 pixels on top/left/right, 4 on bottom?

Sorry, my mistake. I've noticed this +1 bug in code after I submitted the message. You have very sharp eye.

Wow, I'm impressed! Good work, vasyl! I wonder what cerberus and avatar will think of it as a possible solution.

HunterZ wrote:

Wow, I'm impressed! Good work, vasyl! I wonder what cerberus and avatar will think of it as a possible solution.

I'm up for anything that makes the game playable 😁 Good work vasyl.

Its too bad you couldn't just put the border on the sides and top but not the bottom...

avatar_58 wrote:

Its too bad you couldn't just put the border on the sides and top but not the bottom...

That might look good for Crystal Caves, but I think it would be best to go for a general solution... Hopefully the blending ratio will be configurable as well so that people can set it to whatever their preference is.

it looks very cool, unfortunately it makes the HUD look very weird. it almost defeats the purpose of making the HUD stop shaking.
(almost 😉)

anyway, it's exciting to see how much effort people are putting into geting old games to work. thanks guys!

so that border thing, will that work in any game that used the technique, or only crystal caves/secret agent?
and won't it be too big when you go in fullscreen mode then on a 17 inch flatscreen monitor? like mine

also, I'm worried about how this border will affect gameplay, like getting the reflex of "ENEMY COMING" 3 pixels later because my brains will automatically ignore what's behind the red border?
or am I just speculating too much? 😉

before you think this post is ridiculous, know that I'm highly sensitive towards "oiriginal", for example: I refuse to install Zdoom, give me the naked doom any day.
don't get me wrong, I'll download the fix of you guys when it's out 😀

It is blended so it does not obscure any pixels completely. The technique should work in all games, the implementation is not specific to Crystal Caves, although I haven't tried to modify scalers other than normal2x yet. It has to be configurable -- in some games three pixels is the best settings, some may require more or less. The blend ratio needs to be configurable as well. I have 2:1 in my example but some games may require much weaker effect. Incidentally, what other games actually used border color as part of gameplay?

Cerberus_e: Wow, you won't even run ZDoom? I much prefer Doomsday (jDoom), or at least ZDoomGL...

vasyl: I can't clearly recall any specific games that use it, although I think it may have been much more widely used in old text mode games than in graphical ones.

I don't know, but maybe you can implement a hotkey to enable/disable the VGA border in any game (and enable it by default)
so if it annoys someone: one click and it's gone, and if he wants to see it to see what color it has: one click and it's back? 😀

just like the screen capture hotkey, which I want to rebind, but can't figure out how. each time I press ctrl+f5 now, I shoot in wolfenstein 3D 😀

I'm the same way with exult....I prefer the pure game (although I do use Jonof's for Duke and Doomsday for Doom) I guess it just depends on preference.

Does it work with scale2x? Thats the mode I use (since I have LCD) 😖

I'm sure it will work with everything by the time he comes up with an implementation that he's happy enough with to release as a patch. Cool stuff.

Well either way vasyl deserves another beer for this one! 😏

Indeed.