I'm having trouble figuring out the graphics options. I have a 1920x1200 display. I would like to play 320x200 DOS games at 1600x1200 with hq3x. If I set:
I get the desired resolution with vertical black bars at the sides but without the hq3x interpolation. If I change scaler to hq3x like so:
1scaler=hq3x
then I get the hq3x scaling but it isn't stretched to the edges of the desired 1600x1200 viewable area. I've tried playing around with other settings but the results are usually less good and more confusing.
As a point of comparison, I am able to play games on ScummVM with an hq3x scaler and correct aspect ratio. It scales the game to 1600x1200 and the hq3x is working well.
Is this possible to achieve with vanilla DOSBox and if so how? If not, is it possible with DOSBox ECE, X, or Staging, or maybe a different fork I haven't encountered? I'm not hellbent on hq3x, an xBR variant would be great. It's correct aspect ratio plus sharp interpolation that I'm looking for.
Well, your suggestion just gave me 1920x1200 without hq3x.
However, I neglected to mention I was using GOG DOSBox O.74. When I replaced it with the official 0.74-3, using the same configuration file, everything it worked as expected: 1600x1200 with hq3x.
I take your point and agree about the beauty of the original pixels (I grew up in the 80's and 90's playing DOS games), but I still think a good enough scaler can look very nice, especially for cartoon-style graphics like in a lot of SNES games.
1$ diff Star\ Control\ 2.orig/ Star\ Control\ 2/ 2diff -ur "Star Control 2.orig/dosboxSC2.conf" "Star Control 2/dosboxSC2.conf" 3--- "Star Control 2.orig/dosboxSC2.conf" 2021-01-09 12:52:42.760567400 -0800 4+++ "Star Control 2/dosboxSC2.conf" 2021-01-09 15:51:10.049533300 -0800 5@@ -17,9 +17,9 @@ 6 7 fullscreen=true 8 fulldouble=false 9-fullresolution=original 10+fullresolution=desktop 11 windowresolution=original 12-output=overlay 13+output=opengl 14 autolock=true 15 sensitivity=100 16 waitonerror=true 17@@ -49,8 +49,8 @@ 18 # even if the result might not be desired. 19 20 frameskip=0 21-aspect=false 22-scaler=normal2x 23+aspect=true 24+scaler=hq3x 25 26 [cpu] 27 # core -- CPU Core used in emulation: normal,simple,dynamic,auto.
GOG is shipping DOSBox 0.74. If I compare their dosbox-0.74.tar.gz with yours, it's identical. Their DOSBox.exe is also identical to the one installed by DOSBox0.74-win32-installer.exe, so I don't think they changed anything.
If I vary the Target: line of the shortcut to use DOSBox.exe from multiple different installations, I get the following results:
GOG DOSBox 0.74 - 1600x1200 without hq3x
DOSBOX 0.74 - 1600x1200 without hq3x
DOSBOX 0.74-2 - 1600x1200 with hq3x
DOSBOX 0.74-3 - 1600x1200 with hq3x
My guess is the problem got fixed in 0.74-2 by the changes represented by the following line in the changelog:
"Replace NV_PixelDataRange with the more common ARB_PixelBufferObject extension. Should help with output=opengl."
I hope this helps. To be clear, I don't have an issue anymore, outside of it would be nice if GOG updated their DOSBox versions.
I don't follow the GOG forums that closely anymore but for quite awhile there has been discontent on how GOG does or doesn't update their games. Best you can do is to contact GOG and send them the info and also open a thread on the GOG forums but there isn't much participation by GOG on the forums anymore so best you can hope for there is a bunch of users posting that they have the same issue so hopefully GOG does something with it.
The ironic thing is that the DOS collections you can find on the Internet use the latest versions of DOSBox whereas GOG doesn't when GOG was created to provide something the "abandonware" community couldn't or wouldn't. GOG is failing badly at this as well as other things.
Last edited by DosFreak on 2021-01-10, 04:46. Edited 1 time in total.
I think that's mainly because of how DOSBox changed to using the appdata folder for the config file, this makes it less portable as you'd always have to re-do your config on a new PC.
