aspect=false
output=openglnb
fullresolution=1920x1200 (this should then be 1600x1200 in fullscreen)
scaler=none

please do not use those scaler filters, why would you want to rape the pixel graphics, why?

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.

Anyway, thanks.

Can you attach your full configuration file for the game ?

Sure. It's GOG's copy of Star Control 2. It opens with "Launch Star Control 2.lnk" which says:

1  Target: "C:\Games\GOG\Star Control 2\DOSBOX\DOSBox.exe" -conf "..\dosboxSC2.conf" -conf "..\dosboxSC2_single.conf" -noconsole -c exit
2Start in: "C:\Games\GOG\Star Control 2\DOSBOX"

so I'm attaching

and

The only changes I made are per my first post:

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.

cjfp wrote on 2021-01-10, 00:49:

My guess is the problem got fixed in 0.74-2 by the changes represented by the following line in the changelog:

More likely to be commit 4095, "Allow 15/16/32 bpp inputs to the opengl output".

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.

hq3x and overlay aren't best friends. (it resets to surface for hq3x) (and since 4095 as jmarsh posted, opengl does not)