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640x480 image scaling in DOSBox 0.70

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First post, by countdowntoblastoff

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I recently discovered DOSBox 0.70 for myself, and it is the most amazing application! Thanks to everyone who has had and continues to have a part in perfecting this software!

My question concerns the display of certain games with high native resolutions. My laptop PC's monitor is a widescreen LCD displaying a resolution of 1400x900 96dpi. My video card is an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300. I usually play my old VGA games that have resolutions in the ballpark of 320x200, like the typical Sierra adventures. My config settings seem to work great for these.

fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=1440x900
windowresolution=original
output=surface

frameskip=0
aspect=true
scaler=normal3x

The effect of these config settings is a box in the center of a black screen that, though not touching the top and bottom edges, is nicely large with no distortion--i don't mind that it's not full screen. The image is not blurry or filtered-looking, which I prefer so it replicates my old experiences with the game graphics more closely.

THE PROBLEM arises with games with a higher native resolution--say 640x480 with SuperVGA, like the 7th Guest or Space Quest 6. Contrary to being larger as I would have imagined, the displaying image is actually smaller than the lower-res games with all the same config settings.

Why is this? Is there any different setting in the DOSBox config or a patch or something that would render my higher resolution games at a larger scale? Again, the games running fullscreen is not my concern, but having them run larger than a business card would be nice.

Thank you for your time!

Reply 1 of 7, by dh4rm4

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fullscreen=false
fulldouble=false
sdlresize=false
fullresolution=desktop
windowresolution=original
output=ddraw

That's what I use to play Magic Carpet II and Wing Commander III in VESA 640x480 resolution. Seems to work well for me, even looks great going out to TV.

Reply 2 of 7, by Psykechan

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fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=1440x900
windowresolution=original
output=surface

Change the "output=" to ddraw or opengl depending on your platform. I use opengl and it looks beautiful stretched fullscreen.

When developers were designing games for 320x200, which is technically a 16:10 ratio and not 4:3 did they ever imagine that 16:10 widescreens would be used to play their games at 1440x900? 🤣

Reply 3 of 7, by DosFreak

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Probably, it's not like higher resolutions were unthinkable or unavailable back then. They just weren't realistic to use at the time.

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Reply 6 of 7, by wd

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but I still believe that 300x200 games are (were) meant to be played at 4:3

mode13 was definitely 4:3 with non-square pixels which is noticable if
you simply plot circles/squares without aspect correction (gives ellipses).
Iirc. some games actually DO look a bit odd because of this, but that's a
design fault and it looked the same back then as in dosbox (fullscreen).

Reply 7 of 7, by Zorbid

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wd wrote:

mode13 was definitely 4:3 with non-square pixels which is noticable if you simply plot circles/squares without aspect correction (gives ellipses). Iirc. some games actually DO look a bit odd because of this, but that's a design fault and it looked the same back then as in dosbox (fullscreen).

This is true in some Lucasfilm/Arts games... Especially, in Zak, the earth seen from space is stretched vertcally, at the beginning of MI2, Guybrush becomes short and fat when he's held by Largo on the bridge of Scabb Island.

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