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How do I get this screen configuration?

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First post, by arromdee3

Posted on 
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I have an 1280x1024 LCD monitor that only runs in particular resolutions, but always scales them up to cover the full monitor, and never shows bars at the top and bottom. A 1280x1024 monitor has a 5:4 aspect ratio, and other resolutions are mostly 4:3, which means that scaling them to cover the monitor stretches them out.

I want to run a game which is 320x200, like a lot of games are. 320x200 uses non-square pixels, but covers a screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio.

This means that in order to get the aspect ratio the same as it would be on a real DOS PC, I have to say "run in a resolution of 1280x1024, but scale the 320x200 screen to cover the 1280x960 piece in the middle of the screen."

How do I do this?

(Needless to say it's not in any FAQ.)

Reply 1 of 2, by ripa

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Just setting the fullscreen resolution to your display's native resolution (as long as its pixels are square) and setting aspect=true should do the trick. I just tried it and a 320x200 game gets letterboxed (small black bars) correctly at non 4:3 modes. At fullresolution=1280x960 it of course covers the whole screen. It also works correctly with widescreen displays.

Reply 2 of 2, by arromdee3

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Why, so it does work.

But there's a reason I thought it didn't. The "DOS" screen you get when you start up has 25 rows of 80 characters of dimensions 8x16--i.e. it's a lot like a 640x400 screen. But this DOS screen is drawn using square pixels--DOSBOX doesn't try to stretch it out to fit a 4:3 area, but instead puts black bars at the top and bottom. So I had concluded that putting a 640x400 (=320x200) area in a 4:3 screen didn't work. In fact it only failed to work in the DOS window, but when I started the actual game it worked.

I suppose it's a bug in DOSBOX (with aspect:true, why is it *not* stretching the DOS window out to a 4:3 area?) but it doesn't affect any games...

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