Alt+Enter

or fullscreen=true in dosbox.conf

The README included with DOSBox or the "intro" command in DOSBox are nice things to use.

Check out this video tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0PWVnFmlR8&li … eature=view_all

Also check out DosBox front ends like D-Fend Reloaded. You can tweak DosBox settings without ever needing to manually edit the .conf files.

[Thread moved to DOSBox General Section]

I'd actually like to do the opposite:
is it possible to make the game (in fullscreen mode) smaller (with black borders on all sides)? Those low res games look really ugly on my big monitor, but I don't like windowed mode for playing games; I want no distractions 😀

Thanks!

PearlChoco wrote:

I'd actually like to do the opposite:
is it possible to make the game (in fullscreen mode) smaller (with black borders on all sides)? Those low res games look really ugly on my big monitor, but I don't like windowed mode for playing games; I want no distractions 😀

Thanks!

Yes, but you got to know your way around the graphics driver. It's a scaling option in the AMD, Nvidia and Intel graphics driver. Basically you tell the driver to render lower resolutions letter boxed (with black bars around).

Hope this helps 😁

I tried messing with the scaling options in the nVidia panel but nothing seems to work.

I tried selecting "no scaling" but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Anything I should change in the conf file?

My conf file:

1fullscreen=true
2fulldouble=true
3fullresolution=1920x1080
4windowresolution=original
5output=opengl
6
7aspect=true
8scaler=normal2x

Given your current config file, this is expected. Basically, with these settings applied:

1fullresolution=1920x1080
2.
3.
4.
5output=opengl

What happens is this:
1. DOSBox uses a fullscreen window of 1920x1080 pixels.
2. With OpenGL, scaling is applied to fill the screen, with some kind of aspect correction applied by DOSBox internally (i.e. not the drivers).

I think you would like to try and set output=surface first. That way, DOSBox will not scale as much as with other outputs. Truly, it will scale a bit if aspect=true is applied, and with something like scaler=normal2x it may double the dimensions or so. But it won't try to fill the screen as it does with any output other than surface.
If it's working but there are a few corruptions seen on the bottom of the screen, aspect=false may solve that.

If there are still problems, you may revert back to opengl or some other non-surface output. DOSBox will scale as much as it can in general, but now the NVidia "No scaling" setting can come to effect.
To make it work, though, you really want to do something like:

1fullresolution=original

And if it's not working then you may play with a few fixed resolutions. For instance:

1fullresolution=1280x960

Thanks.

The nVidia settings did nothing, but setting output=surface did the trick!

Great news. Looking at the image, the reason the Nvidia scaling didn't work is because it's configured to let the display do the scaling. But you want to he GPU doing the scaling. Just change the scaling from display to GPI and it should work.

So if you now set the full screen resolution of the game to 1024 x 768 you should have a letter boxed screen.

Thanks!

NY00123 wrote:

What happens is this: 1. DOSBox uses a fullscreen window of 1920x1080 pixels. 2. With OpenGL, scaling is applied to fill the scr […]
Show full quote

What happens is this:
1. DOSBox uses a fullscreen window of 1920x1080 pixels.
2. With OpenGL, scaling is applied to fill the screen, with some kind of aspect correction applied by DOSBox internally (i.e. not the drivers).

I think you would like to try and set output=surface first. That way, DOSBox will not scale as much as with other outputs. ... But it won't try to fill the screen as it does with any output other than surface.

Thanks for clearing this up. But is this everything-scales-but-Overlay behavior by design? Is it a limitation of OGL/D3D?

I am frequently frustrated by the OGL and D3D renderers scaling images to my monitor's maximum vertical height (1080), which results in ugly artifacts due to different-sized pixels.

This would be more workable if I had a 1200-tall screen, as 1200 is evenly divisible by 200 and 240, two common vertical resolutions in DOS. But I do not, and I find it surprising that DOSBox and several other apps I've run into don't offer finer-grained control over the OGL/D3D scaling factor. I would very much like to have a little letterboxing at the top and bottom (as is possible in Overlay) so that the pixel ratio can remain 1:1 (meaning each original game pixel (320x200), when scaled up, is displayed on the same number of LCD monitor pixels).

Again, it's interesting to learn how Overlay is the exception. But on my system Overlay is otherwise inferior to OGL (which can do Aspect=True without major graphical errors) and D3D (which can do Aspect=True and has the amazing CRT shader, among others).

As NY00123 was saying the exception is surface, not overlay.

Alexandra wrote:

I am frequently frustrated by the OGL and D3D renderers scaling images to my monitor's maximum vertical height (1080), which results in ugly artifacts due to different-sized pixels.

does your system not show a difference between "opengl" and "openglnb"?

VileRancour wrote:

As NY00123 was saying the exception is surface, not overlay.
does your system not show a difference between "opengl" and "openglnb"?

Apologies, I misspoke when I said Overlay. I intended to say Surface.

It does. Opengl is blurry and openglnb is sharp. They both (almost?) always stretch to the full vertical height of my monitor, though.

By the way, I'm running a Radeon 5850 and believe I have the relevant scaling settings set correctly. It's entirely possible that the drivers are screwing up and scaling anyway. I would be very curious to see if my experience would change on NVidia hardware. I will probably be switching to them for my next graphics cards; in my experience AMD just has too many quirks and problems.