Having a pillarboxing / custom aspect ratio option would be nice. Might make it a little less confusing.

Yeah, I agree. Although I guess the current configuration is better understandable for the novice user (who won't know what an aspect is and why his ratio is wrong 😉 )

Then again, given that there are many questions about these settings, maybe something entirely different is needed...

I'm happy with my algo in Direct3D. With aspect=false, fullscreen will find the closest integer factors to scale to 4:3 (320x200 will be scaled to 1280x1000 on my 1680x1050 display), with aspect=true it scales to 4:3 exactly. If you leave fullresolution=original, then it will be stretched to the whole display area. A little something for everyone 😀

Ahh, but "original" doesn't scale for me at all on my LCD. Thats the problem. Theres too many different settings that work for some people, but not others.

We need a unified "Stretch" / "Pillarbox" option that will work no matter what the display/gpu/etc is. I mean every other program or emulator does right?

What other emulator had to deal with the amount of resolutions and screen sizes that DosBox supports?

DosFreak wrote:

What other emulator had to deal with the amount of resolutions and screen sizes that DosBox supports?

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying "OMG DO IT" as if it's the easist thing in the world, I'm just saying right now it's a little needlessly complex. I mean if someone asked you "How do I make my game fullscreen?" you wouldn't be able to answer him with one direct answer, you'd have to ask what screen he has and to try different output methods.

Surely this can be helped?

Well adding another configuration setting doesn't make it less complicated, does it?

wd - it sometimes does. If that setting is some kind of super-combo-setting forcing a set of common, should-work settings. E.g. take a look at the Unix rsync tool (for synchronising files between 2 hosts). It has (in typical GNU style) around 80 options. One of these options is -a (archive) which is a short hand for -r -l -p -t -g -o -D (recursive, symlinks as symlinks, preserve permissions, preserve times, preserve group, preserve owner, preserve devices).

In this case, adding the extra -a option makes it less complicated for a very common operation.

It is nice having all the feature specific options available, but *assuming* that the user has filled in the correct screen dimensions, *assuming* that the system has a graphic driver that works correctly, *assuming* that the game expects common 4:3 aspect (maybe more assumptions are needed?), then some kind of combo-setting like screen-mode=wide-full / normal-full / wide-windowed-80% would make life easier.

Feel free to figure out how to do that for the different behaviours of the
output modes on different graphics cards using various monitors.
And keep in mind it should work with most modex settings, like square
pixel square dimension setups.

I would if I could, hence why I suggest it rather than code it myself.

I mean I'm still trying to understand why using normal2x+aspect causes it to go fullscreen, yet removing one or the other does not. How can this be explained?

In order to make dosbox do what I want I must set a manual resolution and use either DDraw or OpenGL. Why? Surely the surface option + original can scale? Why does normal2x+aspect force it to stretch, whereas removing one or the other causes it to remain un-stretched and centered?

My problem here is with the lack of documentation over what each of these features is supposedly doing. For instance -

Normal2x - Stretches the image to 2x it's normal size
Aspect Correction - toggles whether or not to use the output's original resolution aspect (depends on the game)
resoluion=original - uses the original dos resolution

So explain to me why all three active causes full screen stretching, yet removing one causes it to remain as a tiny image? Thats all the problem here, lack of explanation of features or else theres a major bug taking place.

As I see it one of these features is causing unwanted results.

avatar_58 wrote:

In order to make dosbox do what I want I must set a manual resolution and use either DDraw or OpenGL. Why? Surely the surface option + original can scale? Why does normal2x+aspect force it to stretch, whereas removing one or the other causes it to remain un-stretched and centered?

Surface is default option because of compatibility I think, and you are suppose to change it depending on your system capabilities. Software non-integer scaling of image would look pretty bad as can be seen with aspect=true.

Well then the first thing to do is ask nvidia/ati people what resolutions
at what refresh rates do stretching, and why it is inconsistent.

Maybe you even have some configuration capabilities of your monitor,
and it's just misconfigured for some modes, or allows for correction.

Which resolutions? I have my options set to scale. You can't set per-resolution scaling in the Nvidia control panel. It goes thusly - "Scale, Do not Scale, Scale with Pillarboxing".

If I play these games in DOS without dosbox they scale automatically because my control panel tells them to.

DOSBox seems to be using my native resolution even though I've selected "original". Then I add scale2x - still my native only without stretching fullscreen. Then add aspect and it's fullscreen. Remove scale2x and it's not stretched.

Thats why I'm confused, not because of some monitor feature taking effect. This is a dosbox problem, not one on my end. It occurs on every LCD I've tried.

But maybe it is some driver "feature" after all. Maybe the driver refuses to stretch resolutions smaller than 640x480 (which happens when one of normal2x and aspect are off and you are playing a 320x200 game: 320x200 or 640x400), and it might be right to do so because many LCDs are simply unable to display/stretch those small resolutions.

You see, each user has her own set of peculiarities. As was already said, no emulator has to deal with that many possibilities. From 160x200 games to 1024x768 and all that is in between, including video modes not officially supported but created by fancy programming of VGA registers. Imagine that on a wide range of output devices, CRTs that can't even do 1024x768, CRTs running on 1280x1024 (4:3, but no square pixels), LCDs on 1280x1024 (not 4:3, but square pixels), cheap LCDs that refuse to display some plain VGA modes, widescreen LCDs of varying ratios, ultra-high-resolution LCDs on computers without correct video drivers (no hardware-accelerated scaling), and so on...

Then why does running a dos game outside of dosbox scale? It displays 320x200 full screen. Many LCDs upscale to at least 640x480, which is what my older 19" did. My current one I'm not too sure.

On my older 1280x1024 monitor (which also had this problem) if I forced a game lower than 640 (dos, or an older game like HL1) then it would scale fullscreen. So I don't think the monitor is at fault here.

It can be anything. Different refresh rate in NTVDM for example. Gazillion of possibilities.

I think the LCD's should always display in their native resolution when in fullscreen mode.
Much better to let the dosbox code decide the small tweaks as LCD's differ from one to next piece.
Demanding the absolutely correct refresh rate emulation is almost "fetishistic". Maybe the right aspect ratio and pixel display is not asked too much.