Jazz Jackrabbit uses 16:10 aspect ratio during in-game and will display letterboxes on the top and bottom of the screen if the monitor aspect ratio is 4:3. That is based on the 320x240 resolution in order to get 60 Hz refresh rate.

The Incredible Machine and Sid & Al's Incredible Toons display in a slight letterbox and aren't full 640x480 nor 4:3 (and should never be 'corrected' to 4:3)

The Lemmings frontend should also be similar (ingame however is intended 4:3)

MDK is 4:3 (640x480) but has black bars on top and bottom for a 16:9 image. There is no option to change to a 16:9 resolution or zoom the image .

I'm looking for examples that use actual 320x200 or 640x400 output signal. The above examples don't seem to be doing that, well at least MDK definitely isn't.

A few of the games that were mentioned in this thread might be what you're looking for.

Personally, I don't think any DOS game developer deliberately targeted the 16:10 aspect ratio. However, some of them didn't understand how 320x200 would look when displayed on a 4:3 monitor, so their games ended up with "squished" circles and such.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1904/new-horizons/screenshots

I think Links386 uses 640x400.

Mystic Towers should be able to 320x200 letterboxed

Pył

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-10-15, 10:46:

Personally, I don't think any DOS game developer deliberately targeted the 16:10 aspect ratio.

The examples don't have to be DOS. There are windows games that support those resolutions.

I just checked Star Wars Dark Forces 2 and its 640x400 resolution is meant to be viewed at 16:10; it's vert-.
However the 320x200 mode is quite odd. The viewable image is vert+ compared to 320x240 and 640x480. Setting the output ratio to neither 4:3 nor 16:10 matches the image at 320x240/640x480.

Dzzee (Vogons thread, released 2021) has a "widescreen" mode for its 320x200 output resolution, the hotkey is "W" (and "H" to switch back to 4:3 mode, with 4:3 being the default at startup). The resolution is always the same, it's just the projection that's changed for 16:10 aspect ratio, and it can be changed at runtime on the fly.

Nerdly Pleasures has some relevant info: https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/09/ … tions-when.html

One game that comes to mind is Mortal Kombat II. The aspect ratio of the arcade version is also being debated and the AR of the graphics for the MS-DOS version are all over the place.

Not so common in the west, but quite a few Japanese systems like PC98, X68000, and even later consoles like Sega Saturn had some games that were in 240p or 480p that were meant to be viewed on a 4:3 display but letterboxed for a widescreen look.

In the early days this was done by manually lowering the display's vertical screen size until it looked correct. In later years most 4:3 TVs sold in Japan have a button on the remote to switch to letterbox mode.

eddman wrote on 2023-10-17, 06:22:

There are windows games that support those resolutions.

If you want some other violations of aspect, there's Lithtech 1 games (about everything up to Kiss Psycho Circus only calculates 3d aspect for 16:10)

Hard War's another 16:10 640x400

I'm not sure if this answers your question, but I've discovered that quite a few DOS 320x200 games indeed seem to not look "right" when stretched to 640x480. Many of these are ports from Amiga and/or developed by European (e.g. UK) studios that appear like they were used to making graphics with square pixels. However, it remains debatable if any of these were actually intended for the 16:10 aspect ratio, and many look sort of okay both ways.

Here's a random example from a Spanish shmup (registered and shareware main menu screens), the ladies look proportionally built in 320x200 and likely overly tall if corrected to 4:3:


I'm also inclined to think that Tyrian graphics look better without aspect ratio correction, which appears to be supported by the fact that they were drawn on a 1:1 pixel ratio machine (IIRC).

However, just like the author of this video, I'm not sure if the presence of uncorrected squares and circles (which appear like tall ovals and rectangles on a 4:3 screen) alone is an indicator of a game created with square pixels in mind. Yet the truth is that you'll find many games that at least appear as if their graphics have not been purposefully adapted to the 4:3 aspect ratio.