VOGONS


First post, by Alling

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I want to run Achtung, die Kurve! fullscreen on my Asus ROG Swift, but it is impossible to distinguish the left edge of the playing field, since the pillar boxes are black, making the game unplayable. Is there any way to select another color for the pillar boxes?

What I have:

QjlzExF.png

What I want:

MPcTA2b.png

It is possible to run the game with its left edge adjacent to the left edge of the monitor, but that doesn't look too good. I'd rather have the game centered on the monitor with visible pillar boxes.

Any help appreciated, thank you!

Reply 1 of 2, by mr_bigmouth_502

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Hoo boy, this is something that probably boils down to an option in your video drivers, although it's unlikely there are any video drivers out there that support anything like this. Honestly, your best hope would be to try and run it in a borderless window centered on your screen. This would mean setting Dosbox to use a window size of 1920x1440 (4:3 area of a 2560x1440 monitor), then using some other program to remove the borders and center it.

Good luck. πŸ˜€

Reply 2 of 2, by Alling

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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Hoo boy, this is something that probably boils down to an option in your video drivers, although it's unlikely there are any video drivers out there that support anything like this. Honestly, your best hope would be to try and run it in a borderless window centered on your screen. This would mean setting Dosbox to use a window size of 1920x1440 (4:3 area of a 2560x1440 monitor), then using some other program to remove the borders and center it.

Good luck. πŸ˜€

Hooyeah! Thank you very much! I experimented a bit with Borderless Gaming and managed to pull off exactly what I was looking for. This solution is even better than being able to pick an arbitrary pillar box color, since I can now choose any desktop background. For example, I can do this. I'll probably see if I can create something even less disturbing, though, that's just a concept.

In Borderless Gaming, I added the DOSBox process as a favorite (right-click β†’ Add to Favorites... β†’ ... by the process binary name). I then set it to a 1920x1440 window at (320,0) (right-click β†’ Set Window Size β†’ No). I also checked Always On Top and Hide Windows Taskbar.

My .conf file:

fullscreen=false
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=1920x1440
windowresolution=1920x1440
output=ddraw
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=mapper-0.74.map
usescancodes=true

frameskip=0
aspect=false
scaler=normal3x forced

This gives me glorious pillarboxed, pixel mapped* perfection on a large, modern, low latency gaming monitor. Combining that with my IBM Model M running natively over PS/2, I can't imagine a better setup for playing Achtung!

* Possible because:
1440/480 ∈ β„•
1920/640 ∈ β„•

EDIT: I incidentally discovered that scaler must be set to normal3x forced; none and normal3x (without forced) give small, weird artifacts that throw different parts of the image off by a few pixels.