First post, by metaleggman
Hi all,
I recently unearthed my old Packard Bell CRT and hooked it up to my modern gaming rig. It's 24 years old and surprisingly still works great! We got it with our old Packard Bell machine that ran 3.11 (not sure if it was a 486 or pentium or what). I've been able to play it just fine with Windows titles like Diablo, Outlaws, and games on ScummVM without any issues so far. I played Heroes of Might and Magic on it just fine using the gog-included version of dosbox. But then I got the wise idea to try DosBox ECE, and the only way to get it to work in fullscreen with the image actually filling the screen is by using scaling. But...it's a VGA CRT, I would like to think I wouldn't need to scale the original resolution images. When using normal2x scaling (which I presume I was using on the gog version of HoMM) it looked funky in the dos prompt and in game while playing Dark Forces. Everything looked all...poorly scaled.
Is the idea of using a CRT for dosbox and having dosbox output something akin to an actual vga resolution more or less a pipedream, and that I might as well go and dig out my old PCs if I really care that much? Or are there some settings that I can use that should get me even 90%, hell, 75% as good as if I was just hooking up this CRT to my old gear?
The monitor is a white Packard Bell 1511SL (no, not the rare black one sadly)
My rig has a GTX 2060 in it, running Windows 10
I'm using a monoprice HDMI to VGA adapter
The odd thing is if I mess with nvidia custom resolutions, I can get working picture output of, say, 640x480 @60hz to the CRT monitor, but she seems happier at 800x600 or 1024x768 (windows claims this is the native resolution). I'm guessing I'd need to calculate some custom timings at a resolution like 640x480 at a given refresh rate to get her happy with it. In doing some digging on this topic, that's one of the other weird things I've learned about all these DOS games, they apparently run at 70hz sometimes? And while I knew about the whole 320x200 resolution issue, with everything doubled, it's calling into question how in God's name I could get some good looking output from this thing haha. If I overlooked some awesome guides or threads on this subject, please, direct me to them.
Any and all help is appreciated, and to be frank, if I can just get help figuring out what the possibly *best* settings for this would be, even if it's not perfect, I'll be happy with that too. I've jumped into the conf file and played around, but sadly, I'm still coming up without much.