Hello all,
I noticed after few years, GOG not changing in game option or add special options app to the games anymore. So you have to figure out how to change resolution from 4:3 to 16:9 which is a bit sad, because more games can't be changed with some addons, mods or rewriting values in some game file. Do anyone know what this is happened? Or maybe we should notice GOG? What is your opinion

Doing such work costs money and then GOG wants to get paid a bigger slice of the cake but that would leave less to the others.

This is a bit of a cheat, but a lot of EGA and CGA games used a doubled aspect ratio, so you can pop em into a different ratio and bam, free widescreen.

They only ever did this for DOSbox based games and I haven't seen a DOSbox based game without it. Which games are you talking about? I've re-read this a couple of times and I have no idea what you mean. I know a decent amount about display modes and aspect ratios but I'm still drawing a blank.

GOG doesn't do much, if anything, to change how games work internally.
They can patch out DRM, and apply some compatibility fixes that newer OS's require, but they don't play with aspect ratios.

Some third party software, like DOSbox and ScummVM, allow them (and you) to do something, at least if you want to have all pixels on your screen used. Obviously those old games are still 4:3 or something else internally, so basically you are just stretching the graphics into distorted proportions to make it "widescreen".

You can find some nice tricks and hacks here:
http://www.wsgf.org

Of course, nothing there actually works with pixelarts, but with 3D generated graphics those things usually do make things really widescreen. Yeah, I don't quite understand that either.
My guess is that he is referring to how in some older games the pixel shape is actually a bit different, and needs to be stretched on modern displays. That's where aspect ratio correction comes to play.

To sum it up:
"For a game with an original resolution of 320x200, aspect ratio correction results in a resolution of 320x240."

And that is a quote from http://docs.scummvm.org/en/latest/advanced_topics/understand_graphics.html which is a nice page showing different graphics options in ScummVM.

I think the difference between "fit to window" and "stretch to window" is perfectly explained there, and I think that's what the problem with widescreen games often is.

Actually, I was refering to a trick that ADG/Pixelmusement sometimes mentioned in Ancient DOS Games.

I beg to differ; there are widescreen hacks for old Settlers games, early Anno games, early Age of Empires, etc. Basically anything with tiled graphics can at least theoretically be made widescreen without major changes (not that it's something GOG does). Things like adventure games where the entire background was drawn as a single image, yeah, those are gonna be stuck at 4:3 unless someone re-draws them.

GOG never made widescreen patches for games. WTF you talking about?

Also, if there is a widescreen patch for an old game, that information is almost guaranteed to be in the game's PCGamingWiki page, so you can just go check that out. No they didn't. DOS games resolution is 4:3, but always with stretched pixels so if you leave the default "pixel perfect mode" it outputs a wider resolution. That's not GOG's doing. That's DosBox default settings.

Thanks PixelBoy for the website :)

I was talking about the "special options app" that the OP mentioned. That was a program GOG made for "easy" DOSbox configuration, although I just carried on editing the .conf files myself instead. My point was that configuration app is something they only include with DOSbox based games because it only applies to DOSbox.

There's no money in patching 20 year old games for widescreen when 90% of the audience for them aren't graphics focused anyway.

Well you can stretch anything into widescreen but it's just going to be stretched no matter which display mode you're stretching. Are you referring to the fact that 320x200 and 640x400 have a logical aspect ratio of 16:10?

It's true you can multiply them up and get 1280x800, but that isn't any more widescreen than those lower resolutions already were. 320x200 is the same shape as 1280x800.
Often games using those modes were meant to be displayed 4:3 anyway (with tall pixels), so it's kind of moot anyway.

I think that's the point, yes.