Having been playing a number of old DOS games thanks to DOSBox and GOG, I've noticed that having them stretched to fill a 16:10 widescreen monitor is actually more to my preference than playing them at their original 4:3 aspect ratio.

In fact, there are times when the 16:10 aspect ratio actually seems to be more correct than the 4:3 one. This is noticeable when there are circles being displayed. Take a look at the two screenshots of the Virgin Interactive Entertainment logo at the start of Screamer 1. In the 4:3 ratio the circle is squashed so that it is actually elliptical. The 16:10 ratio, however, shows what appears to be a perfect circle.

Anyone else notice this and have any thoughts on the matter?
I seem to be having difficulties attaching images. Must be a problem with the GOG forum. It's taking multiple attempts to add files and then only one shows up. Editing the post removes the file and you have to re-add it. Hopefully the second screenshot is on this comment.

UPDATE: In fact, looking at the correct logo it would appear that it should in fact be a very slight elliptical with it being fatter than it is tall, suggesting that it would appear correct at 16:9. Here is the proper logo.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/39/Virgin_Interactive_Entertainment.png

Yea I usually have a hard time of telling what is the right ratio. I would assume that older games were intended to be played in 4:3. However, I think some developers designed games for resolutions like 320x200, and thus when played in a different ratio like 4:3 it was compressed.

Basically, it seems like it was a small oversight back then.

Yes, its basically because many pixel artists drew with square pixels, even though the monitors at the time used non-square pixels for 320x200.

Problem is not all games used 320x200 back then. With the widespread introduction of SVGA/VESA and later 3d accelerator cards the resolution stuff got a bit more confusing. Psycho Pinball for example has a rather strange High Res resolution that looks out of proportion when kept at a 4:3 aspect ratio (which is good for 320x200). Maybe it's 5:4 or something that isn't commonly known at all because it was only used in this game.

Back in the day I used to adjust my monitor a bit using the knobs for vertical/horizontal size and position. Now you need to input exact values into the DOSBox configuration since many display are lacking sizing options (especially when connected via DVI or better) or the display defeats any change at once due to autosync.

This is why I would like to have a feature in DOSBox where it would actually show the active internal resolution on the program bar (like cycles). This would help us a lot on finding out the correct aspect ratios to use within the configuration files, especially when using window mode since most of the time you need to input a multitude of the actual resolution because otherwise it's too small on modern screens.

I haven't said anything about square or round pixels because I just don't get it yet. Maybe someone who knows could try to explain how it works. This is also important for some retro consoles and arcade hardware. But at least on most arcade boards you have geometry tests screens which help you set up the screen right without knowing anything about the pixel sorts.

I normally use DOSBox's built-in aspect ratio correction, which normally clears up these sorts of issues, though it adds small black bars which might bother you. I had to do some tinkering with the settings, however, and my settings might be different from yours since my monitor is 5:4 rather than 16:10.

Is it the "aspect=true" setting in the configuration file that accomplishes this auto correction?

Square pixels mean the actual physical width and height of a pixel are equal, ie. if you display a 100x100 pixel square on the screen, it will look like a perfect square. The opposite of this is not a "round pixel", but simply a rectangular pixel that is not a square, ie. its width isn't equal to its height.

VGA mode 13h, 320x200 pixels / 256 colours did not have square pixels on 4:3 monitors, for example. The non-standard 320x240 mode did. Some games used really exotic custom resolutions, such as 256x256, 360x480 etc. (often referred to as "mode X") which obviously resulted in wide or tall non-square pixels.

In theory it should be, but for it to actually work properly I had to set these:

[sdl]
fullresolution=original
output=surface

[render]
aspect=false
scaler=normal2x

Those options together seem to create the original aspect ratio, but honestly it looks like it would do the OPPOSITE of that based on the description in the config file. That's what works for me, though.

So not as easy as I first thought then, due to the wide variety of screen modes used. Guess it does indeed fall down to personal preference then, but I would have thought that all games back in DOS days would have been designed for 4:3 screens, so regardless of how DOSBox calculates the pixels to display I would have expected a fixed 4:3 aspect ratio in DOSBox to be the correct display. Maybe that really is how games used to appear, even if it was wrong.

I see, thanks. I've tinkered a bit with the settings, but I don't have a good enough understanding of the different output modes. Need to read up on them a bit.

I noticed that in the Screamer DOSBox conf file that GOG have used fullresolution=desktop. I didn't even know that 'desktop' was an option until I saw it yesterday.

I'll try out that openglnb too. Last time I used it I ended up with a small screen that was stuck in the bottom left corner of my monitor, but I had aspect set to false and I think scaler was normal2x (though it might have been none).

Does anyone else prefer to run DosBox in windowed mode?

Interesting, and for games with higher resolutions, netbooks with weird screen sizes, or widescreen monitors, it probably would work better than my setup. Most of the DOS games I play are 320x200 games, though, and on my 5:4 monitor the surface mode seems to give a more authentic experience. Thanks for the tip, though, and I'll save it for later in case I expand my DOS game collection.

I do, occasionally. For really old games with very low resolution it can look a lot better in a smaller window than fullscreen. (usually normal2x)

Note that you also have the option of running a game in a non-stretched fullscreen mode (fullresolution=0x0). That way you're seeing just the game with black padding taking up the rest of the space. Scalers can still be applied as usual.