In my middle-age phase I tend to forget how young gamers on gaming forums can be :)
Not a bad video on the whole, although you need to work on how your video renderer is compressing the final video. There's some rather irritating sporadic blockiness there.
Also, it's probably worth mentioning that the edge filter shaders like Supereagle are very much a matter of taste. I personally don't consider them to be an improvement of any kind - outlines look horribly inconsistent and detail often gets lost when techniques such as dithering are used.
I know it's not everyone's thang but I prefer to avoid any kind of filtering (even bilinear filters) and to keep the pixels as clear, visible, square and equal as possible - otherwise known as pixel-perfect scaling. You can achieve a 1:1 pixel scale by setting
fullresolution=0x0
output=overlay
aspect=false
scaler=none
For most games running in common resolutions like 320x240, 640x400 or 640x480, that'll give you a very small display on your monitor/TV in fullscreen mode that should match the pixel output of the game precisely to your monitor or TV's output (unless your device doesn't output 1:1 even in native resolution, for instance if you have some kind of overscan or underscan problem).
Common resolutions back in the 1980s and 1990s were 320x240, 640x400, 640x480, some later games also used 800x600 and 1024x768. There's not a single standard resolution that vertically divides neatly into a 1080p display resolution, so if you want pixel perfect scaling, you have to "put up" with black borders (however, by way of exception, if you have a 4K display, a vertical resolution of 2160 does divide neatly into 240 for 320x240 games).
On the resolution that your game uses, you should be able to bump up the scaler to normal2x or normal3x. The Daum Café DOSBox build (and probably a few other custom builds) also supports normal4x and normal5x. This is important in combination with "output=overlay" and "aspect=false" in that it preserves pixel-perfect upscaling, unless the resultant upscaled resolution is less than your fullscreen resolution, in which case it'll downscale it again with less than ideal results.
fullresolution=0x0
output=overlay
aspect=false
scaler=none
So: if you have a DOS game that ordinarily runs at 640x480, your best bet for pixel-perfect scaling is to run with the following settings:
fullresolution=0x0
output=overlay
aspect=false
scaler=normal2x
On an 1080p HD monitor or TV, this should output a 640x480 framebuffer upscaled 2x to 1280x960 and centred on a 1920x1080 display, with the customary 4:3 aspect ratio black borders to the left and right as well as 60-pixel borders at the top and bottom.
Of course, DOSBox's very buggy nature means that this can be very unpredictable in terms of what actually happens.
Alternatively, you can also set the fullscreen resolution to an absolute multiple of your game's resolution and then configure your TV or monitor manually to output a pixel perfect display:
fullresolution=1280x960
output=overlay
aspect=false
scaler=normal2x
Some displays don't allow this, and others still don't like outputting 640x480 and just treat it as an analogue signal over HDMI. Also, your video card driver may need be reconfigured to prevent your GPU doing the upscaling before it reaches your TV as a prepared 1080p signal.
Post edited March 13, 2017 by jamyskis
