New to the series. Wondering what is the best/preferred way to play. Windowed/Fullscreen? Double buffering or not? etc.

Thank you.

my favorite way to play them is laying down :P


seriously though i just turn on full screen in the graphics mode setup and thats it

Whatever you do, make sure "Aspect Ratio" is on, otherwise it will look stretched (the games were made for 4:3 monitors). Otherwise, fullscreen or not is your preference.

I like playing windowed as it makes it easier to access the PDF manuals / hintbooks / reference materials. Back in the 90s these were physical books that I would often consult while playing, but now that they're digital it's eaiser to switch between them when the game is windowed. I choose a high-ish 4:3 window resolution by specifying it in the configuration file, e.g. 1024x768 or 1280x960. Depends on your monitor's native resolution. This also makes it easier to take notes, which you may want to do occasionally.

Of course, playing fullscreen is also totally fine if you prefer, just make sure (as others have already said) that you preserve the correct aspect ratio to avoid a stretched image.

Honestly, for games of this era, you're more likely to want to tweak sound settings. WIth MIDI you can try to set up Roland emulation or use a soundfount, if you want improved music. I think there are some threads on that in this forum somewhere (not seeing them at the moment).

Thanks, everyone. Much appreciated.

How do you preserve the aspect ration and still have fullsceen?

Aspect=true in Dosbox. And make sure your video control panel set scaling to Maintain aspect ratio.

If you're willing to customize your installation, you can do so much better. If you make it through this process, then you'll have a good working understanding of DOSBox and be able to optimize performance in other games.

For MM4-5, run the install (double-click dosbox.exe, type 'mount c: ".."', hit enter, type 'c:', enter, type 'install', enter). Select Roland Sound Canvas for music and Sound Blaster 16 for audio. Set up VirtualMidiSynth with a good soundfont or two (you can find soundfonts made from ROM dumps of the Sound Canvas, or use an entirely different soundfont--just use what sounds good to you) and specify it as your MIDI device. This will give you the best possible music. If you experience a crash when saying goodbye to the barkeep at the Vertigo tavern, reconfigure the Sound Blaster in both the install program and your dosbox configuration to use IRQ 5 instead of the default 7.

Disable scaling in your GPU options, or set it to "centered". If you have an Nvidia card, don't tell it to defer to your display. If you have a 1920x1080 or larger display, you need a higher scaling multiplier than the included DOSBox build offers. Download an SVN build like the Daum's Cafe build which includes Normal4x in order to get a sharp fullscreen image which nearly fills the entire screen vertically. Normal4x simply quadruples the pixels on each axis--no blurry mess.

Here's the only downside to having perfect audio and graphics: without the stock DOSBox build, the CD version won't run. Use the non-CD version. You lose out on most of the voice-acting, but I think most people would consider the trade-off worth it. There's no other downside.

This advice--reconfiguring sound using the game's install (not GOG's configurator) to make use of VirtualMidiSynth (or MUNT), and using an enhanced SVN build of DOSBox for better image scaling support--applies to most DOS titles on GOG. GOG's stock configurations are simply abominable.

I can't remember the sound config options offered by MM3, but your aim should be the same--to get DOSBox to look to VirtualMidiSynth. The video configuration will be identical.

I also recommend my autohotkey script which allows one-key strafing for all three games. You can find it here.

Do you have any information on why the stock GOG build handles the CD version, but the custom DOSBox builds don't? Did GOG patch DOSBox to make it work, or is there some regression in later DOSBox releases that GOG hasn't picked up yet?

The bundled DOSBox version is simply 0.74 stock, unmodified. I actually have two different builds that support greater normal scaling, one which is a stripped down 0.74 build with just added 4x and 5x options, and the other is the daum's build. Both failed to launch the CD voice-acted version in my previous testing. I thought I'd retry the daum's build just now, and the CD version actually launches successfully for me 25-50% of the time and is stable in-game. I'd assumed it didn't work at all because the first launch or two failed before. Wish I'd been even more tenacious when configuring this the first time around. :P

So it seems there's no trade-off at all: good music, good scaling, and speech from the CD version are all possible. It's alarming that it doesn't ALWAYS work, but with each failed launch taking only a few seconds, it wouldn't deter me from playing the CD version of WoX on a future replay. By the way, the install.exe (and resulting .cfg) for the CD version is in the \WORLD directory, so you'll need to type 'cd WORLD' before typing 'install' to configure the audio options properly for the CD version.

I'll also add the soundfont I settled on was FluidR3 GM.sf2 which can be found free online.

Which one?

Xeen SGE, or at least its site says it hasn't been tested with .wox. If it truly doesn't work, there are probably others which do support the .wox format.

It works, you just need to enter "*.wox" on the openfile box to see WoX save files.

Ok, I must have read the developer's notes from an older version, or it's a matter of official vs actual support. I'll edit my previous post.