X-Wing 1994 looks so muddy...
I played TIE Fighter to death as a kid. Loved it. Never really got into X-Wing. Have been trying to do so now.

The graphics are just killing me.

Let me be clear, I'm not someone saying "Oh Call of Duty looks good why doesn't this look as good!" I literally remember thinking this about the X-Wing graphics in 1995 when comparing it to TIE Fighter (that's why I never played it... even then I thought it looked terrible). TIE Fighter looks great to me. I'll happily play that for hours and hours. But X-Wing.. I feel like I can barely see what's going on. 320x240 is murdering my eyeballs.

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to see if there's any way to basically bump the resolution up and have come up with the following three options, all of which are unsatisfactory:

1) X-Wing Alliance is modded such that I can port the missions is... but I don't want to lose iMuse, cutscenes, all the nice bells and whistles that that kills.
2) 1998 version of X-Wing. Same problem as above.
3) I tried the 3D Acceleration Fix wrapper described in a Steam forum post ... but it didn't seem to do anything that I could see.

So what I'm asking is this: Is there any way to upscale the resolution output by X-Wing without having to go one of the completely different engines where you lose iMuse and and cutscenes and all those touches? I've messed around with DosBox and some of the options in the thread above but I can't seem to make 1994 edition in DOSBox really look any different. I suppose I may just bite the bullet and go with the 1998 version if I can't figure out any other solutions.

There's nothing you can do about that, if you want to preserve any other aspect of the 1994 version... you may increase the rendering resolution in DOSBOX, but the practical result will still be a stretched 320x240, so the "muddiness" will remain (and the fancy filters make it even worse)

The 3D accelleration wrapper you mentioned it is probably still for the 98 version, no such thing for the DOS one.

Honestly, I'm so used to it from my very first playthrough back with a 486/33 that I really don't mind; i simply set DOSBOX with the usual "normal upscale 3x" and off I go; the only slight annoyance is the targeting system using "pulsating red", instead of the visible brackets, but even that is easily forgotten after a few missions

Try setting dosbox to openglnb, it won't increase the resolution but eliminating filtering does improve the look IMHO.

Thanks, I feared as much. Appreciate the responses.