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[Arulan]

I recently started playing Pool of Radiance again, which was recently rescued from license hell by GOG. Naturally, a lot of new players are now being exposed to the Gold Box games, but one thing that really bothers me is most of all the videos and screenshots look like this:

when it should look like this:

I scaled the first image from 320x200 (native resolution of most MS-DOS games) to 640x400 using nearest neighbor. The second I scaled from 320x200 5x/6x to 1600x1200 using nearest neighbor.

MS-DOS games were designed to be stretched vertically to a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Funny enough, I came across this article while doing a little research: No, MS-DOS games weren't widescreen: Tips on correcting aspect ratio, which goes into more depth than I'm about to, so I'd recommend reading it.

DOSBox has an aspect ratio correction option (aspect=true) that will fix the problem, but for some reason it doesn't appear to be enabled by default in Pool of Radiance, or the other Gold Box games.

Here are a few other noteworthy examples:

*Credit

The left image is corrected, the right is not. *Credit

I'm sure a lot of users already know this, but I just thought I'd add some awareness to the topic, because I've seen a lot of uncorrected examples. Of course, part of the problem with screenshots anyway, is that DOSBox outputs the native frame uncorrected when you take a screenshot.

 

[Durante]

I noticed this recently in DOSbox. It's strange that the aspect ratio correction is not turned on by default. Easy enough to fix, but I can't help but think about all the poor souls playing stretched DOS games

Edit: I just saw that the article you link is by Felipe Pepe of RPG book fame! He's doing such a great job on everything, can't wait for the final result.

 

[Arulan]

Edit: I just saw that the article you link is by Felipe Pepe of RPG book fame! He's doing such a great job on everything, can't wait for the final result.

Yes he is. He's also written some other articles that have been quite good.

 

[Santerestil]

Super NES games have the same type of problem: they are supposed to be played at 4:3, but the console aspect ratio is 6:7, so the image is stretched horizontally.
Some games correct this drawing the circles as elipsis, but the majority of games have a lot of "fat" circular objects when viewed on TV.

 

[Arulan]

Super NES games have the same type of problem: they are supposed to be played at 4:3, but the console aspect ratio is 6:7, so the image is stretched horizontally.

I believe the default output is 256x240, but yes, it was designed to be scaled to a 4:3 display, which was all that was available.

 

[Erin S Kittens]

Super NES games have the same type of problem: they are supposed to be played at 4:3, but the console aspect ratio is 6:7, so the image is stretched horizontally.
Some games correct this drawing the circles as elipsis, but the majority of games have a lot of "fat" circular objects when viewed on TV.

I always thought it was interesting, seeing which games were designed around it, and which ignored it and designed for 8:7.

 

[Durante]

SNES games are "only" off by 14% in terms of pixel aspect ratio to intended, DOS games are off by 20%. I think that's why some SNES games might have ignored it in their art while this is really rare for DOS games.

 

[Falk]

The DOS era has it lucky to be honest. I mean you're at least guaranteed that the target aspect ratio was meant to be 4:3.

PS2/Wii era is much worse off because both 4:3 and wide TVs were common. and games quite often had UIs that said 'screw it' and sat in the middle of the two.

I've heard arguments that it's 'ok' for an image to be stretched horizontally but less so for it to be stretched vertically, since TV/screen viewing angles other than straight perpendicular will naturally squash the image horizontally.

I don't buy that. Unless we're talking about watching a game at a sports bar while sitting 45 degrees off or something.

 

[epmode]

First thing I do when playing a game in DOSBox is make sure aspect ratio correction is turned on. Then I make sure that the game is running at my native resolution with no crazy overlays so the scaling artifacts are minimized. Works out pretty well.

edit: That link in the OP is good, thanks.

 

[Sir Abacus]

The essence of the problem is that you're converting between non-square pixels (320x200 stretched to 4:3, 256x224 stretched to 4:3) to square pixels which is a tad more difficult than just fixing the aspect ratio. You'll still get distortion but it'll never be pixel and aspect perfect. Only one or the other.

 

[Tain]

Even more evidence suggesting that nearest-neighbor integer scaling isn't the be-all end-all when it comes to displaying old games on modern displays.

 

[Pathfinder]

Fascinating.

I'd never put much thought into this, but this thread is a very interesting read.

 

[Durante]

Even more evidence suggesting that nearest-neighbor integer scaling isn't the be-all end-all when it comes to displaying old games on modern displays.

I really think CRT emulation is where it's at, especially as we get higher and higher pixel counts to play with. When you start having over a hundred physical pixels per game pixel to play with (E.g. 320x200 on 4k) you can do a pretty damn good job.

 

[Tain]

I really think CRT emulation is where it's at, especially as we get higher and higher pixel counts to play with. When you start having over a hundred physical pixels per game pixel to play with (E.g. 320x200 on 4k) you can do a pretty damn good job.

Definitely. I'm already pretty happy with CRT emulation on my ROG Swift outside of the typical TN issues. High-resolution high-contrast variable-refresh displays of the future are gonna be sick.

 

[Arulan]

I really think CRT emulation is where it's at, especially as we get higher and higher pixel counts to play with. When you start having over a hundred physical pixels per game pixel to play with (E.g. 320x200 on 4k) you can do a pretty damn good job.

CRT emulation is fascinating, but at some point the question becomes, which aspects of the emulation are key to visualizing the developer's intentions, or is it all of the above? There are certainly cases to be made about the 4:3 aspect ratio, and even scan lines as demonstrated in the Felipe Pepe article:

But what about the phospor effect and color bleed, the NTSC or PAL color differentiation, the curvature of the screen, etc? I'm not entirely certain of my opinion on the matter myself.