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Real DOS vrs DOSBox...

paperfist

paperfist

Diamond Member
So since gog,com has been putting out some EA titles like SMAC and Dungeon Keeper which I bought I find myself a little fuzzy over the graphics. It's been a long while since I first played these games and remember them not looking so bad as they do now. They aren't terrible, some or most of the colors bleed into each other and it's making it tough to see what the heck is going on.

I'm just wondering if it would be better to play them in their native DOS or if DOSBox is producing the same results? I find it a little odd that the pics gog.com uses looks a lot better then what you get in-game.
 
Might be LCD scaling blurring everything to hell. What's your desktop look like at the same resolution the game is running?
 
Try using your GPU scaling instead of your LCD. That way the monitor stays at native res. You'll still having blurring, but it "shouldn't" be as bad.
 
paperfist said:
I'm just wondering if it would be better to play them in their native DOS or if DOSBox is producing the same results? I find it a little odd that the pics gog.com uses looks a lot better then what you get in-game.
Click to expand...

As everyone else suggested it's probably an LCD scaling issue. The screenshots at GOG.com aren't being displayed fullscreen. If you scaled them up to the full resolution of your monitor they wouldn't look as good.

Alpha Centauri is Windows game, by the way. It doesn't use DOSBox, and playing it under native DOS isn't an option. There are hacks for for playing the expansion at your native resolution, but they don't work with the original game that you got from GOG.

Although nothing can be done to completely eliminate the blurring caused by LCD scaling, playing MS-DOS games under native DOS or even Windows 95/98/ME can improve their appearance with CRT. Most MS-DOS games used resolutions with non-square pixel ratios like 320x200 and 640x400 (instead of 320x240 and 640x480). Modern versions of Windows don't support these resolutions and so DOSBox has to scale the display. It ends up not looking as good as when games using these resolutions are displayed "natively" on a CRT.
 
What you can do is edit the configuration file for DOSBox so that the emulator renders at your native resolution. The first thing I usually do when I install a DOSBox game from GOG is setup the configuration file to my liking.

The only problem I have had with DOSBox is with the Pro Pinball Time Shock game. The DOSBox does not support the high resolution VESA settings so Time Shock cannot be set to 1600x1200 32 bit (but the game was rendered for that resolution). I had to get a version of DOSBoxthat had some modifications done, it's called DOSBox-Md 5 I think. It has the higher resolutions supported and I can finally run Time Shock as I should.

One other thing about Dungeon Keeper is that the Windows 95 version eventually got a Direct 3D patch. At the cost of some of the effects, it allowed you to use Direct 3D instead of the software graphics emulation. Despite some complaints I've heard to the contrary, I liked the final result as the image was softer and lacked the harshness that was due to the low resolution graphics. If you used the Windows version of the game you may be remembering how it looked with Direct 3D.
 
Ross Ridge said:
As everyone else suggested it's probably an LCD scaling issue. The screenshots at GOG.com aren't being displayed fullscreen. If you scaled them up to the full resolution of your monitor they wouldn't look as good.

Alpha Centauri is Windows game, by the way. It doesn't use DOSBox, and playing it under native DOS isn't an option. There are hacks for for playing the expansion at your native resolution, but they don't work with the original game that you got from GOG.

Although nothing can be done to completely eliminate the blurring caused by LCD scaling, playing MS-DOS games under native DOS or even Windows 95/98/ME can improve their appearance with CRT. Most MS-DOS games used resolutions with non-square pixel ratios like 320x200 and 640x400 (instead of 320x240 and 640x480). Modern versions of Windows don't support these resolutions and so DOSBox has to scale the display. It ends up not looking as good as when games using these resolutions are displayed "natively" on a CRT.
Click to expand...

Actually if you insert this line into your .ini file, "directdraw=0" you can play the SMAC from gog.com in your native resolution which made the graphics issue much better as far as playability goes. Dungeon Keeper on the other hand is another story.
 
Born2bwire said:
What you can do is edit the configuration file for DOSBox so that the emulator renders at your native resolution. The first thing I usually do when I install a DOSBox game from GOG is setup the configuration file to my liking.

The only problem I have had with DOSBox is with the Pro Pinball Time Shock game. The DOSBox does not support the high resolution VESA settings so Time Shock cannot be set to 1600x1200 32 bit (but the game was rendered for that resolution). I had to get a version of DOSBoxthat had some modifications done, it's called DOSBox-Md 5 I think. It has the higher resolutions supported and I can finally run Time Shock as I should.

One other thing about Dungeon Keeper is that the Windows 95 version eventually got a Direct 3D patch. At the cost of some of the effects, it allowed you to use Direct 3D instead of the software graphics emulation. Despite some complaints I've heard to the contrary, I liked the final result as the image was softer and lacked the harshness that was due to the low resolution graphics. If you used the Windows version of the game you may be remembering how it looked with Direct 3D.
Click to expand...

Hi all! I have the same problem running Pro Pinball Timeshock! game with DOSBox 0.74 and can't set 1600x1200 :'(

I can only set 800x600 as maximum resolution.

I try "machine=vesa_oldvbe" on the Dosbox.conf but still the same,
I try also, find another version of Dosbox (md-5?) as you say, but can't find it! md-5? My question is if i can scale to native resolution and how, or should fix problem with another vesa driver 😕 Thank you!

edit: Ok, now i can scale editing config file with DOSBox 0.74, but with high resolutions the game slow down.

Fix 1 : Scaling but game slow down
Fix 2 😕: DOSBox with driver that can work with original resolutions at full speed
Fix 3 : Windows stable version of the game
Fix 4 : Real DOS on a new generation PC?

Any suggestion will be great for help!
Thank you

I can't understand how GOG.com can sell unstable version of a game with windows version!
 
Last edited:
PingSpike said:
Good luck getting your sound to work in native MS-DOS. Do modern sound chips even have drivers for that OS?
Click to expand...

Old sound cards didn't have drivers for MS-DOS, it didn't work that way. The game had to have specific support for your sound card.

If you want to play games under real MS-DOS with sound you'll pretty much need to use an old PC with an old ISA soundcard or with a motherboard or PCI card with SoundBlaster emulation.
 
I wonder how hard it would be to find all the components to build an old Windows 98 rig? I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult if one looked in the right places. Just knowing the right places would probably be the hardest part. I don't miss DOS but I sure do miss many of the games that came out for MS-DOS
 
I just kept my old components, so that's how I built my Windows 98 box. Finding something like an PCI SoundBlaster Live! shouldn't be too hard, but finding a motherboard that works with its SoundBlaster 16 emulation would be problem. Probably needs to be Pentium III era or earlier, which would have a decent chance of having ISA slot anyways. But then you'd need to find an ISA sound card...

Otherwise any video card should work, even latest AMD and NVIDIA cards are VGA compatible, with VESA support. You don't want more than 1G of RAM, but there are work arounds if you've got more. More than a 120G hard disk is a waste, but even a SATA drive will work in IDE mode. CD-ROM support is problematic in pure MS-DOS, but should work under Windows 98 and its virtual MS-DOS boxes. A lot of current (wired) Ethernet devices have MS-DOS drivers.

Basically, aside from sound, the PC in front of you right now can boot Windows 98. I've even got a USB stick that boots Windows 98 on my i5-750 PC, although it took a bunch of hacks and it's painfully slow. It works better if I boot off the hard drive.
 
zrashx said:
Hi all! I have the same problem running Pro Pinball Timeshock! game with DOSBox 0.74 and can't set 1600x1200 :'(

I can only set 800x600 as maximum resolution.

I try "machine=vesa_oldvbe" on the Dosbox.conf but still the same,
I try also, find another version of Dosbox (md-5?) as you say, but can't find it! md-5? My question is if i can scale to native resolution and how, or should fix problem with another vesa driver 😕 Thank you!

edit: Ok, now i can scale editing config file with DOSBox 0.74, but with high resolutions the game slow down.

Fix 1 : Scaling but game slow down
Fix 2 😕: DOSBox with driver that can work with original resolutions at full speed
Fix 3 : Windows stable version of the game
Fix 4 : Real DOS on a new generation PC?

Any suggestion will be great for help!
Thank you

I can't understand how GOG.com can sell unstable version of a game with windows version!
Click to expand...

THe problem is simply that DOSBox doesn't support the higher resolution VESA emulation. Search for DOSBox-MB5 (made mistake in my recollection of the name), it's a modified older version of DOSBox that supports the higher resolutions.

Actually, here's the site I think and it looks like he's released MegaBuild version 6.

http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/
 
Last edited:
Born2bwire said:
THe problem is simply that DOSBox doesn't support the higher resolution VESA emulation. Search for DOSBox-MB5 (made mistake in my recollection of the name), it's a modified older version of DOSBox that supports the higher resolutions. Actually, here's the site I think and it looks like he's released MegaBuild version 6. http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/
Click to expand...

Great! Thank you Born2bwire! I will try with mb5 and mb6 DOSBox version
 
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