[Corvin]

is it 1.6:1 (16:10)?

So that resolutions like 320x200 , 640x400 , 1280x800 , 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1600 would give the correct ratio?

Powerslave's demo (I think only the demo) fixes high res a 640x400 and it looks decent at that res even if I prefer 640x480.

Did I put the correct stepping up of the res above correctly? most people had a 1024x768 monitors for native res so I'm a bit confused other than performance reasons.

Any thoughts about this?

[Hendricks266]

It may depend on the game, but the intended aspect ratio is 4:3 with non-square pixels. Compare Duke 3D's loading screen (#3281) as the 320x200 ART tile, and in-game in EDuke32 in a 4:3 resolution.

[oasiz]

Screen modes filled the whole CRT, this was 4:3.

320x240 (modeX) was a tweaked VGA mode that a lot of later VGA games used and this finally gave you square pixels for 4:3 instead of the 16:10 ratio.
Still, 320x200 was considered a norm and it was assumed that you would stretch the image to fill the screen and art was usually designed with this in mind.
A lot of other systems assumed the same and has weird pixel ratios that got a bit less awful after the stretching.

This is not something that is easy to do with flat panels anymore due to their fixed matrix of pixels

Maybe with desktop 4K screens we can finally have scaling that doens't look horrible.

edit: 640x400 = 320x200 * 2, so it makes sense. This keeps the stretched ratio on a 4:3 screen but it will be "widescreen 16:10" when you view it on a flat panel without stretching.

[Corvin]

I find these look best for BUILD Games:

320x240
512x384
640x480
760x500
800x600
832x624
960x720
1024x768*
1152x864
1280x960
1400x1050
1600x1200

These are all supported by Ken S. build engine and they are 4:3 ratio

Edit: added a few more

[MrFlibble]

 Corvin, on 22 July 2014 - 11:32 PM, said:

Powerslave's demo (I think only the demo) fixes high res a 640x400 and it looks decent at that res even if I prefer 640x480.

It does have the screen resolution at 640x400 but on a 4:3 screen it is stretched to 640x480. DOSBox does the same thing if you turn aspect correction on.

A weird thing I encountered a while ago is that you can set Duke Nukem 3D to 640x400 by manually editing the configuration file (Shadow Warrior allows to cycle through possible resolutions in-game by pressing F5 IIRC), but it seems that DOSBox doesn't properly scale that to 640x480. I'm not 100% sure though, and this was with the shareware version (v1.3d).

[Corvin]

Yeah Powerslave doesn't read the 2nd value in the CFG file, and your limited to only two resolutions.

The beauty of the duke cfg is you can set just about any resolution. But you gotta set fullresolution=0x0 to zero x zero in dosbox.conf. Then you'll have bars on the sides of your wide screen monitor. For Powerslave I suggest use aspect=true as well.

What I need to do is find out which res produces square pixels vs rectangle ones.
I'm trying to understand this pixel aspect thingy.
If I get some time I'll try to document it for these build games.

Did some testing in SW:
These res don't need aspect=true setting
320x240
640x480
800x600
1024x768
1280x1024
1152x864

[MrFlibble]

 MrFlibble, on 25 November 2014 - 10:50 AM, said:

A weird thing I encountered a while ago is that you can set Duke Nukem 3D to 640x400 by manually editing the configuration file (Shadow Warrior allows to cycle through possible resolutions in-game by pressing F5 IIRC), but it seems that DOSBox doesn't properly scale that to 640x480. I'm not 100% sure though, and this was with the shareware version (v1.3d).

I have just reproduced this oddity with Shadow Warrior shareware v1.2. If aspect correction is turned off, you get a normal 640x400 image when you select this mode:


However if aspect correction in DOSBox is on, the image for some reason is stretched to 640x467 pixels, instead of 640x480:


Same happens in Duke3D.

What's more, DOSBox also improperly stretches the 320x200 image in VESA mode (to the same size as 640x400):


What's more, this incomplete stretching actually also happens in Powerslave, but only in vanilla DOSBox v0.74 (haven't checked previous versions). DOSBox SVN Daum properly stretches these modes to 640x480.

[Edit] Apparently it's a DOSBox issue, resolved in some third-party builds:
http://www.vogons.or...ic.php?p=114040
http://www.vogons.or...ic.php?p=280224