[JasonGSux]

Greetings, everyone.

I got Duke Nukem 3D from Steam, and I'm trying to play the classic edition (not Megaton -- which runs perfectly, by the way). I'm playing on laptop connected to the external widescreen monitor.

Here's a problem that's been bugging me for a while: I'm unable to get the proper aspect ratio (16:10; 800x600) when DOSBox is in full screen. The game then becomes stretched side to side, and I'd love to preserve the original ratio, with black bars on both sides.

Until now, I've been solving this issue by simply plugging in the VGA cable prior to play. With VGA, the aspect ratio is correct, but then I've been getting different kinds of graphic problems, and controls acted weird from time to time (move forward would get stuck, for example, or fire button, etc). Long story short: I'd like to bin VGA entirely in favor of HDMI.

The game plays smoothly on HDMI, but then it becomes impossible to preserve the correct aspect ratio; DOSBox suddenly fills the entire screen, side to side.

In the "window" mode (after I press ALT+ENTER), the ratio is back to correct.

I've attached my latest DOSBox settings. I've tried countless combinations, and none of them changed anything.







Any ideas? I'm becoming desperate here.

[Mblackwell]

800x600 is 4:3, not 16:10

[JasonGSux]

Mblackwell, on 29 April 2016 - 08:55 PM, said:

800x600 is 4:3, not 16:10

It is, my bad.

[MetHy]

Would be cool to be able to play the DOS version widescreen, but I don't think that's possible without touching the sourcecode, and that's what sourceports are for.

[MrFlibble]

JasonGSux, on 29 April 2016 - 01:14 PM, said:

Here's a problem that's been bugging me for a while: I'm unable to get the proper aspect ratio (16:10; 800x600) when DOSBox is in full screen. The game then becomes stretched side to side, and I'd love to preserve the original ratio, with black bars on both sides.

It's not related to your DOSBox settings, but to your screen settings. Depending on your video card/setup, there should be an option somewhere that tells the screen not to stretch the image but to preserve correct aspect ration for non-widescreen modes. This might be in some video control panel (depending on video card).

[zirkoni]

output=surface does not support aspect correction/scaling.
This should work:
fullresolution=0x0
output=overlay (or openglnb)

aspect=true

[JasonGSux]

zirkoni, on 30 April 2016 - 10:35 PM, said:

output=surface does not support aspect correction/scaling.
This should work:
fullresolution=0x0
output=overlay (or openglnb)

aspect=true

Tried it, thanks for suggestion. Nothing happened, unfortunately, and that's because I now believe MrFlibble is correct:

MrFlibble, on 30 April 2016 - 01:28 PM, said:

It's not related to your DOSBox settings, but to your screen settings. Depending on your video card/setup, there should be an option somewhere that tells the screen not to stretch the image but to preserve correct aspect ration for non-widescreen modes. This might be in some video control panel (depending on video card).

Precisely. I just realized that on 800x600 settings the screen becomes stretched on laptop's screen too, not just on external monitor. And when it comes to preserving the correct aspect ratio, that was actually the first thing I enabled (see attachment, please), but absolutely nothing changed. I also have the latest drivers.

Alternatively, I can always play eDuke (which works flawlessly on 1920x1080), but somehow I wanted to relive the classic experience from 20 years ago.

Seems I'll have to wait until I get new computer, and then try again.

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[MrFlibble]

JasonGSux, on 01 May 2016 - 04:32 AM, said:

Precisely. I just realized that on 800x600 settings the screen becomes stretched on laptop's screen too, not just on external monitor. And when it comes to preserving the correct aspect ratio, that was actually the first thing I enabled (see attachment, please), but absolutely nothing changed. I also have the latest drivers.

Hmm, this is weird. Do you know if the same thing happens to other 4:3 games running on your system? Maybe there's some setting that overrides the general configuration?

Have you tried a different build of DOSBox, such as SVN Daum or DOSBox-X to check if the problem persists?

Another thing you can do is to set DOSBox to fullresolution=desktop and output=overlay as zirkoni suggested. This works fine for me in both vanilla DOSBox and SVN Daum, with the game running in 800x600 in fullscreen with correct ratio on a widescreen display.

[Edit] I just checked your settings (fullresolution=800x600, output=surface), and vanilla DOSBox also runs the game with correct ratio for me. So I'm guessing this might still be host system related. Maybe there indeed is something overriding your settings?