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Just for my understanding...

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First post, by grete

Posted on 
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Hi,
i don't have any problems with dosbox 😉 just a question
to understand things.
How comes, that for program windows (NOT speaking about fullscreen mode, NOT talking about
movies or TV, talking about a window on my desktop)...has to be scaled somehow when using on a widescreen TFT.
A program window has a given pixel size, so from my humble point of view it should look the same whatever size or aspect the monitor is.
Now i realize that for example Scummvm has an option
for scaling with shift-a or something, and gets a bit
larger vertically. Same thing with an option in the
config for Dosbox.
I would really like to know why that is. I understand
this aspect ratio thing with movies, but here i fail.
Thanks in advance.

Reply 1 of 2, by Kippesoep

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Nowadays, pixels are square, which means things work as you say. With the old CRT monitors, though, any resolution was usually stretched to display full screen. The common resolution for CGA, EGA, VGA and MCGA was 320x200 pixels. That's a 16:10 (8:5, if you want to reduce further) ratio of pixels, but the displays themselves were 4:3. This means that a single pixel in that mode was actually a tall rectangle, 20% taller than it was wide.

If you take a 320x200 display and scale it up uniformly, it won't be stretched in the vertical direction to match the old monitors.

Some games used VGA in 320x240 resolution, which had the advantage that it was a true 4:3 resolution and had square pixels. The disadvantage was that this was more difficult to program for.

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