i was wrong.
setting output to opengl, windowsize to 800x500
and scaler "none" is the best scaler ever!!11
Very detailed and original colors.
No really. Large windows and fullscreen is
very blurry though.
Never touched that "none" scaler before because of the
name. heh.
Regarding your comment, i thought of that before.
Would like to read some documentation before i get into
the code. There must have been a site with at least
hq2x,3x,4x documentation, but its not reachable anymore.
Would be easier to read a bit of information
before start messing around in the source tree.

No really. Large windows and fullscreen is
very blurry though.

->openglnb (no that does not mean OpenGL Not Blurry but almost)

The Hq source and pages are available through the Internet Archive.

Already in dosbox.

I didn't think hqx4 was in DOSBox.

hq5x is also missing, but doubt anybody is missing them.

Actually i would like to see 5x of all the scalers on my 20" 1600x1200 LCD.

Bad luck then.

For me, I have found the best scaler to be the default one, normal 2x. With a CRT monitor, the output looks exactly as it did back in the day.

If you don't have access to a CRT monitor, then the best scalers are the openglnb and the direct3d in unofficial builds. These can give you a pure X by X stretch or a proportional but still X by X stretch. It is something of a substitute for normal4x and the like.

I would never use any scaler cause they are spoiling the original picture - letters look bad, overview maps looks bad, the same same items looks differently depending on their background - as a result you may not notice for example some hard to see items, switches, enemies, passages, etc. It is definitely not for playing game levels for the first time or when you want to find some secrets/bonuses you haven't seen before.
The funniest is when the object (or even a mouse cursor) is moving through a different background resulting in changing the object and the background 😀

Great Hierophant this is the best option for every LCD monitor and the only one that I use:
fullresolution=0x0
output=openglnb
aspect=true
scaler=none

For CRT you should also use the highest possible resolution (with acceptable refresh rate of course) cause in smaller resolutions on larger monitors you will get black lines between every line of picture.

By the way, why do you use a CRT? On LCD it looks way better, actually it looks perfect!

These black lines are something I am still struggling with to emulate on an LCD 😉

gulikoza 320x200 resolution was introduced for 14" monitors or maybe even smaller and there were no black lines on these monitors. Later larger monitors appeared but they were devoted for larger resolutions and there were no black lines on them too. The lines appeared only if you on new large monitors wanted to use old small resolutions - incompatibility cause too few lines were not able to cover whole large screen.

It is a simmilar bug like when you play old slow games on new fast computers and the result is that a game works too fast to handle it.

What you are trying to do is trying to reproduce a bug as if you were trying to make old 8086 slow games work too fast as they were on pentiums. It makes no sense.

robertmo wrote:

aspect=true
scaler=none

This looks nice in full-screen mode, but not so much in windowed mode.

Aspect ratio correction with a small amount of pixels leads to a fairly large amount of distortion. So when in windowed mode, use normal2x (or even normal3x). That distorts the image far less while maintaining the oldschool feel (the "normal" scalers just scale up the image without interpolating or other fancy processing). The good thing is that this won't visibly affect the output in full-screen mode (as long as you use a stretching output method -- anything but surface).

Having normal2x + opengl (rather than openglnb) on a relatively high resolution (1680x1050 in my case) gives the image just that little bit of unsharpness that I remember from my CRT displays without getting blurry (like none + opengl does).

@robertmo: I am fairly certain my 15" trinitron produced black lines in 320x200 and 640x400 (not 640x480 though). It took a while getting used to it but I did eventually and now I think it looks better since the picture looks slightly less pixelated 😁

Kippesoep for window you also don't need normal scalers. You can use:
windowresolution=640x480
windowresolution=960x720
windowresolution=1280x960
windowresolution=1600x1200
fullresolution=0x0
output=openglnb
aspect=true
scaler=none

in 1280x960 aspect distortion is almost not visible.

The fact that you remember games a bit blury on your monitor was just that you monitor wasn't perfect - but that was not intended by authors of the game. The picture should be sharp. And modern LCD monitors allow us to have sharp picture. Actually not all LCD: there are two types: one has separate red green blue pixels one next to each other - if you look from a close distant you will see all three rgb subpixels, the other which had better picture is where all three rgb are in the same place (behind each other) - if you look from a close distant you won't see separate rgb subpixeles - you only see one pixel (orange, purple, or whatever from 16M colour palette). Actually on both LCD types you still see slight black horizontal and vertical lines between each pixels.

gulikoza i said 14" not 15" 😀 There are no black lines on 14".
I know there are black lines on 15" in these resolutions. But you shouldn't be playing these games on it. 15" is for 640x480 at least. 19" has black lines even on 800x600. Black lines are not intended. They also make the picture darker. Thinking your way you could also introduce vertical black lines and have only small dots being displayed - the picture would be even less pixelated. 😀 (actually all LCD screens have slight horizontal and vertical black lines - there is no need to introduce them 😉 ).
Nvidia introduced an option in its drivers for removing black lines on large CRT screens - they are double scanning lower resolutions. 800x600 -> 1600x1200 for example. Although still my 19" screens have black lines after doublescanning 640x400 -> 1280x800. LCD screens don't have such a problem.

robertmo wrote:

Kippesoep for window you also don't need normal scalers. You can use: windowresolution=640x480 windowresolution=960x720 windowre […]
Show full quote

Kippesoep for window you also don't need normal scalers. You can use:
windowresolution=640x480
windowresolution=960x720
windowresolution=1280x960
windowresolution=1600x1200

That's close, but not quite the same. Try setting windowresolution=640x480 and then selecting a higher resolution on Quake for instance. It is then scaled down. Just use normal2x and it'll scale up when needed and nothing down. That also prevents having to hardcode resolution values (which I find a big no-no).

robertmo wrote:

The fact that you remember games a bit blury on your monitor was just that you monitor wasn't perfect - but that was not intended by authors of the game.

I know, but most of the people here aren't going for perfection, but for nostalgic authenticity. Not only was my monitor not perfect, but such a thing simply didn't exist. A little bit of blurriness is a fact of life with CRTs. I don't really care about what the authors intended, but to see it now as I did it then, which is the whole point of retro-gaming. To get the proper oldschool experience, it needs to be simulated when using LCDs. So I want a picture that's not obviously blurry, but not 100% sharp either.

robertmo wrote:

gulikoza i said 14" not 15" Happy There are no black lines on 14".

That depends on the monitor. I just checked with some 14" monitors I still have lying around. Two of them show faint black lines in 320x200, one of them doesn't. May even be the graphics card that might render as 320x400 or 640x400 instead. (These monitors don't have an OSD that might show the resolution).

You are right about windowmode scaling.

About bluriness - Well.. i don't know how it is with other people maybe you are right, but i don't agree. I also had no Roland music, actually i had no sound card for a long time and listened only to pcspeaker or silence cause digital audio was rarely played by pc speaker. I played floppy versions or even ripped cd versions without movies, or without speech. I later played with not so compatible with sound blaster card - some games didn't detect it and i had no sound. I played on a too used monitor that was too black - hard to see anything. I played on a monohrome monitor. I still play with stereo only (no more speakers - but i just don't want to bother placing cables and speakers in the room). I played with too slow computer - games were jumping, games were often with lowest detail. I played with a terrible wheel mouse without precision. I have played games without a joystick - was expensive. racing games without a stearing wheel but with keyboard arrows.

And I have to say that i feel absolutely no sentiment for that - actually i hate it. And now when i have a chance to play it the way it should be i will try to have it perfect.

Kippesoep wrote:

robertmo wrote:

gulikoza i said 14" not 15" Happy There are no black lines on 14".

That depends on the monitor. I just checked with some 14" monitors I still have lying around. Two of them show faint black lines in 320x200, one of them doesn't. May even be the graphics card that might render as 320x400 or 640x400 instead. (These monitors don't have an OSD that might show the resolution).

Well even now not every monitor is perfect.
320x400 and 640x400 has the same number of lines - 400
i think you ment 320x200.
320x200 is being displayed as 320x400 (640x400) on every 14" or larger monitor. There were no exceptions.

This also depends on how good the focus of the electron beam was adjusted and the dot mask.

and also on the brightness and contrast level, and whether these old monitors are not too used - too dark right now

> There were no exceptions.

EGA/CGA 😉