How does it look with a REALLY BIG window?

Low-resolution images almost always look bad when enlarged onto a big screen even though all that's happening is the pixels are being made larger. It tends to be especially bad on LCD screens as they don't have the slight blurring effect that old CRT screens do. Using OpenGL as an output method would give you bilinear filtering which imo looks more CRT-screen-like and is less pixelated but kinda blurry, but if you don't like that just try all the different scalers until you find one that looks good for the particular game you're playing. Some are sharper than others and it mostly comes down to personal taste.

I use output=opengl as Lofty suggested. Nothing else looks decent. DOSBox ought to abandon the fixed-multiple scaling system (whatever2x/whatever3x) and use filtering algorithms that work on any combination of source size being stretched to destination size (especially if they are integer multiples). Most media player software (Media Player Classic, VLC, etc.) allow you to choose scaling filter algorithms in this way.

I use output=opengl as Lofty suggested. Nothing else looks decent. DOSBox ought to abandon the fixed-multiple scaling system (whatever2x/whatever3x) and use filtering algorithms that work on any combination of source size being stretched to destination size (especially if they are integer multiples). Most media player software (Media Player Classic, VLC, etc.) allow you to choose scaling filter algorithms in this way.

I'm sure you know this, but dosbox already supports arbitrary scaling through different drivers other than "surface".

Thanks guys, I didn't know about opengl, so I changed to opengl and then changed scaler to hq3x. It now takes up around 14 inches and maintains a great image. I tried aspect=true, but it seems to effet the performance, so I went back to false, and it gives a much clearer image as well as better performance.

Thanks for all the tips, you're legends, I will keep tinkering with the configuration just in case I get something better 😁

ripa wrote:

I'm sure you know this, but dosbox already supports arbitrary scaling through different drivers other than "surface".

Scaling to arbitrary sizes, yes, but it can't (properly) filter the image in various ways. The scalers only work properly for filtering an image that is scaled to a given integer multiple.

Gibbers wrote:

Thanks guys, I didn't know about opengl, so I changed to opengl and then changed scaler to hq3x. It now takes up around 14 inches and maintains a great image. I tried aspect=true, but it seems to effet the performance, so I went back to false, and it gives a much clearer image as well as better performance.

Thanks for all the tips, you're legends, I will keep tinkering with the configuration just in case I get something better 😁

it's always good to read the dosbox.conf comments and memorize them 😉