In full screen, my game is letterboxed and doesn't even fill out what should be a 4:3 resolution. I'm obviously not expecting "graphics", but my visuals still don't seem as nice looking as screenshots/trailer video.

Is there any way to activate some "high res mode" similar to Magic Carpet, or at least properly scale it to a 4:3 full screen res?

You should be able to properly scale to 4:3 full-screen, with black bars on the sides. Check your graphics card scaling options to make sure that scaling is enabled (and make sure that the option "preserve aspect ratio" is enabled). You can also try the "Graphic Mode Setup" utility that should be in the start menu entry for the game. This is a little utility provided by GOG to let you change DOSBox graphics options without mucking around in the configuration file. Try a few different output modes and see if they scale better.

If those don't work then you can dive into the configuration file and play with resolution and scaling options. I think the graphic card settings need to be correct first, though.

Thanks. I sorted it out by changing graphic mode from Overlay to something else, and by selecting keep aspect ratio.

Is there any specific reason why GoG would have it set to Overlay by default, and have it NOT maintain aspect ratio? Who on earth would want to play a distorted resolution? I wish I had a better idea what these modes meant.

I'm not sure about Overlay... it works fine for me for some other DOS games, whereas changing the graphics mode screwed things up. So maybe it's just the setting that works for most hardware configurations?

As for aspect ratio, is that actually an option from GOG? It's been a while since I messed with the graphics utility, but on my computer I have the aspect ratio setting checked in my graphics card options in Windows. I'm pretty sure you need to have it set at that level for it to work. Players who typically play modern games may not have this setting checked because most modern games support widescreen, whereas older games were often 4:3.

This seems to be a mistake on GOG's part. The GOG installer deploys one of two DOSBox .conf files based on the Windows version being used; the file for Windows 8 64-bit has the correct aspect=true while the one for other versions has aspect=false. DOSBox's aspect correction is different from the video card's GPU scaling. The DOSBox setting determines the handling of resolutions with non-square pixels (such as the 320x200 used by Anvil of Dawn and many other DOS games); these resolutions filled the whole screen on a 4:3 monitor back in the day, so enabling DOSBox's aspect correction skews the output to the intended 4:3 aspect ratio (regardless of your monitor's aspect ratio) while disabling it uses the original pixel resolution (which may result in letterboxing, depending on the fullscreen resolution DOSBox is using).

Setting the video card's GPU scaling to maintain aspect ratio ensures the most accurate result as long as DOSBox's aspect setting has also been set appropriately.

Thanks for the clarifications, Arkose! I'm surprised that Anvil of Dawn doesn't use 640x480, but I guess it was released right around the time that higher resolutions were starting to appear.

Good ol' games eyh?! :D

You might want to try playing DOSbox games in a windowed mode, finished Secret Agent & LBA 1 + 2 on it, played Syndicate Wars, HoMM3 too - It just seems make everything look better, at least for me. On top of that, I can see what's going on in IRC/browser & so on, which is a nice bonus whilst gaming.

Might be a bit late but since Anvil is using the 0.74 Dosbox, you can change a few things in the .conf for a better experience:

fullresolution=desktop (so it auto sets your desktop resolution)
aspect=true

graphic mode: ddraw (to support scalers and aspect ratio correction

scaler=hq3x

The font is kind of weird with that setup, and it runs very very slowly in W8 64 bit.

Try:

fullresolution=desktop
output=ddraw
aspect=true
scaler=normal2x

Do you have DX9 installed? I don't know much about Windows 8 to be honest, but I do know that Win7 did not have DX9 by default. And with the change to DX10 and 11, the backwards compatibility was cut. And as far as I know, the Dosbox DirectDraw interface is using DX9. The only other reason could be cpu/gpu, though former should not be a problem. What kind of GPU do you have? Is it a desktop or a laptop?

Desktop, nVidia GTX 560 Ti, DX11. I did read some things saying the old DirectDraw stuff is not included in Windows 8. That could account for the slowness.

You can download DirectX 9.0c from Microsoft here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109

It will not overwrite your DX11, they can both be installed at the same time with no problems. DX9 is just for legacy support.

The weird font you were seeing may have to do with the scaler (hq3x). These scalers try to upgrade the old graphics to look better on modern screens that have many pixels, but they can distort the image in weird ways too. You might try the normal2x option suggested by Atyth and see if the font looks better that way.

Sorry for the late reply, but that is not for Win8.

Supported Operating System
Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Service Pack 3

I have it running using OpenGL, it's fine enough for me.

Uh oh. That's bad news for a lot of older games if DX9 can't be installed on Windows 8. Can anyone confirm if it will work with Win 8?

That's good. OpenGL is, in many ways, better than DirectX, but not all games support it.