hi all.

Ah, now that I have found the way to open the configuration utility, I wonder what settings are your favorites?!

there seems to be a ton of these settings, "surface" has a bunch, many many graphic options too. Then there is the resolution settings to play with.

I have a small problem: that to test *each* setting means to begin the game over again each time, lets see.....there are probably 500 different possible combinations of graphics settings and this is not counting what could be achieved with the dosbox itself, in its config section!

so please, what settings do you all find to give the best graphics?

an old game made for tiny monitors and the 19" monitor i have destroys the game!

thank you....freestone

For Graphics Mode, I find OpenGL works slightly better for me, but it depends on your card. It shouldn't make much difference but I think some use software rendering so won't be as smooth. OpenGL and DirectX should be safe choices.

The Advanced Settings are the same for all Graphics Modes, I think. The most important one for quality is the scaling engine: the lower on the list the scaler is, the better quality (but more processor-intensive). On a good spec modern PC, you shouldn't have any problems using hqx3.

The scaler works by 'guessing' what the extra pixels would be, so the results aren't perfect but if you really don't like the jagged pixel look then this will rescue you from that.

Double Buffering may make it slightly smoother but again uses more processing power.

If you're running it in a window then you can turn up the resolution - don't worry too much about it because it scales: you won't suffer from issues like unreadably small fonts, etc.

EDIT: Tweaking it myself, I've found that it's a bad idea to turn on Keep Aspect Ratio.
EDIT2: And Double Buffering doesn't work right either, for me at least.

I'm still trying to figure out which scaling mode gives me the most readable fonts.

(Using ATI 48xx, xx=50 iirc, on Win7)
I avoid Dosbox's scalers, preferring a basic look so the text is clean and consistent. In fullscreen opengl works best for this, scaling nicely. Overlay and ddraw scales badly, while surface and direct3d don't scale at all resulting in a small window. Windowed is the same, except that ddraw scales as nicely as opengl for some reason.

I've decided to do the music+sound fix(topped thread) and for graphics i've gone with the same settings i ended up using in Gabriel Knight, either 'super2xsai' or 'advinterp2x':

In notepad open 'dosboxDarklands.conf' and change the line:

scalar=normalx2

to:

scalar=super2xsai

or:

scalar=advinterp2x

Either does an ok job of smoothing out the pixelization while leaving text you can read, probably i prefer 'advinterp2x' for the cleaner text.