Goodaltgamer: In the moment I only remember mostly games asking for VESA driver......
I was never such a fan of King Quest, Larry and similar.....
Lucas Art, were they not mostly in VGA? I do remember the really good graphics back int the old days....
But I had C64, Amiga and PC. and the PC was having the worst graphics ;)
Best example Elite.
Bloody 4 colours ONLY on the PC.......it was horrible compared to the C64.....And even worse to the late version on the Amiga ;)
I might be wrong, but I think VESA was later on, in the 'super-VGA' era (which wasn't a well defined standard like VGA and before, so I think VESA drivers were to do with cross compatibility between manufacturers).
The LucasArts games were mostly VGA, but at the time 320x200 was the most common VGA mode (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h). I think that 320x200 was a pretty common resolution for the Amiga too actually.
burkjon: Yes, I'm referring to 320x200, a 16:10 ratio that was meant for 4:3 screens. GOG messes this up by delivering these games in 16:10 which in my opinion constitutes a broken experience. I hope when Windows 10 drops and they give their entire catalog another pass-over, they reconsider the default on this. It affects tons of classic adventure games.
I agree, the aspect ratio correction should always be on.
Rakuru: That's interesting, I never knew that about Doom - thanks for the heads up. I recently played through Doom and Doom 2 in DOSBox and had messed with some of the config to try to get it optimized, but not the aspect ratio. That article made me kind of worried that I had played through it all with it stretched out without realizing it.
Anyway, I just went back and tried comparing 'aspect = false' (what I had it set to) to 'aspect = true' in the DOSBox settings, and when in windowed mode the title screen without aspect correction looks almost exactly like the uncorrected version in the wiki article (and weirdly widescreen for such an old game), and with correction it looks like the corrected version on the article. But what's interesting is that in fullscreen (which is of course how I played it) it looks pretty close to being correct even without aspect correction, I guess because I'm using a CRT monitor and when I originally set up the game I played around with the horizontal and vertical stretch settings on the monitor until it fit the screen properly, I manually stretched the pixels vertically and replicated the originally intended display conditions without even realizing it.
So I guess I was probably pretty close to an accurate ratio and didn't need to worry so much, although I wasn't able to quite fill the entire screen with a max vertical stretch setting (close though). It is really nice to know what was going on behind the scenes for future 320x200 games, though, and why I had to initially adjust the screen so much to get the image to fit.
Also I'm currently rocking a dual monitor setup of a 17" CRT and 24" LCD. I keep telling myself that I'll swap out my CRT for the other LCD in the closet when I'm not planning to play any classic games for a while, but let's be honest, when am I ever not going to have another classic game to play right around the corner. :)
I'm envious, I miss having a CRT. But yeah, the issue talked about in that article applies to probably over 90% of DOS games from that era. I think there were a couple of games that did use that graphics mode but seemed to have art designed for square pixels (so they would look too tall with the aspect correction on). Not many though.
