Hi John, > Though I cited Edit, and the mode suggestion might improve that, I > imagine that the improvement would be lost if I started a game or > anything else that runs in a graphical mode.
As long as the game lets you make a CHOICE between several resolutions, you will again have the possibility to select ANY resolution that does look nice when zoomed to the native resolution of your LCD screen :-) > In the meantime, I found this very dense thread on vogons.org: > http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18933 Well that is mostly about REFRESH rates - which makes a difference in CRT screens because of the flicker. But for LCD, you do not have that issue anyway. On LCD, faster refresh rate only means faster reaction times, which is sometimes nice for fast games. Also, when watching a video, it is good if the refresh rate is a multiple of the frame rate of the video (e.g. 25 frames per second video & 50, 75, 100 Hz screen refresh rate instead of 60, while 30 fps video looks better on 60 Hz). Again, regarding the zoom issue, LCD screens differ in the quality in which they manage to make odd RESOLUTIONS look smooth. Assuming that your screen has 1920x1080 native resolution, which is common today, 640 width should zoom fine. On 1920x1200 screens, 640x400 should look quite nice. As there are no popular 640x360 DOS text resolutions, you could use 640x350 on your 1920x1080 screen as long as you can select aspect ration preserving zoom. In other words, you should simply let the screen put black bars on top and bottom and let it zoom 640x350 to 1920x1050. Each DOS pixel will then be 3x3 screen pixels, which is an integer size, thereby avoiding zoom artifacts. You could also try to reach 1280x1024 if you can tell your screen to NOT do any zooming: This will have small black bars on top and bottom but unfortunately the bars on the left and right will be quite large. Using that with a text font is probably 160x64 chars at 8x16 font... For 1920x1200 screens, an obvious choice could be 1600x1200. Outside of text modes (which look okay in wide screen) most DOS games will be limited to 4:3 aspect ratio graphics resolutions, so you might often have to live with wide empty bars on the left and right. But that is still better than distorting everything if you would select stretch- to-fill-whole-screen for such modes. Note that 320x200 might actually look good when stretched to 16:9 AND it is again zoom friendly using 4x4 screen pixels for each DOS game pixel on 1920x1200 screens :-) As you see, 16:10 screens (1920x1200) are simply cooler than 16:9 ones (1920x1080) even though the latter are better for watching videos ;-) Long story short, try 640x400, 640x350, 320x200, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, depending on which screen you have and what your games and editors do support. It sometimes takes some playing with the possibilities to get a nice resolution. Do not forget to also use the buttons on your LCD screen itself, it often lets you select one of several zoom settings. Cheers, Eric PS: DOS will often use the DEFAULT BIOS text mode of 720x400, but as 720 is a weird fraction of 1920, this might look less smooth... There even are funky mode setting tools for DOS, too, so in theory, a text mode of 106x67 characters, 9x16 font, padded to 1920x1080 may be fun? Or alternatively 120x67 characters with 8x16 font, tastes differ :-) QUESTION: Can anybody recommend such a tool? Does the mode look good? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
