#oneaday Day 920: DOS pixels

I've been meaning to set up a proper DOSBox… setup for a while now, but I got round to it over the past couple of days. And somehow, simply doing that fresh install of DOSBox has fixed one of the main issues I have with a lot of GOG's DOSBox-based releases: pixel scaling.

For some reason, a lot of GOG's DOSBox titles don't scale elegantly to high resolutions, meaning you end up with horrible wonky pixels all over the place that don't do that lovely 320×200 or 640×480 art justice. I can't find what setting they've buggered up in their config files, but whatever the default setup for a fresh install of DOSBox is seems to fix it completely. So what I might start doing with my GOG games is just copying the files over into my "proper" DOSBox installation and use them from there instead. Job solved.

The reason I wanted to get this sorted was because as part of the Retro Select series, I want to cover some DOS games. There are a bunch I have very fond memories of — and a bunch I still have on my shelf, as you've doubtless seen in the background of my video introductions — so it will be nice to be able to bust them out and make use of them properly.

I was skeptical as to whether or not I could get original media to successfully install an old, boxed DOS PC game into DOSBox, but I tried it with Psygnosis' Pyrotechnica — a fun game that no-one remembers, and thus a prime candidate for a video — and it worked perfectly. And despite that game's rather stern warnings about probably requiring a boot disk to work properly, no faffing around with memory managers or Sound Blaster settings required. Living the DOS dream, for sure.

I was also excited to get Cobra Mission working without any issues whatsoever; I've been curious about that game ever since it was announced and I very much enjoyed my relatively brief exploration of it for this week's History of Lewd over on Rice Digital — I may well play a bit more, because I found it to be a genuinely interesting game.

Anyway, that's probably the most exciting thing that has happened today. Mario Golf should be coming tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have some time to play around with that, and then Chris and I are recording a podcast on Saturday.

Half-considering taking a week's break from writing a chunk of the Atelier MegaFeature this weekend as although I'm making good progress on Sophie and am in a position to write the next part I have planned, I'm also kinda tired. I'll make a decision on that over the weekend depending on how everything else goes.

Anyway. Time for an early night, I think; neither Andie nor I have been sleeping well of late, so here's hoping for a pleasant night's sleep for once.