Scaling/magnifying option for older games
Window hooker to run fullscreen programs in window and much more...
Status: Beta
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When playing older Windows 95/98 games with a lower screen resolution (like say 640x480), I usually use the magnifier app in Windows 10 to blow the image up 2x or more. It's not an ideal solution, but it works.
Could a similar option be featured in DxWnd? I don't have any idea how hard that would be to implement in general, but that way I suppose DxWnd could be even more relevant to retro gamers.
DxWnd already has everything you need.
Setting a larger window size, the game will be "stretched" to a bigger area. If the game doesn't obey to the selected size, go to the Video / "Window size & position" tab and try some different option from "Free".
If the stretching is wide (like bringing a 320x240 game to 800x600 window or bigger ....) the bilinear filtering options are very recommended (go to DirectX configuration tab).
If you find some particular and bugged case, please post it here, I'm alwways seeking for difficult cases to improve the program!
I just got scaling to work in Jazz Jackrabbit 2 by importing the included .dxw file in DxWnd.
I do however have one hard case, and that's the game OpenTyrian.
The game itself has it's own scaling methods that can be accessed by changing scaler in opentyrian.conf. The problem is that the built-in scaler goes to 4x max, and I need 5x to fill my screen. 5x; non filtered (there are some filtered scalers built-in, but I like pure, blocky pixels).
I have not managed to get DxWnd to override OpenTyrian's integrated scalers as of yet.
Well, "Open" should mean that I shouldn't have problems getting the game and giving some hint, I suppose ....
If you want more challenges, I have this game called Giana's Return (an unofficial sequel to the great Giana Sisters) that also suffers from the very same issue as OpenTyrian (Integrated scalers not going high enough, and would not cooperate with dxwnd).
The game's homepage is down as of now (I have no idea why that is; server failure perhaps).
It seems like it's a common thing with freeware-games that have integrated scalers that doesn't go high enough; I had to download a custom version of DosBox to get that 5x scaler I wanted, and all I can say is that I'm glad I'm not migrating over to a 4K TV soon.