YJL

When I was trying to play TES: Arena in fullscreen, the screen didn't go as I expected. I saw the screen resolution changed from 1680x1050 (my native screen resolution), the game screen didn't show but a portion of X window from top-left corner.

There was a thread of discussion about this, the problem didn't exist in DWM v4.3, but that was very old version of DWM. Although there seemed to have some patch, but I didn't look into it. I didn't like to patch on my own.

I was using scaler of DOSBox at the time being in windowed mode, then I noticed there was an option fullresolution under the sdl section. The workaround is actually quite simple, you set it to your native screen resolution, so the screen resolution won't be changed after switching to fullscreen mode.

Problem solved.

You should have a default configuration file under ~/.dosbox after first-run of DOSBox, you can copy and modify it and use it with current directory as dosbox.conf when you run with dosbox .. It is documented very well, or you can read about the options here.

Note that some scaler doesn't re-scale to fill up the entire screen, you will see the picture centered at center of screen and leave a huge black border. normal2x/3x, advmame3x, and some re-scale to fill up the screen.

This may actually better than real screen mode change, by keeping the same resolution, the switching is faster than real screen mode change. You won't feel a pause during the switching.

After I had fun with Fus Ro Dah, I decided to try the first game in DOSBox, here is the commands I used to run it:

unzip Arena106Setup.zip
# file Arena106.exe
# Arena106.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows, UPX compressed, RAR self-extracting archive
unrar e Arena106.exe
dosbox ARENA.BAT

You can download the full game for free on its website.

I have adjusted the configuration file of DOSBox, so I can have fullscreen in DWM, there seems to have bug in SDL or DWM. Save it as dosbox.conf and put it with game files, you will need to adjust it for your screen setting.

Before I changed the default normal2x scaler (you can also use command scaler to change), the game picture really reminded me of the old times. I have no idea how I could have played many games in that period of time. The text was almost unreadable for me before I changed to hq3q or advmame3x. Here are some screenshot of original pictures:




I also had to change to CPU cycle, default was 3000, which was too slow when walking in the game.

The ZIP comes with a PDF file for instruction of using DOSBox, it also contains a list of password for copy protection, there is another Passwords.txt for easy lookup.

This certainly brought me back about two decades ago. After you bought a game, you opened the plastic wrapper, then took out a thick, well-designed, well-printed manual. You would hope there is more than just one manual, some posters or something.

You flipped over the pages, then a piece of colored plastic would fall out, it could be solid color, or two colors. You would put it on certain page which the text was printed in unreadable background colors.

But when you read through the colored plastic a number or a word would show up beneath. You then input that into a popup dialog, which showed up at random or at beginning of the game.

Meh, that was the time.

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You can download the original DOC and RTF.