We don't remember DM properly

[Gambit37]

It's bothered me for ages that my modern experiences of DM (RTC, DSB, etc) don't feel quite right. I've only just realised recently why this is.

We don't play these modern clones at their intended resolution. DM was designed for the 320x200 resolution, but when played on an old monitor/CRT screen, the display was stretched vertically to fill the screen. The stretched view roughly translates to a resolution of 320x240, which means pixels are no longer square. Add in the curvature of the screen, the scanlines and other artifacts, and the visuals back then were very different from how we see them today on our perfect, crisp flat screens.

This is how it looked back in the day. Notice how the dungeon feels taller and less cramped than the modern view. And the limitations of CRT screens actually improve the look of the graphics in my opinion:




This is what we see today (note that this is doubled to 640x400 for ease of viewing)




The old size screen effect can be simulated on any modern screenshot by multiplying the 320x200 resolution up to 1600x1200. That's too big for the forum to display, so it'll squeeze it down and make it look a bit fuzzy, but you get the idea:



If wonder if clones could implement some kind of emulation of the effect, to stretch the output vertically and add some scanlines for that true retro feel;-)

[Ameena]

Hmm, interesting. I don't think I'd ever really noticed/thought about those kinds of differences. I think I was just happy to be able to play DM again .

[MasterWuuf]

The old one definitely made Mr. Stone Club Wielder look more intimidating.
Always one of the more frustrating, as well as irritating, creatures in my opinion.

[terkio]

Nice.
The CRT low resolution was adding to the pictures anti aliasing that had been mostly well executed.
One feel you will never simulate is the not so good mouse with it's crummy roller ball. A sort of lag or inaccuracy, some small play with hysteresis.

[slickrcbd]

One feel you will never simulate is the not so good mouse with it's crummy roller ball. A sort of lag or inaccuracy, some small play with hysteresis.

Actually a mouse with a ball can be quite good when it is new, it's just that they need to be cleaned a lot more often than a modern mouse, and they wear out faster.
I didn't have any problems with the mouse when I first got Dungeon Master, but after a couple years the mouse was wearing out.

The old one definitely made Mr. Stone Club Wielder look more intimidating.
Always one of the more frustrating, as well as irritating, creatures in my opinion.

I did not find them that bad, mostly because there were so few of them.
Oddly enough, I found that punching them was one of the more effective ways of dealing with them. Drink YA BRO potions for your front liners, remove their weapon, and start punching, alternate champions until somebody either takes a hit or gains a ninja level, then swap the person with a rear rank champion (who should also quaiff a YA BRO potion). You can use YA IR as an alternate to YA BRO.
Like rockpiles, the golems were easy to retreat from, and like them, they hit hard so swap champions when they take a hit. It's a good way to gain ninja levels by giving them a death of a thousand punches.

[m1ckey]

Nice.
The CRT low resolution was adding to the pictures anti aliasing that had been mostly well executed.
One feel you will never simulate is the not so good mouse with it's crummy roller ball. A sort of lag or inaccuracy, some small play with hysteresis.

I recently completed CSB on Amiga (real hardware) for the first time since... I dunno, early-mid 90´s.
CRT monitor does give that more menacing vibe, same goes for analog mice, had to clean and fix a few on during the run...
Talk about THAT stereo sound... OH BOY, OH BOY!

Made me appreciate the originals a whole lot more.

[oh_brother]

Makes me wish I could switch on my Atari ST and check it out. It probably is somewhere in my parents' house, but I definitely don't own any CRT displays. Those experiences will have to just live on in my memory.

[Sphenx]

If wonder if clones could implement some kind of emulation of the effect, to stretch the output vertically and add some scanlines for that true retro feel;-)

Certainly possible; I think we already discussed the CRT effect through this forum about "You have to win the game" / "Super win the game".
Here is the article for details :

Being too long on emulators make lose the original feeling ... I think the most I forgot about is the 320x240 dimension and rectangular feel of pixels.

So, I did try myself several processings on the same image to emulate some CRT effect, for what it's worth. Here is the result :



It has been downscaled from a higher resolution (4800 x 3600) that you can find here , generated from a RGB decomposition of the initial image, if interested to know.

[Gambit37]

Lovely, that's a great result Sphenx! Would you be happy to share the process for creating images like this?

[ChristopheF]

Some emulator front-ends provide built-in optional "shader" features to render images of old video games, providing all kinds of filtering to enhance or degrade the video output, and there are many such shaders that reproduce all the quirks of CRT screens like scanlines, curvature, color bleeding etc, and with many customizable parameters if you want to tweak them yourself. Some are listed here: http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_Shaders

I just tried RetroArch https://www.retroarch.com/ to play both Amiga & Atari DM/CSB, and you can get pictures looking very similar to the first one you posted, Gambit, using one of the CRT shaders. I tried the one named crt-geom.cg to get the curvature effect.

[Erik Bauer]

Yes, let's keep in mind that that gfx was also handpainted on a curved CRT Screen so it was intended to be rendered on such devices.
Flat LCDs tend to flatten it, but I started to appreciate that "Modern flat look" long ago, so it does not bother me much.

It is nice, however, to see how on a CRT everything looks gloomy, narrower and more menacing.

[Erik Twice]

I think one of the reasons the game might look more menacing on a CRT is that blacks are much better. Blacks in CRTs are, well, black. There's no picture when the screen is black. But black on modern screens are illumiated.

[DruTan]

I have tested several shaders bundled with DOSBox-Optionals, here are the results (click for larger picture):


crt-easymode




crt-lottes




crt-lottes_mod




crt-lottes_vga




crt-lottes_woBogen




crt-nes-mini




GTU




Jinc2-Sharper-3D




Jinc2-Sharpest-3D




lanczos2-sharp




Lanczos2-Sharper




Lanczos2-Sharper-3D




scanline




stock

[Gambit37]

Aha, nice! I've not used DOS-box for years, that's a nice feature. "crt-lottes" looks perfect to me

[DruTan]

I like "lottes family" too. Here are detailed images cropped from high resolution snapshots comparing "crt-lottes" with "crt-easymode".


crt-easymode




crt-lottes




crt-lottes_mod




crt-lottes_vga



crt-lottes_woBogen

[Gambit37]

Very nice. So can that version of DOS box process static images? That's a useful feature! Is there a tutorial for that? I didn't see one in the readme.

[DruTan]

To view images I have installed good old CompuShow version 9.0.

[Simon]

Damn, this is seriously cool.

I played it on my amiga which was hooked up to an ancient TV that took about a minute to warm up.

[slickrcbd]

I played it on an Apple IIGS with an analog AppleColor RGB monitor (the standard Apple IIGS monitor), and I honestly don't recall really seeing the scanlines like in those pictures. I could discern individual pixels, unlike a modern monitor, but I don't really recall seeing scalines like that.
Maybe it was just the IIGS monitor compared to an Atari or Amiga.