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[Japo]

Everybody wants not to have those black stripes. Y U NO like unused area of your monitor?

Originally Posted by Japo

The desired effect is to display the game, at its originally intended 4:3 aspect ratio, making the most of the area of the monitor. If yours is an old 4:3 monitor, the game image should fill it completely.

However if your monitor is a "wide screen" you SHOULD see black stripes left and right. This is is NOT BAD, this is GOOD--as long as there are no similar black stripes at the top and bottom. If the image of a DOS game--intended for 4:3 aspect ratio--were to fill a wider display (like a 16:9), it would be distorted, and you wouldn't be really getting more of the area of your display, contrary to what you might thing at first, and even though many people actually try to remove those stripes when they see them. Click here to see an example of distortion and why it's undesirable.

Mind you, you COULD stretch the image and remove the stripes if you really wanted. But you can see the gruesome result in the link above.

So does it work for you with "ddraw" and not with "overlay", or was it something else? It would be interesting to know.

(Dunno, it may make sense. All this is undocumented, but I think those DOSBox options are probably enum values simply forwarded to SDL calls. Judging from the name, overlay might mean writing directly to the video memory. So maybe the result could vary depending on the particular hardware. DirectX on the other hand is an industry standard API and any driver is responsible to produce the same result out of the same call.)