As someone who's spent far too much time fiddling with DOS game aspect ratios, I appreciated this video immensely. There are _so_ many variables to consider on a per-game basis, so I'm constantly tweaking captured footage to address this stuff!

this reminds me of my dad's "I paid for the whole TV and I'm going to USE the whole TV!" which results in him stretching EVERYTHING to fit no matter what the original ratio was.

This explains why so many characters in old DOS games seemed strangely wide and squat.

I really appreciate the purist (or 'historical accuracy') mindset that drives your writing and research.

One thing I remember from old DOS days - Car & Driver game had special test screen which would display a circle, you had to adjust your monitor image stretch dials so that the height and width of the cirlce were equal, at this point you would know that the aspect ratio of displayed image was as intended by the game programmers. Also I always use aspect=true in DOSBox while playing 320x200 games ;)

I can't stand incorrect aspect ratios. Same goes for getting the correct refresh rate on DOS games. I setup my old PIII with a CRT recently for this reason.

The Chocolate Doom project had a big argument over whether to apply aspect ratio correction to screenshots a few years ago, and the solution was to upscale 320x200 shots to 1600x1200, basically non destructively giving each original pixel its own 5:6 aspect ratio

Your Lure of the Temptress point, about it being made on a PAL Amiga makes perfect sense about the ignored pixels, converting PAL games to NTSC alters the fact that, in Europe, 99% of all PAL games were letterboxed by at least 28 pixels top and bottom. Its something American retro gamers don't really take into account as when played in NTSC the games fill the screen. It was the same on later consoles as well, even up to Final Fantasy X on PS2 looking almost like VHS widescreen movies did.

It always bothered me to see people watching analog 4:3 broadcasts in widescreen TVs. Can't you see everything is squished? They didn't care. Some 3D games had settings to use a widescreen ratio in their calculations, so you could use your analog widescreen monitor with the same resolution as before, but usually the UI would suffer stretching. Once we switched to accelerated 3D with large resolutions and square pixels, the issue became moot. Great video!

I agree here, there is no such thing as PC early-mid 90s games made for 16:10 or 16:9 monitors, no one had them back then. Why the hell devs would even make games for monitors that didn't even exist on the mainstream consumer market? Simple answer, they weren't making games for wide screen monitors it was all 4:3.

Jazz Jackrabbit is an interesting case - it doesn't actually use the 320x200 mode, rather a hacked 320x240 with only 199 lines used in order to gain a 60Hz refresh rate. On a CRT, this does appear as widescreen when you have sizing set properly for 640x480 video modes.

Wrong aspect ratios are driving me crazy!! By the way: in 2019 you still can't correct it in youtube :/ Thank you for this video :)

Finally, Hocus Pocus gets some credit! I honestly didn't think people remembered it existed. Subscribed!

Great video! I also prefer 16:10! Lure of the Temptress from GOG, using ScummVM, does have a graphical interface for you to adjust the options (as should any game using ScummVM from GOG). They just launch directly into the game for a more seamless experience. Press Ctrl-F5 and select "Return to Launcher" to get to the configuration screen. From there you can Edit Game and turn off the aspect ratio correction to correct the aspect ratio on Lure of the Temptress.

On screen display is fancy, but back in the days I always preferred physical wheels and buttons, because tweaking was sooo much faster with it.

Thank you for this. I started doing computer art in the 80s when there where the “graphics contests” that required you to submit your [usually BASIC] code that generated the graphics. When I started doing raytracing in the 90s and got my first FTP Warez copy of photoshop, I used to get into arguments with people on IRC about pixels being taller than they are wide but I wasn’t sure of the ratio, and they thought I was crazy. I knew I wasn’t. I had notebooks with the best quarter-circle patterns for every radius that I painstakingly figured out on my own.

I love the 16:10 format. Great to have tall screen real estate on a PC. Still use the Samsung 2232BW screen. PC FPS games is a joy. You can spot players up top or down low much better, without moving the mouse. Nice DOS video! =)

Also worth noting that games from the transition period in history where aspect ratios were changing, or which by chance were intended for something other than 4:3 often had a 'calibration' mode, or at least something in their settings which made it possible to adjust the way the image was drawn to fit different aspect ratios. Many late era n64 games do this (helped out by the fact that the n64 can do hardware image scaling as a post-processing step) An extreme example would be Perfect Dark, which gives you manual width and height adjustment, screen positioning, 4:3 and 16:9 video image output options (eg, settings to output the image correctly at those aspect ratios if your display was that ratio), and, independently of this, standard (4:3), widescreen (16:9), and cinematic (2.15:1) image output modes that crop the image using letterboxing, taking into account what your screen aspect ratio settings are. (eg 16:9 if you set your screen mode to 4:3 will have letterboxing, while 4:3 on 16:9 will have pillarboxing. But if you get it wrong and set your TV output to 4:3 when you actually have a 16:9 television, then unless your television is applying pillarboxing, you'll get a stretched image) Incidentally if you make homebrew for old systems and want to use a non-standard aspect ratio (like say, 16:9 on a PAL snes, which works out to roughly 256x200 due to the pixel aspect ratio) it's a good idea to include something in the main menu that not only makes note of the fact that your game isn't intended for 4:3 aspect as you would expect for that era, but also displays a calibration image that can let people visually identify whether they've got all their equipment set up as intended - typically by using a series of squares and circles to visually show stuff is being drawn as intended.)

Great video. Thanks for taking the time to do lots of comparisons.

It is so fun programming in 13h mode. From time to time I still fire up Turbo C++ in DOSBox just to remember the good old times. There's a hidden 320x240 mode called mode X, but I never tried it.

It's even weirder in 640x350 EGA high-res mode. Non-square pixels were not an artistic choice in games, for many years that was the only kind of pixel available on a PC, and so some artists made their game art look correct in non-square pixels, while others simply let it be whatever it is, even if it looks wrong. So when correcting aspect ratio, not everything really looks best, it's on per-case basis like LGR said. You can, however, get perfect 4:3 integer scaling of 320x200 on a 1600x1200 LCD panel, though those are generally larger than any CRT that was meant to use 320x200 with. Likewise, 1920x1200 LCD panel is suitable for 4:3 integer scaling of 320x200 with black bars on the sides.

Regret getting rid of a perfectly good flat screen SyncMaster when I went to LCD's. No CRT left to retro game on.

"Personally, I'm a 16:10 guy" the algorithm has blessed us, instant sub. also, as a fellow 16x10 guy "nobody knows, the trouble..." - as monitor tech advances we get less and less love. I feel like my HP Z24i and Z24x G2 might be as good as it can get without breaking the bank. is 120 Hz and native 10 bit output from a VA or IPS panel too much to ask for at 16:10?

Your video doesn't go into *why* they used an odd aspect with non-square pixels, and some people may wonder, so I'll comment it for the curious: First of all, the two aspects mentioned here are 320x200 and (doubled) 640x400. If you add horizontal lines to those to create a 4:3 aspect, you'd get 320x240 and 640x480. (Probably familiar to most people, since we use those now.) So, what's on the screen is stored in video memory, physical memory chips on the video card. Memory is made up of bytes. 1 byte = 8 bits, and 1024 bytes = 1 kb. Memory chips tend to be packaged in a nice even number of kb that is a power of two: 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k, 16k, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc. And as to the actual drawing of the screen, the way pixels corresponds to bits and bytes depends upon the color depth: 256 colors is 8 bit (1 byte) per pixel, 16 colors is 4 bit (1/2 byte) per pixel, 4 colors is 2 bit (1/4 byte), etc. So if you do the math for how many bytes you need for a screenful of pixels: 320x200 @ 256 colors is (320 x 240) / 1 = 64,000 bytes. 640x400 @ 16 colors is (640 x 400) / 2 = 128,000 bytes. Well 64k = 65,536 bytes and 128k = 131,072 bytes, so we can use standard-size memory chips and have sufficient memory without a bunch left unused- there are just enough bytes. But now, do the same calculations using 4:3 aspect ratios: (320 x 240) / 1 = 76,800 and (640 x 480) / 2 = 153,600. Uh oh- those numbers are slightly *over* the size of standard chips. If we wanted 320x240 @ 256, we'd need 75k- that's a 64k chip plus a 16k chip, with a whopping 5k left unused, or a larger number of smaller chips to save on unused memory (like nineteen 4k chips). So to keep things simple, they picked resolutions that were an even number below what their memory chips demanded, and stretched the pixels to fill a standard screen. But if you get to video cards with larger amounts of memory, giving multiple pages for lower resolutions, this granularity issue becomes moot. CGA cards could be either 320x200 @ 4 or 640x200 monochrome because they had a measly 16k of memory on them; an SVGA card from the mid-90s may have had a megabyte or more. So... square pixels.

God your editing is getting so much better. Timing, scripting, pacing... You deserve to blow up. Easily one of the highest quality tech channels on the platform. Your hard work does not go unappreciated!!!!

Good video. There are a few instances of games that I've run into that do seem to be designed with square pixels in mind; whether that was accidental or intentional I'm not sure. Some examples would be Dreamweb and Overkill. Both of those are clearly distorted/stretched vertically when viewed in 4:3, but are correct in 16:10 - circles, squares, faces... they're clearly wrong in 4:3. Such cases are definitely few and far between though.

Thanks for making this. I have been trying to re-create the look of 320x200 art as it would be seen on early 90's VGA monitors and the brief moments when you showed CRT footage was surprisingly helpful. Perceived gamma and the faint scanlines that are still visible are an important part of how I remember these graphics, but its just so hard to find good examples of how this looked on the internet with period-appropriate hardware. Everyone seems to have a different idea about this stuff in hindsight and perhaps from using meme filters/shaders for decades now also. I love the deep dives into niche topics on this channel so much- keep up the great work!

Thanks, you helped me understand something I didn't "get" for a long time. I put your tips to use when recording and upscaling Stunt Island films in 320x200 mode.

This is a great reason to bust out a CRT if you have one. On one of my modern computer setups, I actually still use a Sony Trinitron through an adapter as my daily driver. After putting DOSBox into fullscreen without any scaling, it can be indistinguishable from an actual old PC hooked up to the same monitor.

Interestingly a lot of gaming magazines in the nineties published their screenshots without any aspect correction, so I've instantly knew that the game was in 320x200 resolution and I could also deduce if a game had 640x480. Even when the game or demoscene stuff ran in those exotic x-mode resoulutions. One interesting tidbit: our older monochrome PC monitors all displayed 320x200 as 4:3, but they've displayed 640x400 as a widescreen resolution. When we've upgraded to better, high-refresh rate CRTs, the widescreen effect ceased to be on those modes, too. And 1280x1024 was also displayed in 4:3, mostly. I remember an icon of a particular Windows 9x application had balls/circles squashed in the opposite direction than with 320x200. That's why I preferred 1280x960 on that new monitor.

I have to admit that this issue never crossed my mind. Makes perfect sense and I'm sure I will notice now if I play a classic game without the proper 4:3 aspect ratio. Great video as always, I have learned a lot about video in your channel, your videos are very well thought and produced, kudos.

3:28 - guys, he said it right! KZfaq sent me down a Rabbit Hole of your vids. Love the content. I can get over all the "diss-plays" lol

A huge thanks for this video. I've seen too many people watch 4:3 Cable TV on their widescreen TV sets without noticing, leading me to believe that most people simply don't notice until it's pointed out to them. Keep up the good work :)

On one hand, I am clearly one of those people who barely notices things like this; on the other, I thoroughly enjoyed this video and am glad you put the work in to produce it. It definitely makes me wonder if perhaps I should consider getting my trusty 1992 14" monitor out of storage for any future DOS gaming I want to do, haha.

Aspect ratio bothers me. I hated it when I watched my family watch a 480p image stretched on their HD tv. I'll deal with the artifacts

9:40 thanks for the "tip", I finally got DOSBox to show my old DOS games properly. This was driving me nuts!

Ohhh this is the delightfully nerdy stuff I've been looking for. Came from the 480 vid and now this. Subscribed!

Quite literally zero DOS programs were designed for widescreen of any kind. Almost all monitors (and video adapters) available were 4:3 or very close to it. Widescreen simply did not exist. I'm pretty sure 320x200 stems from ye olde CGA monitors, which had 200 vertical lines on screen at any time. CGA had a 320x200 mode as well as a 640x200 hi res mode. EGA also supported this, and was backwards compatible (in low resolution modes) with CGA monitors. VGA almost certainly held this over to help keep backwards compatibility with CGA and EGA, as well as make the memory layout simpler.

I get the feeling that those that argue for 320x200 being 16:10 never actually used the hardware in its original setting. What about 640x200? 32:10 CGA?? SUPER-WIDESCREEN IN 1981?? The same can be said about DVDs. The standard NTSC DVD resolution is 720x480, but is clearly not a 3:2 aspect ratio, as it was designed to fill a 4:3 display. (or even squeezed to fit 16:9 on anamorphic DVDs. Wait a sec, have any of these people ever watched an anamorphic DVD on their modern display?)

And this is why I use my Thinkpad T60 for retro gaming. It's the last mainstream laptop with 4:3 display, that also had an IPS panel option. In fact that laptop is my main daily driver too. And that screen is quite frankly spectacular, even in today's standards.

10:24 Watch as it stretches: The backdrop becomes a circle, but the O's in the text become improperly stretched. 🤔

I've been going through all your videos recently; great work man. Also I love the screenshot at 8:33

idk why this is getting recommended to me out of nowhere but this is the perfect kind of nerd shit to listen to lol. keep it up

The reason is very simple. 320x200 = 64000. 65536, a 16 bit integer, could store that. Anything larger would require more complicated paging routines to draw the image. 320x256 blows out the size of an unsigned 16 bit integer. I used to do a lot of this in x86 asm, and once paging was introduced, everything slowed down. (640x480x8bit). mov esdi, 0xa000; mov di, 400; lodsb 15; (Been a while) That should set row 2 column 80 to color 15. They did it for speed, and the speed worked. There were lots of great games back then.

I'm Wolfenstein 3D modder and I was (or still am?) struggling with the ratio. Information you provided is priceless. Thank you.

This was awesome! As a kid in the 90's I had no clue about the aspect ratio in my DOS games. It was fun to see what was going on. Nowadays I just use DOSBox to play them. The one I go back to the most is a weird game called Spacewrecked.

Great video! Really happy to have discovered your channel.

Again, thank you for educating a new generation on this. This is one of my pet peeves. DOS gameplay footage being presented as if it was widescreen. URGH.

QBASIC (MS-DOS) has a CIRCLE-command, that cares for the 4:3 ratio even in the 320x200 screen mode. (or did I try it on a 640x200 screen?) So I got a perfect circle on this non-squared pixel mode.

I'll have to check out your video on SNES which you referenced. Another curiosity from the time of CRT displays was Capcom's CPS1, 2 & 3 arcade hardware, they used a 386x240 resolution (an extra 64 pixels horizontally from the more common 320x240 at the time) which gave their arcade games a seldom seen & recognizable *super crisp* look. Whenever they made console conversions they had to butcher the games to make them fit, with Magic Sword for SNES as a good example.

Something else to point out is the reason so many platforms went with such an odd resolution: While 320×240 _would_ make more sense in a lot of ways-and Sega's consoles managed it somehow-it also goes just over the magic number of 65,536, a power of 2. Which means the pixel count multiplied by the color depth would also be just over a power of 2, as would the number of character tiles, or any other method of dividing the screen up into smaller powers of 2 for performance reasons. So you'd need to bump up to the next highest power of two to store any screen information, and then have to find some use for all the space left over so as not to waste it-and processing it would probably be a pain too. It was easier to find some kind of compromise resolution that stays within the 65,536 limit instead. Nintendo's solution kept both dimensions under the smaller magic number of 256, which probably improved performance when managing sprite positions (which is kind of a pain on the Commodore 64), as well as filling the entire screen. Actual computers probably went with reducing the line count because it allowed them to keep everything well inside the TV's overscan "safe zone" while also maximizing the number of columns, which is ideal for anything text-based. Hypothetically you could make a system that uses 288×216, giving you an overscan safe zone _and_ square pixels as well as the choice of either one extra offscreen column or row for smooth scrolling. And it divides evenly into thirds both ways, in case anyone needs that.

This is why I installed an extension that let's me change the KZfaq aspect ratio. Someone as big as Chuggaaconroy was using the wrong SNES ratio, and it bugged me.

yes, it matters to me, the wrong aspect ratio just looks... wrong!. it's supposed to be 4:3. I didn't think there could be a debate about this.

6:45 Super-cool to be able to make reference to actual referents when talking about something that is otherwise completely digital.

LCD ( least common denominator) has left the chat

god that tyrian remix at the end hit me hard. tyrian is one of my favorite dos games.

I never realized this! I think my brain compensates for the wrong aspect ratio or else I just never was bothered enough to really notice the strangeness. I love playing around with configs almost as much as playing the game though, so I'll definitely try out these options. Thanks!

I always try to match the creator's intended aspect ratio. I always cringe when I see someone using 4:3 content stretched over their modern widescreen display. It looks horrible. When I comment it the answer is usually along the line "I paid the whole screen, I use the whole screen". Okay, whatever, ruined image as long as it fills the screen I guess for most people.

This makes me realize the first C&C and RA run on 320x200 in DOS and 640x400 in Windows. Usually it would run 640x480 with added bars, ruining the aspect ratio. I just hope the upcoming remakes know the original games uses non-square pixels, but from what I've seen I'm afraid everything will look stretched.

Ahh! This explains why dos games that look better in 4:3 often have screenshots in their manuals and strategy guides that are 16:10! Good video.

I used to have a 16:10ish CRT The amount of time I spent in the OSD...

The pronunciation of display sounds like it has 2 S's. Some people want the screen filled, I just want the game to look correct - with the black borders.

My dad had an old Compaq Portable III with an orange CGA 640x400 screen which was in true 16;10 ratio. I'm forever gutted that he sold it when he got a new laptop in 1993. I fkn loved the design of that machine.

12:30 OMG, the video features Jazz Jackrabbit! Best PC jump'n run ever. Maybe not best looking one or funniest one but I just loved the smooth scrolling and its fast pace; it was like playing Sonic on a PC.

This has been quite interesting, I never thought about how pixels must be stretched.

One might ask (and something you didn't cover) is _why_ they chose that strange 320x200 resolution for mode 13h, which has non-square vertically-elongated pixels, rather than the much nicer 320x240 (which would have square pixels). The reason is that, at 256 colors per pixel, 320*240 = 76800 takes 75 kilobytes, while 320*200 = 64000 takes 62.5 kilobytes, which fits within a 64-kilobyte segment, and thus can be entirely addressed in 16-bit mode without the need to change segments. (The maximum 320xN resolution that would fit within 64 kilobytes would be 320x204, which takes 65280 bytes, ie. just a tad bit less than 64 kilobytes, ie. 65536 bytes. I don't know, however, why they decided to go with 200 lines instead of 204. I wonder if it's because 320/200 is such a nice round number, ie. exactly 1.6, while 320/204 has infinite recurring decimals. Maybe they thought that a resolution aspect ratio of 1.6 is better than one of 1.568627450980292...)

This is something I learned playing Rayman all those years ago. The game runs at 320*200 by default, but there's a graphic option to set the resolution to 320*240. On my 4:3 monitor this just added black bars to the top and bottom and squashed the image. A few years later, I had some game-making software called The Games Factory that supported two resolutions: whatever your windows resolution was, or 320*200 (which I loved because it made the games look like "console games"). Creating games in the windows interface at 1024*768 then switching to 320*200 to play them made it very apparent that the pixels weren't square in the latter. My lovely square Mario blocks were suddenly rectangular. Even as a young teen I started making my "square" objects squat to compensate for the stretched resolution.

I'll never forget the day they made CRT's with an "auto" option which would attempt to perfectly center your image by finding, using and cropping the black edges around the displaying of your signal.

Got a chuckle when you used the Wing Commander briefing with subtitle narration lol..

This is a big point in the RetroPie community where we're playing old 4:3 TV consoles on 16:9 widescreen TVs. Some people prefer their 8-bit and 16-bit console games in the correct ratio with black bars, and some crazy heathens prefer to stretch the games over their whole television.

My favorite DOS games: King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island. I play these games on my old computer with Windows 98 and DOS) Thank you for the video)

I should be able to add a second thumbs up if I come back to this video years later and still love it

Didn't expect to see the image my pfp is from in my KZfaq recommendations today. Great video!

I love all these meticulous analysis of pixels, aspect ratios, and other artifacts of our technological past that are not talked about as much nowadays.

I really enjoy this technical knowledge. Wonderful content!

I can't find the logic behind the thinking that videogame programmers thought about a video aspect ratio that was not yet considered to be used at the consumer level. Rockstar did it with GTA 3 but it was for the PS2, many years later after Doom's release. This feels like arguing whether a Black and White TV Show was shot considering color TVs... when color TVs were during development and much before even considering its public release.

1:36 Hocus! Yey! I love that game! Its so cool and its music and vibes are amazing!

Thank you! You helped me calm my mind.

Gotta say, using the physical models built for Doom in your argument was brilliant!

Answering the real questions. Great video, I'm of the same opinion - it's most likely 4:3! Was happy to find aspect=true i DOSbox.

Yeah the pixel scaling trade off is one of many reasons why I use a CRT as my main display now. Using a Gateway VX700 with a Trinitron tube. Well not officially a Trinitron since they didn't license the name, but that's what it basically is and stuff looks great on it. Granted I don't really use my main PC for MS-DOS games though. I have Compaq Presario 4112 with 120Mhz Pentium processor. It's complete with original monitor, keyboard, mouse, and the main PC itself. Had original hard drive (which still works!) in it too and even the warranty sticker hadn't been disturbed on it. Found the thing on a local Facebook sales group for only $25. Glad I got it because it turned out to be a great machine for old games like this. I do my MS-DOS gaming on that now. DosBox and that other MS-DOS emulator can't compete with the real thing. :D I use my main PC's CRT as the monitor for my Nintendo Switch too. Have a HDMI adapter and a 2 port VGA switch I use in tandom with. Stuff looks great on it. Only OLED stuff can compete with the kind of contrast I can get on it. But gaming on OLED still sounds dangerous to do since they still can have burn in problems. :P I suppose CRTs have burn in issues too and that's why screensavers were a thing. But you'd have to put an image on the screen for hundreds or more hours before it becomes a problem. :P I've heard it only takes less then an hour on a OLED for a static image or element on a TV to have burn in.

One interesting problem is that 240p on a CRT TV for consoles with 240/224 scanlines doesn't match PC/DOS's 200 active scanlines, so the vertical is too small. So when you shrink the horizontal so you get 4:3, but all four sizes have black areas. Old CRT computer monitors were always adjusted so that 320x200 resolution was full screen at 4:3, the physical AR of the monitor. So old CRT computer monitors worked/displayed slightly differently than old CRT TVs, which didn't have decent adjustment mechanisms.

Loving your channel, very informative!

Good arguments for both sides, but I'm pretty much indifferent to aspect ratio differences in these old games. But now I'm bothered about the pronunciation of "display". XD

I noticed this when I switched to a CRT monitor on my DOS PC from a modern LCD. I play DOS games on real hardware with that CRT and will never go back to emulation for gaming at home. I'm all for emulation for a portable setup however.

One thing that wasn't mentioned, is that when forcing 4:3 like this, if the game was designed for non-square pixels you will get a shimmering effect which is why some may prefer a "pixel-perfect" aspect ratio. For example, SNES renders internally at 8:7 but it's designed to be stretched to 4:3 on a CRT. The issue with fixed pixel displays is that this will cause some of the pixels to shrink and expand horizontally as the image moves on-screen. Hence why some now prefer the 8:7 ratio to keep all the pixels at an equal ratio to the screen being used.

I have major OCD when it comes to aspect ratios. If each DOS game had a single intended aspect ratio for all of its art (either 4:3 NTSC vs 4:3 PAL, for instance), I'd be content with picking the display mode that results in perfect squares and circles and calling it a day. No, the problem is when games have different aspect ratios for different assets. Doom is a perfect example: Sprites used for projectiles, powerups, and button and door textures look vertically stretched at 4:3 NTSC, as does level geometry. But character sprites and HUD elements look horizontally stretched at 4:3 PAL/16:10. So, I'm left with a Sophie's choice scenario where I have to choose the "most correct' aspect ratio. This issue extends to consoles as well. SNES is notoriously all over the place, with some developers correctly making art for NTSC standard, others making sprites at 8:7 and not taking into account the horizontal stretch on consumer CRTs, and still others who mix and match aspect ratios within the same game, like Chrono Trigger. Master System games struggles with this mismatching as well (the Sonic 8-bit titles are particularly egregious here). I think the absolute worst I've seen is the classic Tomb Raider games on PS1. On an NTSC set, all the 2D sprites and FMVs appear aspect-correct; however all the 3D geometry, including Lara's model herself, is vertically stretched to a _ridiculous_ degree. If I play the game at 4:3, in-game Lara becomes Jack Skellington. If I play it at 16:10, FMV-Lara becomes Oogie Boogie. I can't win. It's maddening.

Me before fully reading the info beneath the video: Holy crap, is that some sort of Lemmings music remix!? Me after fully reading the info beneath the video: Yes! I am a genius!

I remember mode-X, the 320x240 VGA mode, even though it was 60Hz instead of 70, and the flicker was more a problem. I'm also nearly sure it was possible to go 320x240 square pixel aspect, while keeping the linear mode 13h access (making the extra lines unaccessable, or perhaps by interrupt). As for Doom being designed for widescreen, perhaps it's linked to that pic of Carmack coding on his 16:9 (or 16:10?) CRT, but that was for Quake.

Is that the sound track from one must fall…? Yes. yes it is. Good call!

Some games that supported VESA extensions let you choose 320x240, a true 4:3 aspect ratio, among many other non standard resolutions. For exotic resolutions you cant go wrong with 640x240 VGA or 640x200 in EGA mode.

It’d be neat if more games displayed an “Indian Head Test Pattern” that made the developers intentions clear for monitor settings

Honestly I hate the bad scaling so much that I would rather have the wrong aspect ratio. I also think that for most games the 16:10 looks good enough, sometimes even better than the 4:3 for a few things, but I predominantly play with my DOS games scaled to 640x480 with an integer scale, leaving 80 lines of black pixels, and display it on my CRT monitor, then I use the geometry controls to correct the aspect ratio. And since it’s 640x480 I can run at any refresh rate I want so I get perfect frame pacing and no dropped frame issues or judder.

like all Tyrian fans I always appreciate it getting some screen and speaker time no matter if it's for half an hour or half a minute.

16:10 Monitor master-race! Perfect 6x scale

Weirdly enough, the PS1 Tomb Raider games look more "correct" when stretched to 16:9. Thoughts?

Nice explanation. I suspect this explains why when emulating vertical arcade games they look skinnier than the expected 3:4 - they are probably incorrectly being shown as 10:16 and need a correction to their aspect ratio.

When Doom's graphics are displayed inside a square-pixel, 4:3 screen mode (640x480 or 800x600, for example), they will appear "squashed" relative to how they appear in the game. Because screenshots only capture the logical frame buffer contents and are not affected by the VGA rasterization process, they will similarly appear flattened (in the 8:5 logical ratio) when viewed inside a square-pixel screen mode.

Nobody would mention that this guy just "have fun" testing and creating a rpg with the good old Borland C++.

It's funny that right after "Tyrian" theme begins at 11:47 the clip of "Legend of Kyrlandia" subtitle goes "Please help Brandon..." - Alexander Brandon being the composer of music in "Tyrian" :)