Adventure Gamers - Forums

random tech question :

I know most people say they ‘love’ the jagged look of pixels in 320x200 games because they think it brings them back to the past, but in the past? the interlaced monitors we had didn’t make the graphics look like that, and I can’t stand it lol.

Anyway, as post said, I’m wondering if it is possible to add filters to ‘smooth’ the pixels in older AGS made games.  I know this ‘is’ possible in some AGS games that allow you to add the typically used dosbox type filters like hq3x or etc to smooth out the edges, which I love… but certain games just don’t have that option.  If there was a way to run AGS games in something like dosbox, that would work… but that obviously wouldn’t make sense since they are by default designed to run in 32bit/64bit os’s etc

A workaround way I figured out how to simulate this effect is to run the game in a tiny window and then use windows magnifier to zoom in which smooths the pixels. I would be fine with this, but locking the screen in place doesn’t work because you have to alt tab to the magnifier settings to disable ‘mouse scroll’ to get this effect, and then you lose the centered position you had set up.  I do this with 2d action platformers, which works because you don’t need to use a mouse and can just set it where you want it then play with a gamepad, but in PnC games, you will be constantly moving the magnifier’s position trying to click on the edge of the screen.. anyway, I’ve been having a blast playing through some older games, namely recently Heroine’s Quest, but that game specifically does not work using the filters in it’s AGS settings. It looks the same anything you pick in the settings. Reading the pixelated text is killing me lol. I read you might be able to use third party Nvdia settings to try and force filters, but that hasn’t worked for me either.

Weird question i know, but I figured if anyone has ever tried to do this or figured it out this would be the place to try and ask lol… cheers

syn - 17 October 2023 11:24 PM

If there was a way to run AGS games in something like dosbox, that would work… but that obviously wouldn’t make sense since they are by default designed to run in 32bit/64bit os’s etc

You can run most AGS games in ScummVM.
Graphical settings in ScummVM should work with AGS games too, at least in theory.

They have had some bugs with AGS graphics, such as some games using wrong character sets etc., but the last I heard is that they have fixed (most of) these problems, so trying that out would be the best way probably.