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problems with the GOG catacombs pack

Author Replies
kaitlin4599 Tuesday 9 June 2015 at 2:45
kaitlin4599Anonymous

ok so i installed the GOG catacombs pack and it plays fine except it plays in a small screen how do i fix this?heres the problem detail aimages That Was not reliable to post em Directly into this Message

http://imageshack.com/a/img908/8706/XJSRyq.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img537/5349/F6FtbY.jpg

heres a link to the info found on this site just incase https://www.playonlinux.com/en/app-1767-GOGcom__Catacombs_Pack.html

 

Edited by kaitlin4599

petch Tuesday 9 June 2015 at 8:05
petch

That's a complicated issue.

Catacomb is an MS-DOS game, running with the help of DOSBox emulator. Since the original resolution of such games is often poor by today standards, it supports two ways to increase display size:

- "scalers" that transform the original pixels into 2x2 or 3x3 pixel matrices using various algorithms, from very simple ones to quite complex ones, to produce pleasing displays, already 2 or 3 times larger than the original

- hardware scaling, that take the image generated above to scale it to the final resolution, usually the screen resolution.

Among the scalers, I've found the hq2x one to often give the results I liked the most, even if it can depend on the game, and I used in most of my DOSBox based install scripts. It uses neighbour pixels to round the edges, using lookups in manually optimized patterns. Anyway.

A problem I've since discovered, is that not all scalers are compatible with the next hardware scaling step, and the hq*x scalers are among the incompatible ones. What that means is that when you use them, the display will be locked to the 2x or 3x resolution provided by the scaler alone.

What you can try, for the lack of a GUI to tweak DOSBox settings at the moment, is to open ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/Catacombs_gog/playonlinux_dos.cfg file with your favorite text editor, and modify the

render_scaler=hq2x

line to, say,

render_scaler=normal2x

which supports hardware scaling. If it works you can try the other scalers, but from what I remember only the simplest ones support hardware scaling, which is a shame... :(

kaitlin4599 Tuesday 9 June 2015 at 8:16
kaitlin4599Anonymous

i tried the GOG catacombs pack on my moms windows 7 laptop and it played in full screen unlike on my linux laptop any idea why the windows 7 laptop played fine but not my linux one?

kaitlin4599 Tuesday 9 June 2015 at 8:35
kaitlin4599Anonymous

ok heres an update i editited the CFG files for catacombs and set the scaler to normal4x so far it plays fine and the screen size is much much beter but it doesnt seem to like my widescreen display any ideas

petch Tuesday 9 June 2015 at 10:27
petch

i tried the GOG catacombs pack on my moms windows 7 laptop and it played in full screen unlike on my linux laptop any idea why the windows 7 laptop played fine but not my linux one?

GOG installer uses normal2x scaler by default. You can see the list of existing scalers by clicking on "Scalers" in my previous post, I linked a relevant page

 

it doesnt seem to like my widescreen display any ideas
If by that you mean it doesn't use full screen... Don't expect widescreen support from a 1991 game

 

kaitlin4599 Wednesday 10 June 2015 at 2:50
kaitlin4599Anonymous

thanks the help guess im stuck with the game as it is oh well at least it runs thanks tho also is it possible to change the scren resolution for this game or at least tell it what resolution to default to or to use?

Edited by kaitlin4599