Correct aspect ratio in the menus & help/story screens

[MrFlibble]

ECWolf does a great job running the game with the correct aspect ratio, however I noticed that the menu screens still use unstretched graphics, and the help/story screens are not stretched to the 4:3 ratio at all. Have I missed an option to tweak that, or will these issues be addressed in future releases?

[Blzut3]

Everything that needs to be said about this is said in this report.

[MrFlibble]

Thanks for the explanation!

What about using something along the lines of the DOSBox aspect correction method? The output is inevitably a bit blurry but overall it works pretty well.

[Rachael]

DOSBox uses hardware scaling to accomplish this, which is why it is a bit blurry.

Probably what we have now is the best "for now" - until more work is done with ECWolf's rendering code.

[MrFlibble]

On a second thought, the simple nearest neighbour method yields quite acceptable results too:

(pictured above is the game running in DOSBox SVN Daum with output=directdraw and aspect=true, which does nearest neighbour scaling)

It certainly isn't perfect, but this method of scaling does not seem to degrade readability of the font used by Wolfenstein 3-D. After all, back in the 90s games like Duke Nukem 3D used the nearest neighbour scaling to resize the title screen and other screens, menu items, font, weapons and HUD in high-resolution modes while keeping the correct aspect ratio. Here's a screenshot of Duke Nukem 3D running at the 640x480 resolution, with the doubled rows of pixels on the HUD and the menu font barely noticeable.

I think it would be very nice if this kind of scaling of the menu and other screens that are currently not aspect-corrected were added as a configurable option at least.