Video scalers?

[Gargantou]

Hi.

Recently I've been doing quite a bit of old-gaming on my PC, most of the games run in 640x480.

As such, they lose quite a lot of their sharpness when they are upscaled on my 1920x1080 monitor.

What I was wondering is, does anyone know if there is a way to get games running under Windows to be upscaled to a specific resolution without an anti-aliasing filter being applied?

Is my only option to get an external video scaler that can upscale 640x480 to 1280x960 and have my monitor run that in 1:1 pixel mapping in order to get a sharp image?

To give you an idea of roughly what I mean, here's a 640x480 game where I've resized the screenshot to 1280x960 with and without an anti-aliasing filter being applied.

With AA filter

Without AA filter

 

[Vegeta897]

I've sought after a program that did this since forever.

The term you're looking for is filtering, not AA.

I think it's possible in DOS Box. I tweaked my Duke 3D dosbox setting to scale 2x, and it does so without any filtering.

 

[Gargantou]

I've sought after a program that did this since forever.

The term you're looking for is filtering, not AA.

I think it's possible in DOS Box. I tweaked my Duke 3D dosbox setting to scale 2x, and it does so without any filtering.

Yes I can get it to work in DOSBox easily, don't even have to set it to scale anything, I just set DOSBox to run in the resolution of 1280x960.

The problem is with all the titles I play that are Windows only, like Blade Runner, MechCommander Gold and more.

My worry is that my only option is to buy an external video scaler, and those aren't too cheap.

What also makes me kind of sad is that this is actually because of stupid consumers, early LCDs didn't have a blur filter applied to them when they ran a non-native resolution.

This lead to customers whining about why there were artifacting (when res wasn't scaled to an exact multiple) and this lead to the manufacturers making the blur a standard on the monitors.

 

[Vegeta897]

You could always get an oldschool CRT for cheap and just use that!

 

[Dinnesch]

On ATI/AMD cards you can enable GPU scaling with some options, you might want to check it out if you have an AMD card. It's a bit buggy though, before you can enable it & change settings you need to change your desktop resolution to below-native.(eg 1650*1050 on a 1080p monitor), after changing the settings you can just change your resolution back.
Open CCC, go to scaling options>enable GPU scaling and set it as you want. At least on my monitor(Iiyame e2407hds) it looks significantly better than the built-in scaling.

Alternatively you can use a virtual PC(eg windows 98/XP) to play old games, Virtualbox is very easy to set up but you need an iso of the OS you want.

 

[Gargantou]

On ATI/AMD cards you can enable GPU scaling with some options, you might want to check it out if you have an AMD card. It's a bit buggy though, before you can enable it & change settings you need to change your desktop resolution to below-native.(eg 1650*1050 on a 1080p monitor), after changing the settings you can just change your resolution back.
Open CCC, go to scaling options>enable GPU scaling and set it as you want. At least on my monitor(Iiyame e2407hds) it looks significantly better than the built-in scaling.

Alternatively you can use a virtual PC(eg windows 98/XP) to play old games, Virtualbox is very easy to set up but you need an iso of the OS you want.

Yes I am already using that, but the problem is that the scaling options on the GPUs doesn't let you tell it to scale a specific resolution to another specific resolution, and the scaling system still applies a blur filter.

nVidia has admitted that it would be possible for them to remove this 'blur' filter but apparently they have no interest in doing so.

I am aware of Virtual PCs, I have Win98SE running under Microsoft's Virtual PC after having had some issues with it under Virtualbox. That however still wouldn't let me scale a low res image to a higher res one without a form of blur being applied (I tried it in Virtualbox.)

I guess I could give VMware Workstation 8 a go.

The problem with virtualization is often games that want a dedicated GPU, like MechWarrior 3.

Thanks for all the suggestions/tips so far guys.

If anyone else has any other ideas, please do share!