3 ms·

Probably doesn't matter too much for games, right?

• enriquto 4y ago
  Not at all. But I remember dearly my first 3D program (a rotating wireframe dodecahedron) was all stretched out. The screen coordinates had to be scaled by a factor like 6/5 or 5/4 before display.
• bzzzt 4y ago
  Depends on the game, it's difficult to draw a perfect circle with non-square pixels. It was possible to achieve 320x240 though, problem was you needed more than 64Kb of memory for that and couldn't get the graphics buffer in a linear memory layout.
• vetinari 4y ago
  not at all, almost all games ran in "mode x", which was 320x240, so it had square pixels. It could also double-buffer, unlike the standard mode 0x13.
  • TonyTrapp 4y ago
    "almost all" is greatly exaggerating. Mode X was much less used than EGA or VGA 320x200 modes. As a consequence, many games look completely wrong with a standard DOSBox configuration these days (characters are fat!), because it still doesn't use aspect ratio correction by default.
    • vetinari 4y ago
      It's not exaggerating; I cannot remember a single VGA title made after '91 that uses plain mode 0x13. Primary reason being not being able to double buffer. By that time, EGA titles were also practically dead, the notable exception being Civlization. Sure, there were games pre-91, but in the '90, the PC market exploded, together with available games. The amount what was available in '90s dwarfs the older titles, so "almost all" is greatly fitting.