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Saturday, August 13, 2016

DOSBox Full Screen with proper Scaling and Aspect Ratio

It's quite confusing to get DOSBox to display games properly on modern hardware, partially because CRT monitors often displayed in non-square pixel modes, and partially because modern LCD displays don't scale well or support all the resolutions that CRTs did.

This post discusses the settings required in dosbox.conf to get DOS games displaying well.

fullresolution

Set this to your screen's native resolution such as fullresolution=1920x1200

output

The default surface cannot scale, so set this to output=overlay which can scale. If you have a decent graphics card you could also try output=openglnb

aspect

Set aspect=true to ensure the game is not stretched

scaler

Simple scaler=none will work, but you can experiment with the other scalers to see which performs well and which you like the look of.

The full config options are described at http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/dosbox.conf

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Another Steam Update breaks Ubuntu Xenial 16.04


As of the recent Steam update, Steam will not launch and the following is displayed:

$ steam
Setting up Steam content in /home/username/.local/share/Steam
Running Steam on ubuntu 16.04 64-bit
STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(0)
libGL error: unable to load driver: r600_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: r600
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

You can fix it with:

mv .local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 .local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.old
mv .local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.19 .local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.19.old
mv .local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 .local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.old
mv .local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.19 .local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6.0.19.old

This is yet another instance of the C++ libraries in the Steam Runtime not being compatible with the free software radeon driver for AMD (ATI) graphics cards:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3273

I had a previous fix for this when they just packaged the i386 C++ library, but now they're packaging both the i386 and AMD64 C++ library, so my fix needed updating.

If Valve package one more C++ library that'll be 3 separate libraries: Half-Life 3 confirmed.