How can I make ZDoom's screen look more pixelated?

Even at 320x200, I still want ZDoom's screen to be more pixelated. Is that possible?

(Imgur seems to make it like not pixelated.)

As a test, is Doom Retro at low detail pixelated enough?

ZDoom can be started with the -2 or -4 parameters to enable pixel doubling/quadrupling. However, the resolution is clamped at 320x200, due to anything smaller would actually be below Doom's designed resolution, and would induce some rather terrible pixel aliasing.

@VGA

ZDoom at 320x200 seems to be more pixelated than Doom Retro at low detail. (I also like playing 320x200 with ZDoom mods.)

@Edward

I think pixel doubling and quadrupling was the opposite of what I was looking for. Also considering I'm playing at 320x200, I'm sure I'd be fine playing with a lot of pixel aliasing.

You'll find that 320x200 doesn't have pixel aliasing, actually.

It doesn't matter anyway, because ZDoom doesn't support anything lower. As I said, it's Doom's native resolution, and ZDoom isn't prepped to scale below that.

Why do you even want this? It's one thing to want Chocolate Doom's specific resolution, but you're asking for something well below that. Why even bother?

Why? Perhaps he wants to pretend he's playing the Jag port on his peecee.

Prboom-plus allows arbitrary window resolutions. You can feed it, say, 160x100 or 160x120 with the "-geom" CMD-line switch (i.e. "-geom 160x100w). For fullscreen, set Screen Multiply Factor (Options -> General -> 5th page) to 4 and it will upscale it to 640x400 or 640x480 respectively.

Do not expect to be able to read any text, of course.

Vanilla supports a low detail mode, that effectively appears to be 160x200 (half the horizontal resolution).



I'm not surprised that ZDoom wouldn't want to maintain this. 320x200 is probably the lowest that can be reasonably expected from a Doom port.

You'll also notice that the detail mode only affects the world rendering, not the graphics itself (i.e the hud). That got lost with the assembler optimizations, and as is wouldn't benefit performance anymore. Nobody is in a hurry to put it back in.
Plus it'd also become rather inconsistent in regards as to what's affected by it, based on what state the renderer is in (the HUD weapon will swap between the hardware surface and software rendering at a moments notice, for example).

Its like I up-scaled a Game Boy Color screen.. (Playing at 96x96!)



Thanks PRbama.

(Edit: Woops, apparently PRBoom-Plus saves screenshots.)

Never_Again said:

For fullscreen, set Screen Multiply Factor (Options -> General -> 5th page) to 4 and it will upscale it to 640x400 or 640x480 respectively.

I can't get fullscreen like that. It's still a window, and for example the Windows "Пуск" thingy doesn't disappear, and I can't get it to match the borders of the monitor exactly.
It would be awesome if I could play prboom-plus with DOS-like resolution. Even ZDaemon can do it.

Your display driver doesn't expose 640x400 and 640x480 to the system. If it's an nVidia chip, you can add custom resolutions to Windoze with NVIDIA Control Panel. If it's not you can probably still do it by manually via the registry or with a hacked INF file:

Compressed Modes User's Guide

You can get it to run even in 320x200 this way, although whether that will be fullscreen or a postage stamp in the center of the screen depends on the refresh rate and the chip itself. Even if it works the picture may be too fuzzy to be usable.

Edward850 said:

You'll also notice that the detail mode only affects the world rendering, not the graphics itself (i.e the hud).

At least in vanilla Doom, the HUD and elements such as the marble window graphics are drawn a pretty optimized -if complicated- way to avoid overdraw of single numbers/digits, so even if it stays at high resolution, it doesn't actually affect screen bandwidth much.

LittleInferno said:

Its like I up-scaled a Game Boy Color screen.. (Playing at 96x96!)

Image

Thanks PRbama.

(Edit: Woops, apparently PRBoom-Plus saves screenshots.)

Even the GBA Doom isn't that low. XD





Apparently, it's 240x160 so it's actually a bit higher than the pixel doubling one.

Doomsday 1.15 has a pixel density option under the renderer menu.

This is 640x480 imitating 40x30:



It could make for a good guess the location game :p

Vermil said:

Doomsday 1.15 has a pixel density option under the renderer menu.

http://i.imgur.com/N0qic6m.png

Cool. Is rendering actually faster thanks to this lower resolution, or does the renderer internally process the game scene like in 640x480 and only display fewer pixels?

scifista42 said:

Cool. Is rendering actually faster thanks to this lower resolution, or does the renderer internally process the game scene like in 640x480 and only display fewer pixels?

The later.

Just to make my words clear, by "game scene" I was referring to positions of segs, planes and things, the way how they are processed (whether to render them at all or not) and then rendered per-pixel (before the pixel merger takes effect). In that case, it's a shame that the process couldn't be sped up by rendering with lower resolution in mind, and then just displaying the scene over a larger screen.

I asked and have been corrected; Dday does render fewer pixels and thus one can get a performance improvement.

However said performance improvement will probably be almost non-existent if you have a decent GPU as the display resolution isn't a bottleneck for them.