But many recent fans probably are used to seeing him as a short and chubby guy, not the dashing pirate he was back in the days. Yeah, the anime eyes and the long goatee don't really fit him. This may sound like a minor thing, a silly obsession of a nostalgic fan that no one will notice, but just look at the damage it causes on our old friend Guybrush: If you try to 'force' a re-scaling simply by making the 320x200 image 20% taller and hoping for the best, the computer will shrug at its human master, long for the coming of SKYNET and simply add an extra duplicated pixel row every 5 rows, distorting everything in the process. It should be a simple matter to solve, but digital displays like the ones we all use today cannot stretch a pixel – it will always be perfectly square, with a 1:1 aspect ratio. What today we see as a sharp, square pixel was actually a blurry rectangle back then, about 20% taller than wider (the Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST and other home computers all had different resolutions, but the principle is quite similar).

The 320x200 image was stretched to fit the entire 4:3 screen, to something close to 320x240. I won't pretend I know all the technical details – there are way better sources for that – simply put, the CRT monitors back then stretched images to fit the screen. The thing is, most MS-DOS games were actually rendered in 320x200, which is a 16:10 aspect ratio and thus widescreen – but they weren't displayed that way. Only one of these is correct I would bet on the one where the Round Shield is actually round. So why the hell we keep seeing so many widescreen screenshot of old games out there? Most people in the industry, except the really young ones, still remember those. Before that, we all used those huge, blocky CRT monitors. Now, we all know that widescreen monitors only began to appear recently about 15 years ago. As I went through countless blog posts, forum thread, articles, documentaries and even books, one thing really stood out (and bothered me to no end): widescreen old games.

Dosbox resolution 1920x1080