DOS Games Discussion

Referring to this page where your demo shows perfect square blocks.

https://dosgames.com/game/simcity

Try as I might I haven't been able to figure out how you get the city blocks to show as squares rather than tall rectangles.

I use the latest DOSBox for Windows 10 plus the latest DBGL front end.

I tinkered with the display settings in DOSBox quite a bit...still tall rectangles for city blocks.

The aspect ratio is stuck at 4:3 no matter what I tried so far, so that is the key to solving this.

Steve

Tinkering around quite a bit with this in the DOSBox Game Launcher settings I finally arrived at square city blocks and very improved audio using Tandy:

Config for SimCity version 1.07 that produces square city blocks and very noticeably improved sound using Tandy (setup in DBGL profile). Small variations of this may also do the same but this is a good start:

First, use INSTALL.EXE in SimCity to select Tandy Digital for sound and make sure to overwrite the SETTINGS.CFG file with the one created in the SimCity subdirectory after you ESC from INSTALL.EXE

Display tab:
Output: opengl
Scaler normal2x and forced is checked
Fullscreen/Window Resolution: 1280 x 1024
Aspect Correction unchecked

Machine tab:
CPU section:
Machine: EGA (VGAonly didn't produce square lots and Tandy wouldn't even display)
(rest are defaults)
Memory section:
Size: 16
EMS: true
UMB: max

Audio tab:
PC Speaker section:
Enable checked
Sample Rate 44100
SoundBlaster section:
Type is none
Tandy section:
Enable is on
Sample Rate is 44100
General section is default
Gravis Ultrasound is not checked
Disney Sound Source is not checked

I modified the above because of lot of crashing while adding 320 airports and 30 nuclear power plants to turn off EMS and UMB, reduced memory to 1MB and changed CPU to 386. Pretty stable now. It takes a lot of earthquakes in a row to crash it now.

I don't like DOSBox frontends because, while they provide a user-friendly GUI, they actually obfuscate the actual DOSBox configuration.

The parameter you looked for is aspect=false, found under the [render] section in the DOSBox configuration file.

You can actually change that at runtime by typing in the DOSBox command prompt.