I ALMOST have Daggerfall running on my Mac, BUT it's tiny!

[jimgagne]

I have both a Windows PC and a Mac and have been enjoying Daggerfall on my PC (as many people know Daggerfall is now free). Googling the BEST version of Daggerfall yielded DaggerfallSetup at wiwiki.wiwiland, a French language site Google translates quite effectively. It took a while to get it running effectively on the PC but now it's fine. Since this version uses the freeware DOSBox to set up a DOS virtual machine on a PC, I wondered if there's a DOSBox for the Mac. YES!

So I installed and configured DOSBox and then copied my files from PC to Mac. Took a while to get it going (I needed the information at the end of the unofficial FAQ on this site to fix the path and set up the .bat file). I configured DOSBox to use a 1280x960 resolution in a window and set the scaler to super2xsai (see DOSBox documentation for what this means), producing an extremely nice output on the PC. And indeed DOSBox on the Mac starts up with a nice-sized window that looks great -- until I started running Daggerfall.

The Daggerfall window immediately shrank to near postage-stamp size, and I can't find the configuration file to fix that. Anyone know what I'm overlooking?

[MrFlibble]

The Daggerfall window immediately shrank to near postage-stamp size, and I can't find the configuration file to fix that.

From the DOSBox Wiki:

If you are using Mac OS X, a preferences file will be created for you on the first time you run DOSBox (as of version 0.73). This file contains the same system settings and initialization values as the dosbox.conf file on other systems.

It can be found (and modified) at ~/Library/Preferences/DOSBox 0.73 Preferences, where ~/ is your user profile folder (usually /Macintosh HD/Users/username/). The exact folder name in the Finder may vary, depending on the language you use for OS X.

You need to get that file and check the video output and scaler setting. I guess some defaults on Mac make DOSBox render the screen in the original resolution. Using a proper scaler should fix that. To get the image stretched over your screen, change the output method from surface to overlay, or other renderers available under Mac. Also don't forget to turn on aspect correction.

[Edit] Sorry, I remembered the obvious thing. It's the output method that causes the tiny screen (output=surface). Change it to output=overlay or anything else that works for you.

[jimgagne]

MrFlibble, you're absolutely right. On a Mac the dosbox.conf file is called DOSBox 0.74 Preferences, located in ~/Library/Preferences. I fixed that so the main DOSBox window is the correct size. It's exactly the same as the dosbox.conf files on other platforms. That's not the problem.

The problem is that when I start Daggerfall, the window immediately shrinks. It appears Daggerfall is pulling another dosbox.conf file from somewhere else. But I can't find the other file. Often Windows files have an attached set of command line options, but fall.exe is a DOS file. The options are in the .bat file, listed below and copied from the unofficial Daggerfall FAQ on this site. It pulls in z.cfg, which refers to betaplyr.dat (a binary file I couldn't make sense of) and mapsave.sav. The only ".conf" files on my Mac are several relating to Steam and Chrome, and a few relating to https, and DosBoxFixsave.conf. That file runs Fixsave and quits. I fixed its parameters to be like dosbox.conf and sure enough, Fixsave runs in a larger window. Regarding "@dagger.vmc", there are no ".vmc" files on my Mac.

Here's the .bat file, copied from the FAQ:

Code: Select all

  @echo off
  set [email protected]
  fall.exe z.cfg

So I'm still drawing a blank. Why is fall.exe shrinking when it starts up?

[MrFlibble]

I'm not really familiar with the Mac platform. I would suppose that you can edit the programme shortcuts to point DOSBox to the correct conf file like on Windows or Linux?

BTW, did I understand you correctly that by "shrinking" you mean the original 320x200 resolution in fullscreen mode, as if you were using the surface output method?

Anyway, I think you should ask your question at VOGONS, which hosts the official DOSBox tech support forums.