Use an official ver of DOSBox.
Use a non-ripped copy of the game.
It doesn't appear that you know what widescreen means.
You have aspect correction disabled so the image is stretched. I assume you're using an LCD.

I am using 640x400 ingame and have aspect correction Off, took a screenshot with CTRL-F5

Regardless of whether it's proper widescreen or stretched, why is it getting screwed up after playing a video? My installation is based on the GOG release, I copied it on a different folder and have applied some mouse-related fixes etc.

I have tried both Openglnb and overlay

I've noticed the problem with Blood and its movies at 640x400 resolution. I assume it's a bug in the game because the same thing happens with UniVBE, and that resolution can only be selected "manually" by editing the BLOOD.CFG file, not through the setup program. 640x400 res has an advantage of clean 2x HUD (status bar) scaling, but the workaround for the problem is to skip the movies.

If the intro movies don't play and you really want those then make sure that the Smacker video files (LOGO.SMK and GTI.SMK in the version I have) are in the folder where the game is installed; and also be sure to make that folder the default before starting the game.

My workaround is to save the game if a movie screws the resolution, exit, rerun the game and load it. Takes no more than 20 seconds. But it's weird that this happens, in a real PC I don't think this resolution change would be a problem, it's in Dosbox that the output suddenly fills the upper middle of the screen. So I was hoping for some kind of a fix, fingers crossed.

Sadly I cannot make 960x600 work, the game just reverts to a lower one. It's sad because it would look crispy and fill the screen while running at a reasonable framerate on my PC (I use the rate command to check)

You seem to have some other problem, though perhaps related. The problem I refer to is where the game, in an apparent mistake, sets VESA mode 101h (640x480) rather than mode 100h (640x400) after the intro movies, yet still generates 640x400 frames, and the bottom 80 lines of the display are glitched. Setting an incorrect video mode, even with UniVBE, is not likely to be the fault of DOSBox.

The screenshot I posted was without a video having been played. Here are two screenshots, the upper is with machine=svga_s3 after the problematic resolution switch and another with machine=vesa_nolfb again after the problem, the difference is that in the svga_s3 a part of the screen is replicated in a flickering fashion in the bottom of the screen, whereas in the other it's black.

So with ctrl-f5 I get 640x400 screenshots before the video res switch and 640x480 screenshots afterwards. But the game seems to properly use only the 640x400 region of the screen. I am also using aspect=false and scaler=normal2x by the way.

As I mentioned before, it's rendering 640x400 frames into a 640x480 video mode, and the result is as expected. What appears in the extraneous lower 80 lines is due to the number of video pages: there are multiple pages with svga_s3, but only one page with vesa_nolfb. Again, setting the incorrect video mode appears to be a flaw in the game, not in DOSBox.

The attached program works around the problem. Place the program in the folder where Blood is installed and run it to start the game. What it does is allow mode 101h (640x480) to be set one time for the intro movie, but thereafter mode 101h will be switched to mode 100h (640x400) instead. Should not be used if you configure the game for 640x480, in case that isn't obvious, and of course it's not needed if the intro movie files are absent.

Thank you for your interest, sadly, it didn't work. Here is a capture of the game after the intro video of Episode 1. Also, if you upload another attempt, can you make it run as a TSR or accept cmdline parameters? Because I normally launch the game through a utility called BMOUSE for better mouse control, like this: "BMOUSE.EXE LAUNCH blood.exe -nocd -noaim"

Also, regardless of whether you want to pursue this little problem, can you post the source of blood101.com? 😊

Perhaps you're not using the program correctly, as it works for me. You can substitute blood100.com in place of blood.exe in any command line you use, as it will in turn execute blood.exe and pass along any parameters. The program is implemented as a loader rather than a TSR so it can know when the first time mode 101h is set as opposed to any other time.

Even if it worked for me, it would break on the next video, right? Heh, I abandoned my attempt, now I don't mount the CD image so there are no videos. I also abandoned the BMOUSE driver in favour of the BLOODMFX.EXE fix, for anyone landing here randomly from google 😁

I have another problem, though. I can't use the Dosbox mapper to set mousewheel up and down to create a keyboard event ingame. So I can use the mousewheel ingame for weapon previous/next actions. Why? That would be so helpful, can I do it with creating a mapper.txt manually?

Oh, crap, just found this thread, I guess it's still impossible? I may have to create an AutoIT script ...
Mouse wheel / scroller in dosbox?

I am using the Blood 1.00 game disc and my installation is patched to v1.11, in case it makes a difference. AFAICT, the cutscene videos are 320x200, and thus don't trigger the issue. I can avoid the issue just by deleting LOGO.SMK and GTI.SMK out of the install folder; and it's GTI.SMK at 640x480 that appears to be the trigger.

The GOG version is fully patched to 1.21. I copied those files to another folder and set them up with a newer dosbox and other fixes. Not sure what I did but the intro videos didn't play and the game launched to the menu directly. Then when I started the first episode that video played nicely in fullscreen and afterwards screwed the game res.

Now I made another copy of the GOG files, applied the exe mouse fix, set up the Blood.cfg option the way I want it for resolution and WASD+mouselook and launch the game with the -nocd and -noaim commands. And I don't mount the CD image that's inside the GOG installation so there are no videos and no CD music. Midi is fine for me, heh.

Is that 640x400 proper 16:10 widesreen? And why can't I get 960x600 to work? It reverts to the lowres default. Maybe you should patch to 1.21, breakpoint the res-changing interrupts and beat the thing into submission.

There was no standard for "widescreen" video in the DOS era; it was mostly 4:3 aspect ratio for all resolutions. 640x400 will only appear wide-ish with aspect correction disabled.

Build engine games like Blood will only set available VESA video modes, not arbitrary resolutions. I suppose it's possible that a non-standard mode for 960x600 was available in some VBE implementations, but I've never heard of it, and Blood might not handle it well, anyway.

I guess you have the "One Unit Whole Blood" version, and the issue with 640x400 might be different there than in the 1.11 version.

Yeah, I got that, I guess you have the original "registered CD"?

If you want, PM me your Steam or GOG username and I will gift it to you if you want to fiddle with it, it's only 5 euros.

ripsaw8080 wrote on 2018-11-06, 20:51:

What it does is allow mode 101h (640x480) to be set one time for the intro movie, but thereafter mode 101h will be switched to mode 100h (640x400) instead. Should not be used if you configure the game for 640x480, in case that isn't obvious, and of course it's not needed if the intro movie files are absent.

Hello, do you think you could make another copy of this file that switches it from 320x200 to 640x400? Also, after the first cutscene, will it break again? I assume as long as you quit the game sometime between each cutscene it's be fine, right? Or is even that not required?

Sorry for digging up this old thread, but it's the only one to ackowledge this issue I've ran into. Thanks.