Rendering overview

The [render] section controls how DOSBox Staging turns an emulated video frame into the picture you see on your display. It covers the final stages of video output: scaling the image to fit the viewport, correcting its aspect ratio, applying shaders and filtering, adjusting its colours and brightness, and correcting certain video artifacts.

These settings do not affect the graphics hardware or video mode presented to the game. They only change how the resulting image is displayed.

The rendering settings are organised into the following areas:

• Shaders — Choose how the image is rendered, from adaptive CRT emulation to sharp, pixel-perfect output.

• Aspect ratios & scaling — Control pixel aspect ratio correction, integer scaling, viewport size, borders, and stretching.

• Colour & image adjustments — Adjust brightness, contrast, gamma, saturation, colour temperature, CRT colour profiles, monochrome palettes, and custom CGA colours.

• Special features — Apply targeted corrections such as dedithering for EGA/CGA artwork and deinterlacing for FMV (Full Motion Video) games.

For most games, the defaults produce a good result. These settings are mainly useful when you want to change the presentation, or when a particular game looks stretched, incorrectly scaled, too soft or sharp, too dark, or visibly interlaced.