Follow any of the DosBox configuration guides. Immediately.

[Superfield]

For those who downloaded this game and don't really know what a "DosBox" is, I implore you to follow any of the guides on how to configure this game. I do not understand how it was allowed to go out in this state, and it only takes a few seconds of playing the game to realize this. No, you aren't wearing rose-tinted nostalgia glasses: the default configuration of Dark Forces on Steam makes the game look and run TERRIBLE.

Real quick: Dark Forces was made to run in DOS, and modern PC's don't have native DOS support, so these old games use a DOS emulator called DosBox to play them. Even somewhat crappily-configured games in DosBox on Steam have a few dozen options that they set. The configuration file for Dark Forces does three things: 1. it tells DosBox to launch the game and then close itself when the game closes (standard stuff), 2. it tells DosBox to open the game in full screen (good, although there are other things it needs to do as well), and 3. it limits the cycles to 20000 (omgwtfbbqiusjalkvh489u0293rhoiu*&)&$)!YR).

I cannot stress how incomprehensible #3 is. They specifically told DosBox to limit itself so that it can't run the game properly. The game would run fine if they had just done nothing at all!

Follow any of the guides, they will show you, not only how to make the game run properly, but also to make the visuals more crisp and "true" to the original intention and how to prevent the game from being horizontally "stretched" in fullscreen, among other improvements.

Whoever put this game up on Steam needs to fix the default configuration. It's an embarrassment that this classic will be presented this way to most people who try to play it nowadays. It would take 5 minutes of tweaking a text file and pushing it out in a patch to make this game look and run like a dream.

[sonderkraftfahrzeug]

The settings are not ideal but are workable. I like to play in a window and here are my settings. Both cycles and memsize help out.

You want to right click and open dosbox.conf in Notepad, make the changes and save.

Here is the path C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dark Forces\dosbox.conf

[dosbox]
memsize=64

[sdl]
windowresolution=1680x1050
fullresolution=1680x1050
fullscreen=false
output=opengl
aspect=false

[cpu]
cycles=auto

[autoexec]
mount c "game"
c:\
dark.exe
exit

[Electric Cupcake]

Originally posted by sonderkraftfahrzeug:

The settings are not ideal but are workable. I like to play in a window and here are my settings. Both cycles and memsize help out.

You want to right click and open dosbox.conf in Notepad, make the changes and save.

Here is the path C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dark Forces\dosbox.conf

[dosbox]
memsize=64

[sdl]
windowresolution=1680x1050
fullresolution=1680x1050
fullscreen=false
output=opengl
aspect=false

[cpu]
cycles=auto

[autoexec]
mount c "game"
c:\
dark.exe
exit

Trying to use Notepad is just asking for headaches. Use Notepad++ or Vim.

[sonderkraftfahrzeug]

Yeah but overwhelmingly, the players here use Windows and do not download custom productivity applications. However, everyone knows notepad.