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Scharmers (Qt3) has 1942: The Pacific Air War

Apr 3, 2015 @ 11:48am

Prettying up this old sim

As it stands, this distro of the game is set to run at its lowest settings. Here are the steps you will need to take:

1. Go in to the flight portion of the game and press F9 to bring up the options. Cycle through them all to their highest levels. Exit options.

2. You will now notice that the sim looks better, but runs like a dog. That is because the DOSBox emulator that runs the sim is set at its default settings.

3. The settings you are looking to change in DOSBox are:
- CORE: DYNAMIC
- CYCLES: 20000
- TIMED: FALSE

These should get you get your highest-settings sim run quite well. Note that if you monkey around with CYCLES to get the sim FPS to your liking, you will need to run the joystick calibration routine in the game each time you make a change.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about with these settings, then you will need to Learn To DOSBox. Visit VOGONS or the DOSBox site itself. Learning To DOSBox is pretty much vital if you really want to run old DOS games like these, so it's well worth your time.

Happy flying!

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Showing 1-7 of 7 comments

mp2

Jul 16, 2015 @ 3:09am

kranked everything up to higest and game runs at good speed only the enemy planes still look awfull. still nice to have in my collection to see how flight sims evolved and its way better then my first one on the spectrum 48k , psion flight and i even liked that one too. ;)

Last edited by mp2; Jul 16, 2015 @ 3:13am

zuktad Nov 28, 2021 @ 10:44am

I know I am late here, but would like to know if there is anything more what can be done to this game to look better. I changed settings in config file as per above advice but that is not doing too much. Is there any outside site where I could find something how to improve and make pretty this Old Girl?

Scharmers (Qt3) has 1942: The Pacific Air War

Dec 2, 2021 @ 1:18pm

Not really. There wasn't much of a mod scene for PAW (or most DOS sims, for that matter). The smeary, pixelated graphics at 320x200 were pretty much par for the course at the time and there's nothing you can really do to change those. Maxing out the graphic settings in the sim, and adjusting DOSBox's cycles for smooth frame rates are about the best you can do.

zuktad Dec 2, 2021 @ 2:39pm

320x200 ... ouch, did not even realize that. I try to fiddle with my nvidia game control panel. Thank you for this check above that I am not missing after all something obvious.

Last edited by zuktad; Dec 2, 2021 @ 2:40pm

Cöunt Eastwood May 2, 2022 @ 6:31pm

Thanks for the post and the DosBox settings. I'm reinstalling the game from my old PAW Gold CD and setting it up in DosBox. Wow, that disc is 27 years old and it still works. Going to tweak it soon with the GOG version.

Theoretically, it should look better on an old CRT monitor since they gave those blocky graphics a sort of natural anti-aliasing. Without that, it looks worse today on high def flatscreens. I know dgvoodoo2 has a setting that emulates a CRT screen but that's for Windows not DOS games, so maybe a similar CRT monitor option for DosBox could at least make the game look as it was originally intended?