Distorted galaxy map?

[Zygot]

Check this out. Go to the main galaxy/colony screen and press Alt-M to display the 5x5 parsec grid overlay. Now measure the height and width of a grid box. Is it a square or a rectangle?

I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but here's what's happening for me. If I use DOSBox's built-in CTRL-F5 shortcut to take a screenshot, I get the image below (scaled up 3x to 960x600 with locked ratio for legibility). Note that the parsec grid is a perfect square. However, the image itself has a widescreen ratio of 16:10 (960/600 = 1.6), close to that of a 1080p HD television. This is definitely not how I played MOO back in the day on my boxy old school CRT monitor!



Now, if I play in a DOSBox window as I normally do with the following relevant settings and then take a screenshot with a utility program (Preview in my case, since I'm playing on a Mac):

windowresolution=1600x1000
output=opengl
machine=svga_s3
aspect=true
scaler=normal3x

I get the image below (scaled down to 960x720 with a locked ratio, again for legibility). Now the image has the expected 4:3 aspect ratio (960/720 = 1.33...), but the parsec grid is stretched vertically. This is not ideal since it distorts my perception of distance between stars.



I think this has something to do with an inherent attribute of the old VGA 320x200 mode that's used and/or that the old CRT monitors didn't have square pixels.

So which is correct? I think the second image, the 4:3 one, is accurate in the sense that the game was made for 4:3 displays, so that should be the canonical presentation. In other words, with these settings I should be experiencing the game the same as I did in 1993. But that distorted parsec grid is throwing me for a loop. Was it always distorted like that?

And the first image, the 16:10 one, has an appealing perfectly square parsec grid. But it just looks wrong to me. Like a TV that has a misconfigured zoom control.

Any thoughts?

[Zeraan]

It looks like the first image is sharp (no anti aliasing). You can tell by the bottom bar of buttons, the texts have only two colors, black and grey, but the second image has some kind of blurring/antialiasing going on, and the text is less clear. Based on that element alone, I'd say first image is the "correct" version. The second basically stretches the first image vertically. The pixels are all in the same place, but stretched.

I believe this is an issue of DOSBox. Old CRT monitors didn't have square pixels, I distinctly remember them being larger vertically than horizontally.