Big problem with blur in old PC games. (how to enable nearest neighbour filtering?)

[TetheredHeart]

Hi. I have Windows 7 installed through Boot Camp on a Macbook Pro with Intel Iris graphics.

I was happy to install Windows 7 and play some old classics, but have a big problem. The games look like a blurry mess and are completely unplayable. When I select no enhancements in games and get a nice 1:1 mapped tiny windowed picture, when I full screen the graphics or enlarge the window I get an extremely blurry picture. I simply cannot play like that. I love pixel graphics and looking at the screen like that just makes me cry. I want to see those big, sharp pixels.

Even if the launcher allows me to render the game at a double or triple resolution with nearest neighbor mapping, I get a result which, although pixelish, is still somewhat blurry. I couldn't find anything in the Intel graphics settings to help me, also disabled ClearType. I want system wide nearest neighbour mapping of low resolution programs to the display resolution, is that too much to ask?

I'm devastated. I don't know what to do. This renders my Windows 7 installation completely unusable, since I want to develop and play pixel art games. Can anyone help me?

Thank you, any and all ideas are welcome.

 

[TetheredHeart]

I made a step forward, at least with the development tool I will use. In GameMaker Studio I disabled "interpolate colors between pixels" in Global Game Settings. Now at least the games I make won't look like crap on people's computers and I can see the actual result while testing.

Kinda important I did that first. Still have problems with running old games though. Need all the help I can get, and I'm sure some people who stumble onto this could use it too.

 

[yjchua95]

I made a step forward, at least with the development tool I will use. In GameMaker Studio I disabled "interpolate colors between pixels" in Global Game Settings. Now at least the games I make won't look like crap on people's computers and I can see the actual result while testing.

Kinda important I did that first. Still have problems with running old games though. Need all the help I can get, and I'm sure some people who stumble onto this could use it too.

Windows 7 sucks on retina displays, because it doesn't have HiDPI support.

You'll need Windows 8 and set the scaling to 150% or 200%.