Text mode with aspect correction on a VGA monitor looks... bad.

[chinagreenelvis]

I've been trying for weeks to figure out a solution to this problem. I'm trying to emulate DOS games as close to the original experience as possible using an HP vx74 connected through VGA. I've tried using HDMI to VGA adapters and now I'm trying a Radeon 5450 as output.

The only way I've found to get text mode games, 320x200 games, and 640x480 games all scaled properly is by using high resolutions with scaling and bi-linear filtering, but this destroys the crisp image and high refresh rates of the lower native resolutions and just about defeats the purpose of using a VGA monitor. No matter what settings I use, if I try to run everything at 640x480 with aspect ratio correction, the scaling looks terrible. Zork becomes an ugly mess and even the scaling on DOOM isn't great.

I can pull this off easily in regular DOSBox with the right conf file, but loading that conf file into DOSBox Pure actually looks worse, presumably since it's squeezing the 740x400 pixels in even more. I also obviously prefer Pure for all of the bells and whistles, save states, ease of control, etc. Plus I prefer to keep Retroarch as my front-end.

Why is the scaling so bad? Is there a solution that I'm missing?