I suppose I'll continue to use this topic for my random dribbling in order to keep it in one place.
I thought I'd take a few screen shots of DD so I could look at the artwork in a bit more detail, and I have to say it's amazing: cropping and enlarging random bits (and smoothing the jaggies away) there's so much detail there that I realise I don't normally see, whether my character, others, even just the background image.
I thought that because I was running it at a higher resolution than it was actually designed for that I was miniaturising everything into oblivion, but I just did a rough back-of-an-envelope calculation for what I'm currently using (26" monitor at 1920x1200) in comparison with what would've been a fairly typical screen at the time DD was originally out, something like a 17" CRT at 1280x1024 (at least). What surprised me is that my monitor actually has fewer pixels per inch than the older type contemporary with the game, ~87 vs. 100, so its pixels (and therefore the details) are actually bigger than they would've been back in the day. Weird, that; I guess it's just because there's so much stuff on the screen all at once that you're sort of overwhelmed and none of the individual bits of artwork has as much of a chance to stand out.
I did try running it at a lower resolution with automatic resizing to fill the screen and I think it did look better, but I found myself just not wanting to get used to a much more limited overhead view.
Which I guess is where BD (and subsequently D:OS) have the advantages of being able to zoom to suit one's whims at the time. But DD is mostly set in the green-and-leavy parts of Rivellon and BD... isn't.
