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Here, Merry Christmas:
        http://www.dosbox.com/

(I apologize to your wife/gf/s.o. in advance)

      -dZ.

try this: http://www.dosbox.com/

DOSBox has various integer multiple scalers at 2x and 3x...options are listed in dosbox.conf but unfortunately generate a filter error for junk characters if I try to include them here. On the other hand, I don't think DOSBox is quite up to running Windows 3.1 well enough to run Win32 games. Getting close though.

But I think the general idea of running old low-res games in an emulator/virtual machine is probably a good way to control the resolution scaling. Run the game inside a window that is at an integer multiple of the original resolution, and then your full-screen resolution just has to be big enough to fit the window without being so hi-res that the window is too small. So maybe use WINE for those old windows games?

Since no-one seems to have provided a link to DOSBox, here you go:
http://www.dosbox.com/ OR
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox/

You'll get much better results using scaler=super2xsai or hq2x

Further info on available options and results here.

And then I notice that DosBox already has this implemented: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler

It should be fairly straightforward for Wine to implement a similar feature.

your problem is you are not looking old enough, try runing DOS games in Dosbox, nice scaling options there.

More importantly I can still play the Amiga versions, whereas the PC versions crash both my Win98 and WinXP machines. (That's why I hate using PCs for gaming.)

I really can't believe there are still people who don't know about DosBox.

The real dark age of computer games, in that we have trouble playing many of them now, is the Win95/Win98 era. 2d games from then can usually be played in VMWare or VirtualBox or something, but for 3D games you've still got to have an old computer kicking around with Win98 installed. Some still work on modern Windows, but many don't, or only work partially.

If you like the old games, maybe you still have them hanging around somewhere? I'm a big fan of dosbox: http://www.dosbox.com/ and other emulators that run great under linux. I've got a couple of wireless logitech game controllers for the ROM emulators. http://tinyurl.com/yz6tyop

Also, if you've got fond memories of those DOOM era games, you could try reliving those days with DOSBox. Not all of those games have aged well, but some, like X-COM, are still as much fun as ever.

I got old MS-DOS formatted floppy disks that have my old DOS games on it. I am finding new use with them via DOSBox.

Modern games, mostly Windows based DirectX memory eating and bloated but full of 3D graphics and surround sound audio aren't as good to play as the old DOS games. The old DOS games had a limited memory system and most were written in assembly or C and had to fit in under 12M of RAM using XMS or EMS etc RAM that extended over the 640K of DOS. They didn't have gigabyte hard drives back then and had to fit games on 120M hard drives or lower. They only had 640x480 VGA graphics and Sound Blaster 16 Pro audio.

How many remember Syndicate, XCOM, Dune II, Master of Orion 1 and 2, Master of Magic, Bard's Tale (EGA graphics and no sound card support but the Bard's Tale Construction set fixed that with VGA and Sound Blaster support), and other classic DOS games?

I heard a rumor that the classic DOS games are coming back via online services for $5 each because modern games don't have that enjoyability that the old 1990's DOS games had, plus people are learning how to run old games via DOSBOX or emulators that run DOS operating systems. The online services allows a DOSBox type DOS emulator/environment to run the DOS video game in it.

Almost every gaming company is trying to get the best graphics and sound effects, and it seems like they followed the Doom first person shooter model too closely with variations and modifications to it and forgot to make it entertaining and mean something via those social aspects of it. Not just chatting with other players, but the social aspects of going up against a computer controlled AI opponent(s). One of the few modern games that does that is Civilization IV, but it is basically the same game since Civilization II (or the original Civilization for DOS and the SNES) with more graphics and sounds added to it with movies and animation and then some bonus features but still plays the same as the original pretty much. Send settlers to build cities, take your civilization from the stone age to modern times without an enemy civilization taking yours out and develop technology for stronger military units and improvements to cities and world wonders. But in order to bring it to video game console units they had to dumb it down to Civilization Revolutions.

People want a game that is challenging, but they can set the level of difficulty. Sometimes the turns based game is better than the first person shooter realtime game that eats up lots of RAM and hard drive space for all of the animation and sound. Think of Tetris and other innovative games that did something different from all of the rest, and didn't need the animation graphics and sound effects to win over gamers. Just have an easy to use interface that doesn't require a user manual to be read in order to play it. Some of the best video games the player just clicked the start button and then just joined in the game learning as they went along. Which is what saved games are for, if you mess up, load a saved game before you messed up so you can avoid it.

*cough*

The other .5% are like me and still have some 16 bit software they are really old games from the Win 3.1 days I still love (sim tower and others), or old utilities from mid 90s that haven't been replaced simply because I am used to them and they work. For these, virtualPC is the only option to run them.

DosBox does the job just fine.

Of course, it would be more reasonable if you could install VirtualPC on Vista Home Premium, as I have two laptops that run it (bought them used) and there is no technical reason they can't, except MS doesn't want them to.

If you're really wedded to the idea of using a fancy-shmancy emulator, go download Suns VirtualBox. It'll install on your "home premium" without problems, and I find it to be a far superior product. Plus the "free" thing is kinda nice.

There's a nice bit of software called PUFF that was written at Caltech. It is available as an MS-DOS binary, which you can run on XP or Mac through DOSBox. Also, on the PUFF website they report that the source code comes with the program, and some have had success in compiling it for Linux. Unfortunately, you can't buy the software directly. Some textbooks come packaged with it, though. I can recommend the Rutledge book as a nice overview of lab electronics.

There was FreeSCI, but I don't know how well that works. Seems it merged with ScummVM, and seeing their compatibility page, most games should work.

If all that fails, you could try dosbox. I remember running space quest 4 a while ago, and it went quite well.

Have you tried DOSBox (http://www.dosbox.com/)? It works quite well.

(Also surely this Microsoft & Amazon PR stunt is actually the opposite of success? ... Because if any company released a truly desirable product people would be willing to pay a premium to own that product. Yet Microsoft & Amazon are trying to claim success by reducing its price... (talk about lies, damned lies and PR)).

First off, EVERYONE was running a sale on the upgrade. That was a Microsoft offer, not Amazon's. Just like getting a laptop with Vista now, will earn you a free upgrade.

Business drop the price all the time to see if they can sell more items. They make less of a profit per item, but make up for that in quanity. Very useful in the software business where the materials involved (disc and packaging) in the product cost pennies.

NO ONE is willing to pay a premium for something in this economy that's not a NEED. Sure, I would LOVE to upgrade (well more like retire) my 2.1 GHz PC and build a Quad-Core with a nice 1GB video card (and of course I have to upgrade my HD because that format has changed to SATA.) But I can't afford it and my current PC running XP is doing just fine.

But it's like you're saying, "Oh that dirty, rotten microsoft. They're having a SALE--how dare they!" Damn I'm GLAD they're having a sale, because I sure can't afford the retail and neither can a lot of other people.

I have a laptop that came with Vista. Personally, I've never had any problems with it. (Of course, it was built to work with Vista, so YMMV.) I even run really old, classic games with DOSBox on it! My only quibble (after turning off the truly dumb, UAC feature) is that you have to have a better system to run something (like a game) with Vista than you do to run the same thing on XP. However, since I don't normally play commerical games on this, that hasn't been much of a problem. And I found the voice recognition program included to be superior to even Draggon Naturally Speaking and you didn't need as long to train it.

I've got some problems with Microsoft, but this isn't one of them.

I've had good luck running protected mode games on my 1.13GHZ T23. Not Daggerfall, but Anvil of Dawn works great and it has similar requirements. I bet a 2GHZ system would work for Daggerfall.

You will probably want to use the Dos32/a extender instead of Dos4GW. It improves just about anything it touches. There are other things to play with in the dosbox config. Try changing your output, try the dynamic core.

I'd try that first before running it on bare metal.

This page has a chart of estimated speeds for a given host machine's CPU using DOSBox.

Just to let people know...GOG just bundles the original games with ScummVM and calls it a day. Not necessarily a problem since they have ScummVM approval, but if you're expecting some kind of port, you'll be disappointed. They caught me that way with Redneck Rampage. The web site says "Thanks to our handsome programming team, the classics are now Windows Vista and Windows XP compatible.", but they certainly didn't do any programming in that case. They just used DosBOX with a custom config file and that was it. I also got hooked by Sierra when they did the same thing with Kings' Quest and Space Quest collections. If you still own the games, you can just use ScummVM or DosBOX.

With that said, if you are looking for legal copies of these games, or aren't technically inclined, then GOG is a good way to get them.

people will still run Windows XP Pro in Virtual Machines just to run "legacy software" that does not run on Windows Vista, Windows 7.0, etc.

VirtualBox by Sun just reached version 3.0.0 and supports Windows XP, Vista, and 7.0 as both host and guest operating systems. It can even run DOS virtual machines, but has no addons support for DOS.

For DOS support most people just use DOSBox but it has no printing support. For example Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS runs in it, but since it has no printer support, just select Postscript for a printer and then use Ghostscript or some other Postscript program to drop the Postscript data file on to print it out. After Microsoft went to the Windows NT and up and left the Windows 9X platform, it broke a lot of DOS applications. DOSBox is cool, as it even supports Tandy 1000 standards so that means those DOS video games that selected CGA or Tandy graphics can be played in Tandy mode. That was before EGA and then later VGA was invented.

Retrocomputing is more than just a fad, for some that have "legacy software" issues they have to use older hardware and older operating systems, or run older operating systems in virtual machines and/or emulators.

The cost of upgrading "legacy software" to Windows Vista or even Windows 7.0 standards is too high and too difficult for most software companies, plus Windows Vista broke a lot of software development tools including some old versions of Visual Studio as recent as 2002 or 2003. There is a lot of software that businesses need, that cannot be converted to run on Vista or 7.0, which is why Microsoft has that XP Virtual Machine, but they futzed up the XP Virtual machine and it is not 100% XP compatible. So I am guessing virtual machines like VirtualBox, VMWare, etc will be used to run XP in a virtual machine for better compatibility.

How do you run FreeDOS inside DOSBox? DOSBox doesn't separate out the DOS-emulation parts from the hardware-emulation parts and doesn't support installing another OS. Are you confusing DOSBox with DOSEMU? DOSEMU is a virtualisation program used to run DOS (MS-DOS or FreeDOS) on Linux/x86. DOSBox is a portable DOS and PC emulator.

morgan_greywolf's followup makes clear that he confused DOSEmu with DOSBox (probably because the window title under DOSEmu says "DOS in a box".)

However, the DOSBox wiki specifically mentions FreeDOS as an excellent source for utilities, many of which DOSBox does not provide internally. For example, the MORE program. Since DOSBox was originally intended to run games, DOSBox just doesn't include very much on the CLI than what you need to run games. If you want to be more of a DOS power-user (and prefer running DOSBox) then you need the utilities provided by FreeDOS.

-jh

In theory, any MS-DOS or PC-DOS (referred to commonly as "DOS") application should run in DOSBox, but the emphasis has been on getting DOS games to run smoothly, which means that communication, networking and printer support are still in early development.

On the top of the DOSBox homepage there is a button with the text "Make A Donation". Click there to pay for the software. :)

http://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?letter=O

They have a database listing all the games and are rated for how well they run.

There are a number of frontends to dosbox for managing and launching installed apps. Obviously the apps themselves are no more or less GUI than the originals (sort of the whole point), but you don't have to start them from the command line if you don't want to.

I do realise this does not constitute "include" but have you ever heard of DOSBox that does exactly that and is free?

http://www.dosbox.com/

So, can I run DOS software via emulation inside XP inside Window 7?

Or you could skip the XP and just run Jazz Jackrabbit in DOSBox directly in Windows 7. (Any app that runs in Windows Vista, like DOSBox, should run in Windows 7.)

buy a mac mini, with alis-vet software... more info here: http://www.informavet.com/ Mac's have the most resilient hardware vs time and performance... If he needs to run his DOS only app, you can use DOSBOX http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1 its very easy to script for it. If you need more help let me know, I wont charge you a cent...

While it's nice to have this one working on ScummVM, it's been running fine on DOSBox for years now (since DOSBox v0.60 or so).

MetzO'Magic

I used to have a frontend for mine, but when switching to ubuntu, ditched that.
In both windows and linux is pretty easy to just make shortcuts, dosbox supports a lot of command-line arguments so you can just make each shortcut automount your dir and run the appropriate file.

But here are my recommendations for windows:

First, all frontends listed here:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/DOSBoxFrontends

Then:
D-fend: Pretty easy to use, has dosbox profiles that is basically just a different config file for each dosbox game, along with some general info. Games can be sorted on developer etc. Discontinued, but there is D-fend reloaded. No experience with that though.

D.O.G. : Easy to use, pretty much same functionality as d-fend. Also added zip functionality (just keep all your game-related stuff in a zip). Also a version of dosbox can be specified per game so if a update of dosbox breaks a game you can use both versions side-by-side.

It's the flashy, pop-culture references and glitzy, trendy looking artwork that give games replay value...

Huh? The game that I've found to have the most replay value is Civ2, hardly known for it's "glitzy trendy looking artwork". I've also found that DOSBox and Snes9x are two of the coolest pieces of software ever written. To each their own I guess.....

. Just how hard would it be to emulate an S3 video card and SB16 so that we can run whatever we fill like in the VM?

Well, DOSBox does a decent job. But that's a self-supported donationware project. To include that sort of functionality in a commercial product, you have to hire people not only to do the development and tweaking, but to support customers who use the feature. Just not worth it for companies like Parallels and VMware to go to all that trouble for a few customers that want to play abandonware games.

Perhaps, but AFAICT DOSBox is a virtual machine, one that is optimized for compatibility with old DOS games. For example you need full support for really old CGA/EGA graphics features to run Linux/Windows/FreeBSD etc. However these features are needed to run many old dos apps, particularly games, and DOSBox has these.

But when in Long Mode, the processor can't do 16-bit Virtual Mode at all.

Not in hardware, but it is already done in software (e.g. DOSBox). It should be for Microsoft to do something similar back in 2004, or sooner.

Arena is one of the best games ever. You may need DosBox though...

http://www.elderscrolls.com/downloads/downloads_games.htm/
http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1/

Before you try this, make sure that whoever's sponsoring this program is OK with your installing abandonware. Although this is not strictly in accordance with copyright law, abandonware sites (at least the ones that don't like getting sued) only provide abandoned games that their owners don't object to being made available. In many cases, the owner has gone out of business and there's really in a position to object — but verifying this is impractical.

Now then, go to an abandonware site and download every DOS game that looks at all fun. By modern standards, these games have tiny footprints, so you might as well go crazy. These will mostly not run directly under XP, so you should install an x86 emulator to use with them. (Yes, running an x86 emulator on an x86 system is weird, but it's the best way to deal with the low-level compatibility issues you get with DOS software.) The one I use is DOSBox, and there seems to be broad agreement that it's the best. Even emulates old sound cards!

Apparently, Fallout works:

http://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=1647&letter=F

(with the usual headaches surrounding hardware drivers of that era, you have to tweak DOSBox and then run the games configuration utility).

Here's the link you really want: "Command & Conquer: Red Alert"

Looks like someone has already mentioned some tweaks needed to get the EA-supplied rar running smoothly with dosbox.

I run Linux you insensitive clod.

Merry Christmas, you insensitive clod!

DOSBox is simply an incredible emulator. I never thought I'd see the day when DOS would be as well emulated as the classic computers of yore. :-)

DOSBox + Master of Orion II + either quakenet #moo2 or RL friends. Aaahh heaven.

Well, if only moo2 was slow real-time, or if I could punch people through internet.

http://dosbox.com/
http://masteroforion2.blogspot.com/2006/05/dosbox-guide.html

You could use DOSBox to run Windows 3.1, in case AmiPro doesn't work under Wine.
If you choose this route, you might want to download S3 video drivers for Windows 3.1, so you can choose a higher video resolution.

Well, if you need legacy support for a handful of infrequently-used Microsoft apps, virtualization is certainly a valid solution, and has been quickly adopted for virtually every platform used today.

If your apps are really old, DOSBox tends to do a better job of running old DOS apps than the compatibility layer in Microsoft's NT-based operating systems does. It's also got a good x86 emulation layer, and therefore runs on just about any platform you can throw at it.

I will agree, however, that Photoshop, Final Cut, and many other "creative" apps that simply don't have large enough userbases to justify a decent open-source version are still a thorn in Linux's side. I can't live without Lightroom or Photoshop, and like you said, the open source alternatives are genuinely pathetic.

However, given that Adobe seem to be going through a (much needed) transformation at the moment, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a Linux-native Photoshop in the future. Apple called Adobe out on the fact that their product depends on libraries that everyone else stopped using 8-10 years ago, and that seems to be motivating them to actually start developing innovative products again, this time using a more portable code-base.

That's because Linux will most probably NEVER:

-Let me run my old PC games
-Let me run current PC games (without great hassle)
-Let me run applications specific to my line of work (3d studio max, maya, premiere, photoshop, and various game engines)

Actually, dosbox works in linux, and plays any of the old DOS games. Wine is a fantastic emulator...I was surprised the first time I ran Age of Empires on the tux.

Now that nVidia and ATI are beginning to actually support linux, some game companies are showing interest. First it's emulation, in a year or so we'll see native support...

It'll happen, we just need to get more people on it to increase actual demand.

You're right about MS domination of the market. Anyone I talk to has no concept of a world without Windows. I try to share the light as much as possible, but, for some reason, the dark is what makes people feel all warm and cozy.

From what I understand, you can do all of that stuff with VirtualBox (virtual machine), DOSBox (x86 emulator w/ DOS) and Wine (cross-platform implementation of the Windows API).

DOSBox takes care of basically every vintage game I've ever played and even though VirtualBox needs Windows installed in the virtual machine, it has a 'seamless' mode that allows you to have the Windows apps running 'outside' of the virtual machine. That's a sucky explanation and it'd be easier to explain if I had a pencil and paper.

Wine recently reached version 1.0 and, as I believe a sibling post pointed out, it should be able to run Photoshop perfectly well. The open source Windows project you mentioned, ReactOS, shares some of its code with Wine (which is how the two projects have managed to make some great advances in certain areas), so there's a nice little tie-in.

ReactOS is currently at about version 0.3.5, so we'll probably have to wait a while for a fully stable version to come out. The day it does will be a good day. A very good day.

mix in a little WiFi capability for leeching off hotspots, and you now have a true hacker toy that can lug anywhere!

PDAs and Smartphones just don't cut it. They suck for doing stuff like coding and compiling your own programs.

I recommend using DOSBox. It runs the game perfectly and you don't even need Windows.

DOSBox, it's your friend. Or use VMWare with Win98 installed (granted, DirectX is experimental.)

I don't know what work things you require, but Doom and Quake both work well on linux. Duke3d too. If you like old games, you'll find that very many of them are well supported on linux, either through source ports or emulators.

Duke3d works great under dosbox. It works even better if you replace the dos4gw extender with dos32a. If you want fancy 3d accelerated graphics, there's eduke32.

It's still a lot of fun after all these years.