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DOSBox Sees Continued Success
KingofGnG writes "DOSBox, the emulator designed to run DOS games on modern operating systems (and not necessarily on a PC), has been chosen as project of the month for May on SourceForge. It's the latest award granted to a piece of software that 'simply does what it is supposed to do,' as the authors say. After having amassed more than 10 million downloads, it will soon be getting an update that's been awaited for almost two years."
I use it to play Masters of Orion 2. It has a built in IPX simulator, so it makes multiplayer very easy. You can also record your games using built in feature!
Works for me. Press alt-enter.
YMMV depending on the game, maybe?
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Already done. Use dd to copy the disk images, and use imgmount to mount the disk images.
Some folks are doing amazing things with dos emulators on Linux:
http://www.melvilletheatre.com/articles/powerbasic-linux/index.html
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
It's a full-blown x86 emulator. It works on PowerPC and everything.
The "update that's been awaited for almost two years" will supposedly implement "the ability to save the state of the emulated game and to interact with the software through a GUI"
Actually, that's not quite true. Unfortunately, DosBox developers concentrate to games only, to the point they refuse patches for non-gaming hardware like printers or network cards (which could be used to make old DOS software work).
I am not saying the emulator is not great, it is, just it focuses to much on games.
FYI - copy protected sectors still have to be read by hand. Sorry, you're Ultima V disk isn't (directly) copyable. You'll have to use Neverlock or some other 'helper' software to play it without the disk in DOSBox.
However, I'm open to suggestions about the above...
I second the fact that DosBox is better than Microsoft's own offerings within Windows.
Time-critical things are smoother, and there's quite a lot of legacy DOS applications that are time-critical.
I've seen people program on an 8086 such compressed and timer-reliant code that only recently has Linux (before other OS'es for that matter) been able to get that functionality back.
The same individual responsible was also a fanatic of the Atari 8-bit era, even going through large lengths to slave a PC to one (as a hard drive emulator). This is also very timer-sensitive; because any stutter in the I/O transfer means corrupt data.
This project has kept alive many relics of the old enthusiast community; and it's nice to see that it's not forgotten.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
You would probably be better running freedos inside a VM (qemu, vitualbox, vmware, etc) for that stuff. If you have one, a live copy of DOS would work too.
Just remember that DOS didn't idle the CPU. So your VM will be pegged at 100% usage. (There's a TSR called dosidle that solves this)
God. Remember TSRs? I remember fighting to get every last bit of conventional memory, and having trouble getting more than 520kb free.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
KingofGNG recently tried to plug his site by adding the download count to DOSBox's Wikipedia article. And now he's doing it here. The source for the download count should have linked directly to dosbox.com or sourceforge, not this spammer's personal page. The difference? Wikipedia's editors caught it and removed it. Slashdot's editors? ...
Are you sure the original code wasn't using floating point operations? If DOSBox is turning x86 operations into PowerPC floating point operations then you are going to see some differences. On x87, all floating point operations are done at 80-bit precision. On PowerPC, they are done at either 32-bit or 64-bit. If you do a 32-bit float operation in C and compile it for x87[1] then you will get a load-and-sign-extend operation turning it into an 80-bit float then operate on that, and finally truncate it when you write it out. Compile the same code for PowerPC and you will get a 32-bit load, 32-bit operations, and a 32-bit store. If you perform a sequence of calculations then the rounding errors will accumulate a lot faster on PowerPC than x87.
DOSBox probably could use PowerPC long double (128-bit) floats to get around this (which works great until you find someone who was relying on rounding errors from 80-bit operations), but that's going to be a lot slower, which is more likely to generate complaints from gamers than the odd rounding error.
[1] Compilers targeting newer Intel / AMD chips will emit SSE 32-bit float instructions instead.
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I think you may be confusing DOSbox with the built-in command prompt in Vista. With Vista, the native method to run DOS applications no longer supports full screen mode(for no obvious reason). DOSbox, which is a third party application not owned or supported by Microsoft does such a better job at emulating a DOS environment that even ancient DOS based applications will run properly on Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7, among others.
So, if you dislike NOT being able to run your DOS applications in full-screen mode, download DOSbox and that should resolve your problems.
I'll just be content when the JavaScript stops eating up all of my clock cycles every time it pulls in more stories.
Agreed! Especially when I view the stories on my phone... it is absolutely useless.
Note that nosound=true will not stop emulating the sound, only mute it. So if you're hoping to free resources, you'll have to actually disable the sound emulation...
any or all, in their respective sections:
sbtype=none
gus=false
pcspeaker=false
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.