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."

Comments

I love DosBox

[SupremoMan]

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!

Re:I love DosBox

[Anonymous Coward]

In this instance, it doesn't matter. The Steam version of X-COM Apocalypse consists of the DOS version, and a pre-configured version of DOSBox. Same goes for all their re-releases of DOS games. You can trivially extract the files, and run it with your own version of DOSBox, or even on a real DOS machine.

In short - no DRM. Even the bundled version of DOSBox runs just fine without Steam.

Re:I love DosBox

[X0563511]

Other games are just as easy to de-steam. The ones that are hard are those that are steam-only, like valve releases.

UT3 for instance. Just manually extract the .exe's and .dll's from the latest patch, and overwrite the steam ones with them. UT3, bought and downloaded through Steam, but runs without Steam. (You do need your CD key though. Steam gives you this when you buy it)

Re:Just upgraded to Vista...

[d_jedi]

Works for me. Press alt-enter.
YMMV depending on the game, maybe?

Re:Virtual Floppy

[Drinking Bleach]

Already done. Use dd to copy the disk images, and use imgmount to mount the disk images.

dosemu is also amazing

[innocent_white_lamb]

Some folks are doing amazing things with dos emulators on Linux:

http://www.melvilletheatre.com/articles/powerbasic-linux/index.html

Re:Is it a virtual machine or an emulator?

[Drinking Bleach]

It's a full-blown x86 emulator. It works on PowerPC and everything.

Re:Not only for PC games

[azgard]

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.

Re:Not only for PC games

[Celeste R]

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.

Re:Good for games, not so much for business apps

[X0563511]

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.