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

Comments

[XanC]

Can we get the comment count for each story back on the front page, please?

Re:Comments

[CSMatt]

I'll just be content when the JavaScript stops eating up all of my clock cycles every time it pulls in more stories.

Re:Comments

[houstonbofh]

I'll just be content when the JavaScript stops eating up all of my clock cycles every time it pulls in more stories.

Me to, and to the OP. It used to work well, and with every "improvement" usability has gone down. "Hey, this is a feature users like! Lets get rid of it!"

Re:Comments

[TheRaven64]

Not all of them. The new messages display, showing all of your recent messages on the front page, is a big improvement for keeping track of replies to your posts. The feature to turn off ads if you have excellent karma is nice too...

Virtual Floppy

[eggman9713]

Now what they need to do is make an app that will allow me to load all the old floppies with these games into DosBox in some way that it will act like floppies, virtual drives or such.

Re:I love DosBox

[Sparr0]

I am one of many people who do not buy from Steam. How many times do companies have to turn off DRM servers before people realize it's a bad idea to buy that sort of content?

Re:I love DosBox

[LackThereof]

And I am one of many people who WILL buy from Steam, because I find the benefits far outweigh the idealogical downside of purchasing DRMed software.

I don't need to go to a retail store and buy a physical box. This is huge for me. If I want a game, I can just press a button on a website and have it playing on my computer in a matter of minutes.

If I want to show a friend a game, all I have to do is log in to my Steam account from their computer; all of my games are instantly available to install and play. This is a big one. They'll continue to be able to play my games until I log in back on my PC, and I don't have to tell them my password.

Streamlined, built in auto-updating; it updates my games in the background, so the game is patched and ready to go by the time I want to launch it.

Being able to instantly join a friend's online game by clicking one button in my friends list.

Easy reinstalls in case of disaster, no storing a binder of CD's and keeping track of ugly product keys.

Never having someone else's keygen stumbling onto my product key and blocking me from online play. Fuck yeah no CD keys.

All this in exchange for the risk that if Valve goes out of business, in a worst case scenario I might have to apply a 3rd party crack to my games. Yeah, I think I'll continue taking that risk.

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

[Dunbal]

Heh, I remember the arcane process involved in trying to get Falcon 3 (the biggest memory hog I remember) to run - especially the add-ons (FA/18 and Mig 29). There was a magic order you had to load your drivers into high memory to get that extra few kb - and have 620k free in order to play.

What a shame about Spectrum Holobyte and also Microprose. They both made some fantastic games. Yet when they were "acquired" by Hasbro everything stopped. I wonder when people will learn that megacorps are NOT a good thing. From GM and Chrysler to Citibank to certain communication companies - time and again we're shown that eventually a corporation reaches a size where innovation and creativity are stifled, and preference is given to greed and bureaucratic idiocy. "Too big to succeed" is much more accurate than "too big to fail".

Microprose innovated more in a single year than Atari has ever since it acquired "Microprose" from Hasbro. Oh well, hooray for DOSBox... /rant