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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!
Can we get the comment count for each story back on the front page, please?
Q&A for DOS was the best non-relational database of the pre-windows era. (Ok, so PSF/File and Alpha4 had their fans too.) When I needed to load a copy of Q&A to retrieve some old Q&A data, every version of the Windows Dos box would lock the system up. The early versions of DOS/Box would also crash on Q&A's nasty habit of directly accessing system video.
However, for the last three years (at least), DOS/Box now loads Q&A and at least the Q&A search and export features work just fine.
This is one fine product.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
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.
Works for me. Press alt-enter.
YMMV depending on the game, maybe?
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Dosbox is fantastic for those times when you want to relive the moments when you first got into pc games (at least for anyone born before say 1984 or thereabouts).
Many of the games we now regard as classics, were written for DOS. Many of those games even pioneered whole genres of computer gaming.
Such games that come to mind include Wolf3D, Doom, Command & Conquer, Warcraft, Need For Speed, Microprose F1GP and the list goes on.
They may not have been the first in their genre, but they were certainly the games that defined the genre. Current game developers would do well to look to the DOS classics for inspiration, not so much for ideas, but for how to create a true classic.
Dosbox works incredibly well right now and I wish its developers every success in its continued development.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
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.
What is a "millions download"?
A typo.
Next question, please.
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"
Bah, TIE-Fighter is where it's at. We don't need to stinking shields! (both games kicked ass though!)
*KLAXON* Alpha One, INCOMING MISSILE!
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...
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? ...
I know quite a few companies that spent a killing in DOS applications back in the days, and who are either too cheap or too strapped for cash to replace those apps with newer ones, so they're stuck with having an ancient box around that still runs DOS. If you happen to have an old machine, don't throw it away, companies will pay for those machines if, and only if, they run DOS 6.22 (3.something, I forgot which one, would even be better) fine.
Now DOSbox would be the saviour... IF it could print! Of course those ancient machines need to output their data somehow, and while the ones that fortunately just store data and spit it on discs can actually benefit from DOSbox, apps that need to create a hardcopy are just out of luck (at least about 9 out of 10 times).
Print support in DOSbox would end the aera of legacy machines littering offices worldwide. THEN it would be the absolute app. And another foot in the door of offices for free software.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now that MT-32 emulator code has been included in ScummVM and bunch of other places, I really hope that they include it directly in Dosbox. There are some builds that contain the Roland thing, (such as http://www.si-gamer.net/gulikoza/ ) but I'd rather have those included with the project itself.
I like DOSbox because it lets me play Shadow of Yserbius on ImagiNation Revival. A first-person perspective (but still-frame) multiplayer RPG world originally offered by Sierra On-Line and called The Sierra Network and later ImagiNation Network. A group has gotten a server running that simulates the old dial-up systems, but over TCP/IP, enabling many players at once.
For me, Shadow of Yserbius was the first MMORPG I played, and still may favorite. It is a fairly short game, and cheating is trivial to do (your character data is stored on your local machine), but if you play it fairly it is quite enjoyable and challenging.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So basically all that a piece of call-home spyware has to do is offer you some advantage... compared to other DRM's that shouldn't exist in the first place, either?
Reminds me of a joke some eastern-european coleague told me some years ago. Went something like, the constant state surveillance and phone taps weren't all bad. If you forgot what hour you're supposed to meet your girlfriend, you could call the police and ask them.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Absolutely. Tie fighter IMHO was by far the best.
I loved it because it had the opposite difficulty style of most games. In most games you are a really tough ship/guy, who needs to fight off hordes of weaker guys/ships. But in Tie Fighter you WERE the dinky POS, two shots and you were fried. For me it made the experience more intense. You couldn't just fly into a group of bad guys and start blasting. You had to have really good situational awareness, because surprises would kill you without a second chance.
Later in the game you would get the Tie Advanced and Tie Defender, which had shields and missiles. But because I spent the first half the game being terrified of being shot, that style of flying stuck with me. Leave the shields weak and put the power to the engines. It ended up making the game a little faster rather then more tank like. The Missile boat was great for the story line, and it was fun to fight capital ships with. They gave you the old "We don't have any good ships left so heres a crappy one ticked out with a bunch of missiles, go get'em tiger."
And finally, Admiral Thrawn. Seriously if they make anymore Star Wars he had better be in them. The Thrawn Trilogy books were awesome, I love that he made it into the game.
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.
QBASIC for some quick-n-dirty programming when linux shell scripts or spreadsheets aren't enough, but C or PERL is overkill.
dBASE IV, complete with DOS 4GW extended memory manager runs just fine. Woohoo.
I also have the original floppies for Chessmaster 3000 (yeah it's ancient). I could not get it to run under WINE. But CM 3000 is so ancient that it supports Windows 3.1 and Win95. When they were throwing out old computers at work, they threw out the Windows 3.1 floppies with them. I took a set home with me. I couldn't install from the floppy drives, but I was able to image the floppies as disk files, and tell DOSbox to treat the image files as floppies.
Win 3.1 was a graphical shell that installed on top of DOS. DOSbox's emulation is good enough that Win3.1 installed properly on top of DOSbox. Now I can pull up the DOSbox prompt, "CD \WINDOWS" and type "WIN", and up comes ye olde Program Manager.
I also run the original Tetris under DOSbox. I use a cheat. Tell Tetris that you're using a joystick, even if you don't have one. That slows down the game to make it more playable.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
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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.