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

[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

[malevolentjelly]

This is probably the most common sentiment you'll find in reference to DOSBox. Everyone just loves this project... I think it really is because it has one singular focus and succeeds whole-heartedly at it. Also, the project has done a great job of remaining very gracefully platform agnostic. It's brought back the old Keen series and Little Big Adventure and such to me, on any system I might want to play it on.

Now that even games on Steam are starting to ship packaged with DOSBox, you really have to take some time to reflect on how much this has done for an archive of almost forgotten and still very valuable games.

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: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:I love DosBox

[QuantumG]

Ahh, that reminds me. Few years back I did some reverse engineering of Commander Keen using DOSBox.

I tapped the emulation loop and wrote replacement functions for each address. So, for example, whenever address 0x1713 of the Keen segment was executed the function add_monster_1() would be called. It would do its thing and, if I had translated it correctly, the game would appear unchanged. I did this for a lot of functions:

    http://www.quantumg.net/keen1.c.txt

The result was much more enlightening than reading asm code. For example, John Carmack used the same code for doors in the game as he did for monsters. In a sense, doors *were* monsters, they just didn't have as complex "thinking" as some of the other monsters in the game. I could also confirm that there were no more "cheat keys" or secret levels in the game than the ones that had already been advertised :)

I later tried to convert this to compilable source code using libSDL for the graphics but that project has been lost to me.. it's probably floating around on one of my old linux machines.

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...

Not only for PC games

[managerialslime]

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.

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.

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:Virtual Floppy

[Drinking Bleach]

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

Re:Just upgraded to Vista...

[d_jedi]

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

Dosbox ROCKS!

[dudpixel]

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.

Re:Dosbox ROCKS!

[penguinchris]

A couple of things I found amusing - first, I was born in 1986, and yet I still got into PC games in DOS. I started formulating this reply as soon as I read that you thought one had to be born before 1984 for this to be true :)

But then the games you mentioned are not the ones I had in mind at all... I did play those games (I especially liked Wolf3D and Need for Speed, from that list - as an aside, I hate where they went with the Need for Speed series after the original...) but the games I grew up with were earlier ones, including a lot of side-scrollers and simpler games like that.

My fondest memories are of Apogee/3d Realms side-scrollers like Secret Agent and Crystal Caves. Then, of course, the X-Wing series came along - pretty much the greatest thing ever invented to a nerdy kid who liked flying (my dad is a pilot), computer games, and Star Wars (and you can't forget Dark Forces - that was a great game, along with its first sequel).

And I completely agree - I stopped playing games a few years ago not because I don't like to play games, but because the games are just not the same as they were. I don't find myself having anywhere near as much fun as I did, unless I simply play the old games. I stopped seriously playing games sometime after Rainbow Six 2. That was, for me, the last great era, with games like that as well as Battlefield 1942 and several great combat flight simulators. It's all gone downhill since then :)

Re:Dosbox ROCKS!

[Toonol]

My son, born in '90, replays X-Com every year or so... along with some other classics like Fallout 1 and Planescape. Those aren't EARLY classics, but definitely before his time. Both he and his younger brother play emulated SNES games from the early 90s on a weekly basis. I think true quality won't be forgotten.

Re:Dosbox ROCKS!

[martin-boundary]

Such games that come to mind include Wolf3D, Doom, Command & Conquer, Warcraft, Need For Speed, Microprose F1GP and the list goes on.

You young whippersnappers! I used to play PACMAN, dammit!

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:10 millions downloads?

[westlake]

What is a "millions download"?

A typo.
Next question, please.

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.

It will be the hit in any office... when it prints

[Opportunist]

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.

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

I've run QBASIC, dBASE IV, Windows 3.1 in DOSbox!

[knorthern knight]

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.