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DOSBox Sees Continued Success

Posted by Soulskill on from the but-does-it-have-xp-mode dept.

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."

20 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. I love DosBox by SupremoMan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

    1. Re:I love DosBox by Sparr0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    2. Re:I love DosBox by malevolentjelly · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:I love DosBox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:I love DosBox by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. Comments by XanC · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Comments by CSMatt · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Comments by houstonbofh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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!"

    3. Re:Comments by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Re:Just upgraded to Vista... by d_jedi · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    --
    I am the maverick of Slashdot
  4. Re:Virtual Floppy by Drinking+Bleach · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  5. Dosbox ROCKS! by dudpixel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Dosbox ROCKS! by penguinchris · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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 :)

    2. Re:Dosbox ROCKS! by Toonol · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Dosbox ROCKS! by martin-boundary · · Score: 4, Funny

      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!

  6. dosemu is also amazing by innocent_white_lamb · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!
  7. Re:Is it a virtual machine or an emulator? by Drinking+Bleach · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  8. Re:10 millions downloads? by westlake · · Score: 4, Funny

    What is a "millions download"?

    A typo.
    Next question, please.

  9. Re:Not only for PC games by azgard · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:Good for games, not so much for business apps by Dunbal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.