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Ask Slashdot: DOSBox, or DOS Box?
An anonymous reader writes "Are DOS game emulators like the highly-respectable DOSBox good enough now, or is there still no substitute for the real thing? Like a lot of Slashdotters I'm getting older and simplifying, which means tossing out old junk. Which means The Closet full of DOS era crap. And I'm hesitating — should I put aside things like the ISA SoundBlaster with gameport? Am I trashing things that some fellow geek somewhere truly needs to preserve the old games? Or can I now truck all this stuff down to recycling without a twinge of guilt? (Younger folk who didn't play DOOM at 320x200 should really resist commenting this time. Let the Mods keep them off our lawn.)"
Not for DOS-era games, but the ones that came just after that (Dungeon Keeper 2, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Need For Speed 4, etc)
I've spent a lot of hours trying to get those games running reliably in a Win7 environment with no success (compatibility mode, virtual machines, etc).
Get a copy of VirtualBox for Linux or Windows and fire up the ISO download. I doubt FreeDOS can read modern SATA drives so running it through a virtual machine is ideal. FreeDOS is the most MS DOS compatible OS. Not to mention with virtualbox you can share files with a shared folder. I do not know if the guestadditions for Dos are available as I use Linux under it but it is worth a shot for sure.
What is great about FreeDOS is it comes with a TCP/IP stack and gnu tools like gcc and a nice editor so you can at least transfer files and old files from the internet to it to have the old experience back if you want to run DOOM shareware for example
http://saveie6.com/
I think for oldschool PC gaming, emulation isn't quite there like it is for oldschool consoles. Yet. The amazing combinations of HIMEM.SYS, EMM386, and SMARTDRV (and clones, HyperDisk was truly amazing) that each developer chose to run with makes for lots of variables that emulation seems ill-equipped to deal with.
Actually, this makes DOSBox a much better solution, especially with a frontend (like D-Fend Reloaded or DBGL [warning, it's Java-based]) that maintains separate configuration files for each game. It also handles booters (those the-game-is-its-own-OS titles) quite well. Now you only have to configure the funky memory setups once for each game, and you're set.
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Alternate DOS extenders.
http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.com/2008/12/dos4gwexe-version-201a-and-alternative.html
The most useful appears to be DOS/32A, a drop-in replacement for DOS4GW.EXE .
http://dos32a.narechk.net/index_en.html
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Here are the reasons:
(1) As of the latest version (0.74) it runs every DOS game I've thrown at it. .conf file specifying the clock rate you want (max CPU if required), resolution, audio quality, and any other peripherals it could use.
(2) If a game needs more resources, simply increase the clock rate within DOSBox using a few hotkeys. Better yet, give the game a custom
(3) Sound support NEVER fails. It supports all typical DOS audio interfaces out of the box.
(4) Why boot another computer for DOS games when you can simply launch from your main rig?
(5) DOSBox is open source. It works on nearly everything.
While you can certainly install DOS on most VMs, the problem isn't the CPU being emulated, but other hardware. And even the CPU isn't being directly emulated in most VMs like VMware or VirtualBox, but rather utilising virtualization tech on your main CPU, but I digress - back to the hardware issues.
Sound in most VMs, for instance, is a virtualized AC97 or similar codec. Sure, there are some 16-bit and virtualized sound drivers (in VMware) for instance if you want to install original OS/2, but predominantly what we're talking about is a software-driven sound card as opposed to an entirely hardware based controller. If you've been around a while, you'll recall the difference between real modems and "win modems". One can be polled directly via its own interrupt/DMA (the real one), and the all the others sit on IRQ11 (not necessarily true, example) and wait for a higher-level driver to sort out what goes where.
DOS relied on "real" sound cards with addressable interrupts, etc, which simply aren't emulated in almost all VMs. DosBox does, emulating almost every function of the actual chipsets of SoundBlasters/Adlib/GUS/etc. It's exactly what real emulation is, as opposed to virtualization. VMware, VirtualPC, VirtualBox etc, provide virtualization. DosBox provides emulation. And there is a difference. :)
Likewise, CGA, EGA, VGA cards. Most virtualizers provide a VESA compatiable SVGA driver(think, an S3 Virge, or similar). DosBox actually emulates the individual functions and quirks of the different graphics adapter chipsets. CGA for instance, isn't just "4 color graphics, 16 color text". It's a very broad specification, and DosBox has to emulate how each aspect of that specification can be used, and abused, to provide the various graphical effects that programmers coaxed out of the original systems, and graphical trickery.
And most virtual machines don't support protected run-time mode, which you can look up. :) I've written enough already!
So yeah - you can run DOS on a VM. You just can't play many games on it. :)
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DOSbox provide MT-32 emulation, basically just pass the midi to the host OS midi driver.
DOS runs just fine on modern hardware.
Including modern hardware that doesn't have a floppy drive, doesn't have PS/2 or serial ports for the keyboard, the video card doesn't support VESA, and the hard drive uses 4 kB alignment instead of 512 byte alignment, and boots through EFI instead of BIOS?
The new systems that can run DOS out of the box without adding legacy hardware are becoming fewer every day.
It's not the instruction set, the PS2 has a wacky MIPS variant CPU....with 128 bit registers...and two powerful-for-time programmable vector units. And a very fast 2560 bit memory bus in there, and fast RDRAM. And a built in MPEG2 decoder (which is used for texture decompression for games) The thing's hardware is so complex it's probably very difficult for emulator makers.
If you have an Amiga, you can legally copy the Kickstart ROM to your emulator and use it. Or let someone else do it for you (i.e. download it).
Good point about nostalgia. I often play Atari VCS/2600 games even though they are technically inferior to the arcade or Colecovision versions. It's reliving my youth.
In my case I never owned a DOS computer until Windows98, so there's no nostalgia there. I prefer the C64 or Amiga versions for those old 80s/90s games.
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