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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.)"
We're better off with DOSbox, emulators tend to last a lot longer than physical hardware. Plus we can just keep layering emulators (DOSBox in Linux in VMware on top of whatever comes next).
The more physical things we can get rid of, the better
I for one I'm quite happy to not have a closet full of 286/386/486/PIIs/PIIIs/etc boxes and peripherals... so much less stuff to store/maintain/move. It also makes you look like a sane person when you bring a woman home =)
For every piece of old hardware I have, I can usually find a home for it. I have people asking me for leads on stuff like AT power supplies and boards that aren't all PCI/PCI-E.
So before you chuck that old DOS box away, make sure there's not some other collector who would like it. :)
(Hugs MSD SD2.)
If nothing else, figure the space in your home is $150-$200 / sf. Keeping junk isn't free, it costs money. Declutter and you may feel less desire for a larger place.
Yeah, the games designed for Win98 just don't work well on anything after XP. Most don't work that well in XP, either.
Here's a fantastic rig for Win98 games:
1GHz P3 on an AOpen A34 motherboard
256MB RAM
GeForce 2 AGP video card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz audio card
Intel Pro/100 Ethernet
500GB HD
Running Windows 98SE with the unofficial 2.1a service pack, DX9, MP9, IE6, and KernelEx to run more recent browsers.
The nice thing about the above hardware combo is that it was supported until fairly recently - most of the kinks have been worked out in the supported games. The GeForce 2 has enough horsepower to play nearly every 98 era game at 1024x768 res as fast as your monitor can refresh.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I've got a similar issue, but with old business applications instead of games.
I have clients that are still running 16-bit DOS applications for thousands of users (don't ask), and are having real trouble with them because support for 32-bit operating systems is slowly but surely disappearing. For example, terminal services requires "Server" editions of Windows, but since 2008 R2, there are no more 32-bit editions, and the 64-bit editions cannot run 16-bit applications at all.
I've been looking for a DOS emulator for 64-bit Windows with decent performance that has the same (or similar) features as the emulation in 32-bit Windows editions, such as cut & paste, transparent access drives, etc...
The DOS emulators designed for games behave more like VMware: they emulate a physical machine with peripherals. What I'm looking for is more of a backwards-compatibility layer like the NTVDM system that can be found in 32-bit editions of Windows, but capable of running under a 64-bit OS.
Anyone here know of something like that?
PS2 emulation is coming right along. PCSX2 just released a new stable build at the beginning of the month, and something like 65% of games are supposed to be playable. Yes, it takes a bit beefier machine to run than an old N64 emulator, but it works well on any recent machine with a decent GPU. My Core2Duo E8400 with an 8800GTX has no problems, and it's hardly cutting edge these days.
I don't believe that at all. The PS2 is hard to emulate because it's an exotic design intended for a particular programming style (stream processing) and it took people a long time to understand it. It was also designed to be as powerful as possible for the price, so it sacrifices things like regularity and robustness.
I used to do the 'intro to PS2' chat for new programmers and I would draw the architecture diagram on the whiteboard, starting with the main bus and CPU. They'd be fine at first and as more and more boxes appeared they would get steadily more apprehensive. There are 7 big black books which describe the PS2 hardware, sometimes quite tersely, and there is much, much more you need to know to get the best out of it. I am not surprised at all that emulation has proven a tall order.
Graham