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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).
...I still have an SB8 sitting in the drawer, right next to me.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
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).
I played Wolfenstein 3d at 320x200 -- on a good day!
Actually, I played Wolfenstein (2d) on a "flippy" disk in my day.
Get off my lawn . . . I've still got my C=64!
I am not a crackpot.
There isn't a true substitute for real hardware. There's no "soul" in emulation. If you don't want to keep the hardware, there's a lot of demand for vintage stuff out there. eBay would be a good start to sell it. Also try checking out communities like www.vintage-computer.com.
Bah! I had to press - a few times or it ran like crap on my 486DX2. Most of it was green marble you spoiled whippersnapper!
I've been thoroughly satisfied with everything I've picked up from GOG. However, I do believe that no matter how great DOSBox is, a DOS Box will always be slightly more compatible.
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.
Crap, I am pretty sure that I have some game(s) from Origin (possibly?) where the game was also it's own Operating System, requiring you to boot from the game disk to play...
If you need to play it, keep the DOS Box IMHO!
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 =)
I've got a very old futuremind sw powered mindmachine, which uses the parallel port and a SB AWE 32 for it's sound. Neither can be emulated. I was thinking of recording the sound and film the LED output, make an mp4 out of it which I can then play and watch on my OLED Z-800 HMD. No time to look into it unfortunately. The same goes for the hundreds of 80's en '90s tv shows on VHS which are gathering dust.
So I'm going to get modded down for this, but you shouldn't go back. I had memories of playing Battledrome over my modem and the game "in my head" was awesome. I loaded it back up, played it, and shattered the nice memories I had of that game - along with many others. I grew up with Doom, Blake Stone, Wolfenstein, etc. They were great in the past. You should not go back there.
However, Ultima 7 is still a great game. I verified that and there is an emulator that allows it to work great
With just a few exceptions, an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 or Amiga emulator is better than any DOS-based games. Better graphics, better sound, and so simple even an idiot could make it work (standard hardware == console level simplicity == plug'n'play). No need to mess with complicated DOS configurations trying to make the carn-sarn-flippy-flam VGA or soundblasthing work. (Grrrr.)
For the era 1985 to 95, almost every game looks and plays better Via the Amiga version. Now when you're talking Pentium-level games, which are post 1995, those will eclipse what an Amiga could do. But still - no need for DOSbox. Windows XP will do the trick, or Windows98 if XP fails for some reason.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Lacking any modern computer hardware until around 2007 or so, I feel I can relate to you, despite being one of the younger folks here. I grew up slaughtering hordes of Nazis in Wolf3D during the PS2 era, along with saving chicks with Duke Nukem, then getting my nerd on with Shadowland (I think thats what it was called :/). Anyway, I have a strong nostalgic love for these old DOS games, and I've yet to run into a problem playing them on DOSbox (Under Linux, just fyi). However, instead of tossing all that retro goodness, I'd put it up on ebay. You'd make a buck or two, and some other nostalgic fanboy will wet himself in joy. Everyone wins!
Ask Slashdot: Who has the biggest antiquated tech-wang?
retro lan party.
profit.
Isn't MS-DOS owned by ... MS? It's been years since I have run that, but I thought it was always there.
Ever try to program a Motorola commercial radio from the 80's? It turns out that you need some hardware from the era to make it work. DOSBox runs the program just fine, but it can't control the serial ports correctly, so the program cannot read or write radio configruations.
While one might argue that nothing is better than the real, bona-fide experience - like the sweet sound of a 28.8 modem connecting to your favorite BBS - or downloading DOOM in 4 individual 1 megabyte zips for the first time - there's little chance I'm inclined to go find hardware for the good old days, especially when a convenient and functional alternative exists.
The emulator brought back those days for me just fine, and there's still a selection of BBS nodes available over telnet today.
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.)
...I was just thinking about throwing away some obsolete crap myself. Anyone want an old UNIX box?
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
I still have my Roland MT-32, and would love to use it for those old DOS games that support it. Can anybody suggest how I'd go about doing that in DOSBox?
(Posted while logged in this time.)
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.
...and destroyed about 1000 floppy disks chock full of games, shareware, and what not. My grand plans were always to "show my kids" what I grew up with...but now they're almost out of school, and aren't the least bit interested.
So practicality trumped nostalgia. The disks, machines, drives, everything are gone forever. I still have pangs of guilt over the decision, but also remind myself that realistically I would never run anything under DOS again.
Plays well enough with an Xbox360 controller. (In fact, they are fantastic for most console emulation) Don't even bother trying to play N64 games with a Playstation controller, blecch.
DOS doesn't run in VMWare? I haven't tried, but I assumed you could setup a DOS O/S environment in VMWare like just about any other O/S that can run in VMWare.
The first reaction when I read "DOS Box" in the title was "Oh, they started producing the set-top box for denial of service attacks?" :)
Can I order it's cousin, DDOS Box?
Been going through many years of accumulated "stuff" and I found parts of my old Altair and a Heathkit. They brought an nostalgic moment, but out they went along with my old US Robotics modem and a box of old DOS games.
Can't believe that I hauled all that "stuff" around from place to place all these years.
I use DosBox purely for the sake of convenience, but nothing can really beat an actual oldschool DOS gaming PC.
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/
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
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
All the games you have on 5.25" floppy. Once you get all that from floppy to images, you can junk the box and bask in the glory of having one less physical system. As an added bonus, your spouse will thank you - or if you're still single, you'll have a slightly better chance of finding one.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I've used Dosbox to emulate all of my companies legacy dos stuff we have to use. It works find with XP.
Every game I've tried it with works though most of mine are text based Remember T-Zero? http://www.sparkynet.com/spag/t.html#tzero all of Infocom's games.
I still play the ones I've not solved yet, I have all my notes.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I don't play games very often these days. Anyway, I remember playing Rise Of The Triad on Virtual PC, and IIRC it did a much better job than DOSbox. It emulated a S3 graphics card.
That was quite a few years ago, when Virtual PC didn't belong to Microsoft yet, and I am not sure VMWare existed.
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.
DOSBox may personally work for you, but lots of people want the real thing for either pragmatic or nostalgic reasons. Giving the stuff to good home is much better than just junking it.
How many people remember astrotit? Blast those booobs! Condom for a shield!
Yeah, call me when PowerVR, Rendition, Virge and Glide emulation are all fully implemented.
As a 8 year user of DOSBox I still use old DOS machines.
The young 'free abandonware generation' is the greatest threat to DOS gaming preservation though. They often never grew up with it in the day and know usually nothing but live on some 'old is best' placebo with a pretend care and all those sites that up them never owned games themselves, it's usually regurgitation of warez rips. It becomes even more contradictory with GoG affiliations.
Like a lot of Slashdotters I'm getting older
No, like every single person on earth, you are getting older.
I still have the 486DX2/66 that I bought with my first summer job. 8 megs of RAM, SB16 and GUS side-by-side, 540 meg hard drive, and 2X Panasonic CDROM with a proprietary interface. It has a cheesy yellow 7-segment LED dispay on the front that displays the computer MHz and switches between 33 and 66 when you push the TURBO button. And I love the thing - the computer came from one of my favorite times in the computer scene, the demoscene was thriving as well as the MOD/S3M/IT community, games were a ton of fun, and the computer's loaded up with all of that good stuff.
Despite all of that, I haven't turned it on in over a year. It's a heck of a lot easier to start up DOSBox than drag the old computer out.
I traded my 99/4a for a 10 band stereo equalizer that was in use until about 4 months ago (and still works) and a CD player that I replaced the laser on once around '92 and then it finally died in 2000.... I'd say I probably got more out of the CD player/equalizer than I would have the 99/4a, even though I have fond memories.
Karnal
From my experience DOSBox works perfectly well for almost everything I have thrown at it. Games with which I had the most issues with are of the Win95/Win98 era ones, they are to new for DOSBox and to old to run properly in regular Windows. For those games I keep an old computer with Windows98 around. Sometimes there are of course other workaround, Wine can sometimes work better then regular Windows with old stuff, but sometimes the real hardware is just the easiest to get things up and running.
If you really want the modem experience, just get a router that has throttling abilities.
And I'll make the appropriate modem sound for you. "REEEEEErrrrrr kssshhhhhh KSSSSHHHHH!"
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
However, it seems like this stuff doesn't scale. DOS-era games, N64, PS1, all seem to work well -- but as soon as we hit the PS2, it seems like emulation isn't a viable option anymore, unless something's changed.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
for those in macworld BOXER is superb. i can do anything i want with ensoniq mirage disks on my current mac. i can also play oregon trail. i know i'm a git. it's ok.
I didnt think it mattered, until one day many years ago I uncovered my copy of Mechwarrior.
Not thinking anything of this then 10yo+ game, I dragged it out and threw it onto my thoroughly modern rig. Bear in mid this was last played on a 486, MAYBE an Pentium, and I was now throwing it onto a 2ghz Athlon XP rig (early P4 equivalent). I installed it and it seemed to go ok. I started the game, great!
lets stop and think back, shall we? Now if you recall playing, you would start the game, and there would be no enemies in sight. you would then start trudging across the field at a pace of about two steps per second. in about 90 seconds to 2 minutes, the first opponent would appear. after several minutes of guns and rockets, one of you would die. Not this time.
I started walking the mech, and it was more like a sprint... the mech was virtually RUNNING at about 4-6 steps per second and its barely controllable. next thing I know the other mechs are on top of me, and before I can get more than one shot off, a hail of rockets and guns and I am dead. The game literally lasted 20 seconds.
Apparently that particular title relied on the clock speed of the processor. the faster the processor, the faster the game would play. By attempting to run that game on a modern platform, I realized that there was no substitute for the original platform.
So yes, hang onto the hardware if you really want to game and get the original results.
DosBOX is used by many game makers when they re-release their old games.
If it is good enough for game makers...
I personally use DoxBOX to play some of the MANY Dos based games that I have.
There used to be a software implementation of the MT-32 that you could use as a plug-in for DOSBox, but Roland sued them to stop, since it used MT-32 samples. 'Cause, you know, Roland really cashes in on those late 80's consumer-grade sample sets.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"Or can I now truck all this stuff down to recycling without a twinge of guilt?" Nonono. Ebay. Also, just because a game will run in Dosbox doesn't mean that it'll satisfy your nostalgia. I've recently learned that the music in Tyrian sounds like crap in Dosbox (and the music in OpenTyrian sounds like crap on a modern soundcard), nothing at all like it sounded on my Awe32. Ditto for Dune 2 and my PAS16.
I don't have any mod points available. Somebody mod this up +Insightful. Recreating original sound is extremely difficult and has a more limited interest in providing equivalent emulation.
http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx
I'm a relatively new computer guy, compared to those in the situation of throwing out a closet full of 486s. Sure, I "used" my dad's 486, but I was in the range of 6 years old at the time, and didn't really learn any of it. First OS I had any real experience with was Windows 95 on a Celeron 300.
I've since acquired a pretty wide variety of computer knowledge - I've run every version of Windows, several Linux distros, and a BSD, I've built computers and networks from the ground up, learned a score of programming languages, etc. And as a gamer, I've played dozens of the old games via DOSBox - beating Doom on Nightmare difficulty remains one of my greatest gaming feats.
However, I've always felt I lacked knowledge of computer history. Sure, I know about DR-DOS, the x86 wars, and the conventional/extended memory weirdness, but I never experienced any of it. Would it be worthwhile, even just as a learning experience, to set up and use an authentic DOS-era system? Or would some sort of simpler method be more worthwhile - running it in a VM, or on modern hardware, perhaps? Or is the entire thing entirely unnecessary?
You'll be missing out on the sharp glow of an EGA/CGA CRT& perhaps the static sound of an original SB16 but that's about it. Only thing I haven't seen DOSBox run is Windows 1.01, & that was a while back when I checked.
Whipersnapper, GS? how an Apple II! Wolfenstein was first on and Apple II in 2D? Take that Whippersnapper!
Whenever work was slow, we'd fire up Doom on the Sparc Station 10's and 20's. It was one of the very few games available for Sun machines. Whenever I got my own SS10 at home, I did fire up Doom a time or two but never really got into it. I'm not much of a gamer. I think Quake was available for Sun when it came out, too but I never ran it.
All that stuff about emulators is just a smokescreen. You're not playing your legacy DOS stuff now, you won't tomorrow, and the day after that you'll be dead.
My god man, who cares if he gets rid of the stuff if he's only got around 2 days to live!!!???
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
For those of you from the DOS era, you might want to consider backing up those old floppies ASAP if you do want to keep them. I pulled out some 15 and 20 year old 3.5" floppies recently. A good percentage of the 15 year floppies had errors and most of the 20 year old floppies did. These were disks stored in a cool, dry place.
My PC days go back to 1988 and PC-DOS 3. I still love to play some of those old games, but honestly DOSBox is the way to go.
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?
I had a 'idiot' moment about 8-9 years ago and trashed all my old IBM compatible stuff. I can honestly say that I've regretted it ever since. I had several different Tandy 1000 boards, a bunch of 486, 386, and a couple of 286 boards. I even trashed on old Packard Bell board that made up my first computer I ever put together myself. However, nostalgia isn't really the topic of this post I guess so enough of that. Yeah, perhaps it was a hassle dealing with hardware conflicts and the like but DOS VM's are no picnic in the park either. I had a painful moment about a year ago trying to get Win 3.1 VM going. It worked eventually but wow! I never had that much trouble with original hardware. I love virtualization but sometimes you can't beat the original. Dang, now I got the itch...gotta go check out old PC stuff on eBay...
It's a chicken & egg thing.
I think we vaguely knew that the hardware sukked, and therefore the software was the desperate lights of creativity funnelled through crappy hardware. It was about watching the future unfold, but knowing it took some twenty sad years of waiting for things to really kick into gear. Look at the modern games... they feel all fleshed out. Yeah, you can discuss minor rendering issues, but modern hardware runs anything.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Pirates! Gold and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe are both fully supported and working with DOSBox.
Most of the time, emulators can support most of what is out there.
Sure you might find something that requires very specific hardware, but that very specific hardware won't play every game from that era either. And a modern PC with emulators can play games from all kinds of eras.
For those struggling with getting old games running in Windows 7 (without emulators), I'd like to point you to this fantastic DirectDraw hack.
http://sol.gfxile.net/ddhack/
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
for DOS Box. I got lucky and found an old classic Pentium laptop with a fair amount of RAM. I use it to play almost all of my old favorites, and with a few small old skool software purchases (register your copy of Moslo), I could run even old EGA era games (classic Mechwarrior!). Add a couple emulators and all the old cartridges I had laying around to copy to disk, I had a virtual arcade machine. So I got an old serial joystick and managed to resurrect the driver disk. The best part is the fact that it has a single USB port to use an old 802.11b wireless adapter. I can still use it to check my email since it's just powerful enough to run a minimal retro Linux distro dual booted with DOS. Don't throw out your hardware if you can re-purpose it! And if you can't find a purpose for it, give it to the poor or better yet; take it apart and see what it looks like on the inside.
Please remember to unplug it first, though.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
DOSbox provide MT-32 emulation, basically just pass the midi to the host OS midi driver.
I'd suggest perhaps it was set up wrong, or you were running a previous version of DosBox. Protected mode was only added a few versions (although, years) ago, for instance. I play both of these games with no issues on DosBox. It's also possible the abandonware version you downloaded (just guessing here, don't take offense! :)) wasn't as good as installing from original disk images.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Sell your old stuff on ebay, and post about it on http://vogons.zetafleet.com./ That's the DOSBox forum. If you've got any Roland sound cards, those guys will pay a premium. The Roland stuff = one of the few things that wasn't emulated 100%, the last time I checked.
Everyone I've ever talked to about old DOS games recommends DOSBox highly, because adjusting the processor speed for old games on the fly is a lot easier than fighting with jumpers.
Check this topic: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=25606&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0&sid=c883e111edfabdab8f3553f8f8a93d7f They already have an executable compiled for anyone to test out. Plus you can use it to run the original voodoo drivers for windows 95 - 98 for hardware accelerated Direct 3D games. Here's a gallery of 3DMark '99, using the DirectX 6 benchmark in dosbox: http://imgur.com/a/sBwz3#XbibR You can download the compiled test executable (dosbox_mingw.zip) on this page in the forums: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=25606&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=340&sid=c77daab3a3561f5a676e32a91b2c97f5
I've got two 80486 era and older rigs for my real old games, and ~20 P1-P3 era rigs for spare parts, with plenty of extra ISA/PCI cards if people I know need them. I've got the room, and am in no rush to throw away perfectly good computers that I can show to my nephew when he gets old enough. We had an old Tandy when I was growing up and it fascinated me to no end until it got tossed when I was entering 3rd grade, and it took another 5 years before I had access to another rig.
I can get high color in dosbox but VPC crashes less in windows 3.1 but it only has 256 colors.
If some one makes an equivalent for DOS (or perhaps HTML5) that can run old games I suppose that would solve all these issues.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
Doom and Quake were great, and I fondly remember using the Quake network testing tool on my SGI workstation.
Like many games of the era, the system speed directly affected game play - how high you went in a rocket jump, for example, depends on your frame rate. With today's 4 GHz CPUs, you'll probably reach escape velocity unless you use emulation that throttles the CPU throughput.
My Nintendo Zapper won't work with anything but a CRT... About the only reason I keep a CRT TV around (well that, and it gets the job done for the crappy TV we get on cable)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I've a Sun Ultra 30 I'd be willing to offer anyone who wants to truck it away. It works (OpenBSD, Splack (Slackware for sparc), Linux, ...). I don't need it.
I've a couple of IBM MicroChannel pizza boxes too that you're welcome to, as long as you promise to never let 'em see the net. Install CDs included.
Lat/long Calgary, AB, Canada, you pay shipping or pick up.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
DEC i386SL20 laptop with 4 megs of ram 256k vga and a upgraded 2 gig hard disk (pc dos 2000)
Fijitsu lifebook, P150MMX 80MB ram 1mb svga, 20 gig disk and a sub mini form factor (12 inch 800x600 screen, ConnochaetOS)
At least you can hook up an MT-32 straight to MIDI. If you make DOSBox pass through your MIDI interface you're set. No such luck for me with my LAPC-I, which you're supposed to plug into an ISA slot (try finding an ISA slot on motherboards these days).
There's some projects out there that try to emulate the MT-32 / CM-32L / LAPC-I - even on linux. But to be honest, I found them somewhat lacking.
I've used Dosbox to emulate all of my companies legacy dos stuff we have to use.
I did that with some software to upload to a CNC controller for a sharpening machine. It wouldn't run on newer hardware but I got it running under dosbox... eventually. It turns out that it was using FCB's which were kind of obsolete when DOS2.0 came out and their support wasn't quite complete under DOSBox so some patching was required.
But at least now they can use the software on anything with a serial port, as opposed to hardware you just can't get anymore.
Are any old IBM AT computer cases and monitors. I'm sure there's a market there in the mod scene. Slap in a 6 core MB with badass graphics and convert the 5-1/4" floppy to a blueray player.... I'd want that. Especially if I could get the LCD panel I glued inside the monitor to display useful stuff in 80/25 ASCII chars in highlighted green on a black background.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Just buy some keyboard stickers, and make it match the mappings in your emulator (usually configurable)
http://www.4keyboard.com/commodore64nontransparentkeyboardstickers-p-141.html
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
$40? I believe that I am in. Thank you!
Well today i really regret tossing my C64 and my whole game collection.
I really wish i kept that stuff.
There is no such thing as a perfect OPL2/3 emulator, especially not the one in DOSBox (which introduces odd jarring notes in Wolf, for example). That's why I've kept two machines going for old DOS games: a 486DX4/100 laptop (with ESS built in - uses OPL3) and a Pentium 3 450 with an AWE64. Between them, they can play practically any DOS game I care to throw at them and - using my old Iiyama Vision Master Pro monitor the experience is pretty much exactly as it was 12 years ago.
I've got Windows 95 on the laptop and a 98SE / Windows 2000 dual boot on the desktop - exactly the same installs as I had when I retired that machine as my main computer. The 98SE install boots into DOS 7.1 by default and has 624KB of free base RAM. I used to enjoy juggling the order that drivers were loaded high to try and squeeze out a few extra KB of RAM!
The problem for peripherals is not the emulator, but the host environment. Windows 7 has no gameport support at all (I've even tried replicating hacks that people did in Vista to put back gameport support, with no luck). That means the Sidewinder 3D and the Logitech Cyberman 2 (it even makes the cover of Boot magazine in 1997) are doorstops, which makes your Descent experience a little less 3D when you can't use the 3D controllers you already have.
I can assure you that emulation and virtualization can easily be better than the real thing. As long as I have spent looking at the tech market the single worst part of the tech sector is worrying about backwards compatibility when they are designing hardware and software. We should never let this happen, we should always move forward and let emulation take care of our backwards compatibility concerns. Take the zsnes emulator, it is easily better than having the real thing. Why? Because on the real thing you will never get things like Netplay (some versions) where you can play Street Fighter II with someone a state away OR the ability to use AA and Aniso with graphic plugins! The simple short story is that a good emulator can make something better than it was on its original hardware because software can hijack its code mid stream and improve it without harming/altering the original code!
DOSbox has started to be better than the original thing already, its main problem is still working out compatibility. Now that I can run games like Master of Magic (shows my age) in pure RAM I do not experience the same lag later in the game when opponents have developed.
A well programmed emulator will destroy the original hardware in quality and functionality HANDS DOWN!
I've given away, sold or scrapped more old computers than I care to think about. In the end, it's what's in your head, what you have done and what you have made that matters. Letting other people's creations define you is something I find inadequate.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Its not only vintage but also wise to keep hardware just in case. Also, there are things software cant do - try playing to original, pc version star control 2, by using pc speaker only for example - and no - it wont bleep - it used mod based music, and that small speaker, even without a soundcard, could create wonders and shivers in your spine. so much that when i actually bought a sound card (sb16) at last, i didnt feel the difference much because i was used to hearing good sound from pc speaker from star control 2.
Read radical news here
Description refers to DOSBox as a "game emulator" which is not entirely true.
DOSBox. Simples.
There's no question about it. You can spend the bucks and the time in setting up an old-fashioned DOS box, and play with the hardware set-up and AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS configurations until you get it right; or you could download DOSBox, use one of its many "presets" of virtual hardware to run many (MANY) popular vintage games and spend your time and bucks on the games themselves.
Moreover, with a physical DOS box, you need the full set of hardware, and dedicated attention to it: You have to switch over to the box (monitor and keyboard) and load up your games. With DOSBox, you can just double-click your icons from within your regular desktop or workstation, or run a DOS "Console" window alongside your Twitbook and MyFace sessions.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
...thread seems to be trying to run Window's games under later Window's operating system. Any modern operating system should have no problems emulating hardware environments from the 90's unless they were purposely designed not to do so.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
...hardware from emulating 1990's hardware with ease, and what other than sabotage prevent it from doing so?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
There is in fact a project in active development that tries to emulate the MT-32 in software (usable on Linux/Windows): munt
You still need the original MT-32 ROMs though, which might be under copyright in your country. You can extract them from a MT-32 unit or from google. :)
In my opinion, it sounds pretty good, although its been a while that I've played around with it and I've never actually heard a real MT-32... To anybody who owns one: Does it still work through e.g. DOSBox or are there occasional hiccups with games? Is there other fun stuff you can do with such a unit besides games (e.g. interesting MIDIs)?
Has anyone managed to get Red Alert multiplayer working under emulation?
It needs Win95/98 with IPX networking.
I Honestly don't see a problem using an xbox 360 or even a PS2 controller on that game. It seems to work well if you set it up using the dual analog scheme that was later applied to Winder Waker and Twilight Princess (with gamecube controller) whereby left analog moves and right stick for yellow buttons. You still get the fluid aiming control the original had (as opposed to playing on a keyboard which is a nightmare for aiming) and the both the PS2 and Xbox 360 controllers have more than enough buttons to accommodate this game. Not only that, but as an added bonus the rumble pack is emulated and needless to say, both the xbox 360 and dualshock 2 rumble features are WAAAAY better than the mild vibration the N64 hardware provided.
In terms of Dosbox, I'd say "emulator" for the same reasons. Controllers have evolved quite a bit in terms of possible functionality, comfort, and the ability to completely remap controls for an old game (which I've done using Xpadder to map keyboard keys rather than the native gamepad support DosBox has). Like the above poster said, it's only a problem when a specialized controller is required and the same feel cannot be replicated without it. The other main drawback is that emulators aren't perfect so not all games will work and it goes without saying that the system requirements are MUCH MUCH higher than the original game itself.
Lastly, nobody mentioned that you can apply modern day pixel-shaders onto these old games making them look better than ever (unless you are a purist and LOVE the original pixel-y feel which is fair enough). You should see what even Windows 3.1 looks like with HQ4x on it. It's surreal.
As an avid fan of all things Apogee, I can safely say that using DOSBox is like a dream come true. It is very easy to use and is compatible with just about everything. Not to mention you can utilize things like the Modem and IPX emulation so you can play your favorite old games over the net. DOSBox is emulation of an old platform for a modern world. Using an old DOS machine is cool too if you have the time trying to figure out what IRQ your soundcard uses, but save yourself the hassle of SET BLASTER this and that, and just use DOSBox. Plus you can still customize your AUTOEXEC.BAT. Nothing like creating a nice custom batch menu for easily loading your favorite games and apps.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
The best thing about going back and playing old DOS games like MOO and MoM in DOSBox with a modern computer is that you can now get for free very high quality midi soundfonts that sound better than the commercial studio level equipment back in the day. My favorite is the 240 MB SGM-v2.01. It sounds way better than even a real roland sound canvas, which I always wish I had back in the day.
I grew up gaming since the beginning. And I love my old computers & games. Not going to talk about C64, Snes, xbox, or any of the other crap that people started talking about here, that has nothing to do with dosbox.
While some systems are easy to find, I don't find old PC's (486 and lower) very easy to find. Let alone a decent monitor that can do 320x200 vga modes (or even ega/cga modes). And honestly, if you don't have the correct monitor, you might as well be running dosbox. (of course, I have 3 Commodore monitors, which can do CGA for sure, maybe ega modes, but I also have a EGA monitor, Sony cpd-1302).
Honestly, doing a Dos Box isn't that practical these days. Not for gaming. Gamepads are way better these days. You can make the dosbox look decent on modern monitors by using different types of filters. Speed of the games can be adjusted. You don't have to have 20 million different settings for booting in your config.sys & autoexec.bat. Dosbox can have different settings for the game, done automatticly when you click on the game icon (if you setup dosbox to run auto like that).
Be seeing you...
I'm just old enough to have grown up playing DooM at 320x200, although that doesn't mean I wouldn't choose to play it at 1920x1080 with hardware acceleration; it's about the gameplay, not the graphics. Carmack is a genius, but...
DosBox can fairly faithfully reproduce the execution and the audio of the title, but input and display might not be quite up to spec. For input, I mean older gaming peripherals. Often just the keyboard; you can buy modern USB versions of the IBM model M keyboard, which should satisfy that part at least.
Display is a bit trickier. If you want a really authentic experience, you're going to need to plug a CRT monitor into your modern computer. Not impossible, and since computers back then tended to have fairly small screens, not necessarily all that space consuming either. Grab an old 15" CRT and you're set.
If you can't do that, there are still... possibilities. I don't know about DosBox specifically, but there have been many projects out there that aim to reproduce the feel of playing on an old CRT on modern displays. The higher resolution your modern display the better. There's hardware devices that intentionally fudge the video signal to reproduce classic effects (add scanlines, slightly blur on the horizontal), and there are software filters out there that go much further, trying to actually reproduce the CRT sub-pixel pattern on modern LCDs. One example can be found here: http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml
Botnet Cloud-in-a-box.
Bring your buzzwords to the BlackHat Briefings, with us.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
In time, there will be a market for this stuff. Everyone will have already destroyed what they kept for exactly the wrong amount of time (so long that it got in the way, but not long enough for everyone else to have destroyed their copies), and if you have things like 5.25" drives that actually work they'll be valuable to those who need them.
It's like any item. In the 70s I could have picked up a bunch of awesome '60s era muscle cars for cheap and kept them in a barn somewhere. These days those old cars are worth more than new cars.
If you don't have the capacity to store a lot of stuff easily, then ditch the computer stuff. If you do, and don't mind having worthless crap around for another 20 years before it's valuable, then by all means keep it.
My dear friend just dropped by to return the computer I let her have while she was finishing her degree..... That was the fall of 1994 and I forgot all about it. How awesome it was to see this old machine again all original Zeos 486-66 DX/2 with a 90MHz Pentium upgrade, and a Diamond SpeedStar Pro with 2MB and a 300MB HDD that if I remember cost me an extra $300. I couldn't believe the deal I was getting! "A hundred bucks per megabyte!". She even dropped off all the 51/4" floppies of the DOS/Windows install and Lotus AmiPro. And the public beta of Win95 - Ha! But the true fun is the DOS 6 and all my old DOS games still on it and running, Blake Stone, Doom (of course), Rise of the Triad, System Shock, etc. I've yet to find an emulator on my Mac that will recognize the System Shock CDROM. There goes an entire day and night...... yay!
change it.
It is better to use nothing at all if you cannot use an emulator. Old hardware is just clutter - toys that just haven't been recycled but aught to be. Virtualization and Emulation are superior in every way. If you need very specific hardware and your time / money are of no concern, feel free to keep old stuff - but only as a toy. In the case of a business app, I would still recommend virtualization. I am however quite shocked to hear that a client is still running 16-bit DOS applications. I cannot think of a single good reason not to upgrade unless it is tied to some sort of machinery (as at an older factory or something).
PCs have gotten so much faster now that even full hardware emulation can outrun the machines the games were designed for. The actual controllers might be useful if they're in good working order since they are a matter of feel, but things like old soundcards can be fully emulated.
I pieced out all of my dos boxes and got the best one I could out of all of the components and now just keep one around.
The world is how you make it
This should bring back some memories...
www.virtualapple.org/
Modern opensource DOS implementation FreeDOS can be customised.
So EFI booting won't be that much difficult (there's already some proof of concept work on FreeDOS somewhere on the Net. Will probably get finished and released stable once pure EFI only machines start to be widespread).
And 4k sectors aren't that difficult (and in fact are completely supported by recent FreeDOS kernels and FDisks. Don't remember if its beta or stable, though).
Floppy drive, PS/2, Serial and the like :
They aren't really needed for DOS nor for DOS games.
USB keyboards/mice :
Most modern chipsets can emulate legacy peripherals, so software using low-level access can still use modern USB peripherals.
VESA:
It's still currently required to be able to boot into BIOS. If 100% pure EFI GPU arises, it won't be that difficult to run a VESA-to-EFI wrapper. Exactly like the hardware dependant VESA wrappers that we used back then, before VESA started to ship on GPU's BIOS.
The only main problem would be sound cards and game ports :
Most old games target specific hardware (Sound Blaster, and Analog port most of the time), and most of modern hardware doesn't feature Sound Blaster back compatibility mode, only AC'97 at best. Similarily USB chipset don't feature Analog-Port emulation only Mouse/Keyboard, due to the weirdness of that one.
Though at some point in the future, chipsets will probably drop legacy hardware compatibility emulation mode. And then all the games accessing it directly will be lost to run on real non emulated hardware.
Meanwhile, regular software accessing hardware through regular API (INTs) could still be brought to run. Only with more and more wrapper and layer being added to still provide the same APIs on BIOS-less hardware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In the special case of MT-32 in DOS games, DOSBox offers you 3 choices :
- Pipe the MIDI link from the emulator to your MIDI-out, in turn connected to a real device. 100% pure MT-32 experience, including the silly message on the LCD.
- Pipe the MIDI link form the emulator to the sound card's MIDI synth (most of the time, Wavetable synthesis. Or software synthesiser). If the game doesn't use too much MT-32 specific SysEx, it's possible to remap the original MT32 instruments to modern General Midi. Good enough approximation. But if the games rely heavily on uploading new instrument definitions to the MT32, you're stuck. (So basically, it's a bad solution for most Sierra and LucasArt games, up until the point when General Midi started to be the new standard)
- Last but not least : the latest versions of DosBox started to integrate MT32 emulation. Given ROMs of the original MT32 or LAPC, the emulators tries to produce the original feel, including SysEx definitions of new instruments. (The only drawback is that the last stage of the MT-32 is analogue and slightly harder to emulate, and I don't remember if the emulator also emulates the LCD output).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's more elaborate than I've had to do. I've been lucky none of the stuff has needed special patching.
Did you release the patches?
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
That's more elaborate than I've had to do. I've been lucky none of the stuff has needed special patching.
Yeah. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find it didn't work straight away.
Did you release the patches?
I worked with the guys on the forum to work out where the problem was and they posted a more general version of my patch so I assume they are in the latest release already.
The real thing has always *sucked*.. i'm talking about conventional memory requirements, EMS versus XMS, command line arguments to start every game.. and the weird compatibility uissues with video cards , hardware yadda yadda.. DosBOX has NONEW of these.. Are we all getting so frikkin old and feeble in the brain that we *ever* want to return to that nightmare???
I would keep it around. I have a 486 era machine I am not using right now, but probably will at some point. I don't think that Ultima 8 pagan is quite emulated, although I know there was a project to do it. Also, as nice as Exult is, it still isn't quite the same as playing the original Ultima 7 and 7.5. I'm not sure if you could emulate windows 3.1 either, and I do have fond memories of it, particularly that early paint program, even though I am using GIMP now. A lot of the nostelgia with me, isn't just playing games and stuff that I did back in the day, but going back to parts of the era I missed. For instance, I recently found out the history of some of the code in a project that I am working on today, I found some of the original coders from 1992 talking about it on old defunct email addresses. Sometimes I wish I could go back to 1992, and instead of wasting my time trying to beat Drakkhen (that I never did beat btw), spend time learning X11 and the Athena Widget set back what it was actually cool and I could find other people willing to talk about it. www.wograld.org
I play all my favorite DOS games on 64 bit Linux with dosbox. No video or Audio issues. Games I platy: Ultima 3,4,5 and 6. Might and Magic 3,4. Pool of Radiance, Wizardry6, Bards Tale 2,3, Dungeon Master 2. Though I did need to tweek the conf file for each game, so I launch DosBox with the -conf flag pointing to the conf file for the game I want to play, usually in a launcher on the desktop, the conf file then maps the appropreate directory to C and initates the correct midi port and executes the game. By adding the exit command at the end of the conf file, dosbox closes when I exit the game. I also use Frotz Z-Machine to play my text interactive games: http://frotz.sourceforge.net/ Also, I hold on to all my old software and games, including the Boxes. I believe that they will be worth something to collectors some day. At my old job I found a bunch of unopened DOS 5, windows 3 and NT 3 boxes and scooped them up, with permission. My boss thought I was crazy, but I think I may have a possible collectors dream. I also have original Comador 64 and Amiga games in good condition, still in box. WatCom Basic OS2/WARP unopened. Borland C, unopened. I wish I had held onto my old hardware though. I think it would be cool to still have my old ZX 81: Vid of ZX 81 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X92xvLlbnVg&feature=feedlik , Comador 64 and Amiga. Even an old 386 would be cool to have kicking around. P.S. Does anyone know why all the text in my posts gets skished up into one block, and loses all my carriage returns?
The purpose of all arguments, is to change reality.
If you have the older hardware, why not use it? Back everything up on disk (hard drives and DVD-ROM if you can) to preserve it all, and play on the original computers for a more retro experience to your gaming. At least, I do that, because I'm a bit of a retro freak. :P
Of course, if a game doesn't work on that old computer, you'll probably have to go with DOSBox instead.
I am not devoid of humor.