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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).
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).
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 =)
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!
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.
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.
...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.
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.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
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
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. :)
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
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.
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.
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
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.
Pirates! Gold and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe are both fully supported and working with DOSBox.
DOSbox provide MT-32 emulation, basically just pass the midi to the host OS midi driver.
No, they were just using more complicated processors because more complicated processors were available. Follow the generic rise: 4bit->8bit->16bit->32bit->64bit->DesktopCPU + DesktopGPU. That final step's the real killer.
Well... except for the PS3. Thing's so fucking terrible to code for that IBM even gave up on their promised "octopiler" compiler for it and said they could never ever get the damn thing to work. It's one big thing holding the PS3 back from "theoretical power" as opposed to what can actually be done with it - the other thing being that it's permanently stuck in 3rd place for this generation, and nobody in their right mind except for Sony's in-house developers will do anything as mind-blowingly stupid as to fail to code and release Xbox360 port that looks and plays just as good. Most of the time, the Xbox360 is the primary code and the PS3 version is the port.
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.
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
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)?
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