Slashdot Mirror
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 =)
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!
...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.
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/
Mod parent up! When it comes to recreating the sound-effects and music of the classics, nothing beats the original hardware... Chiptune is officially a thing now.
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
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.
You know, back then, we always used the cracked version, even for software we owned. I don't know what could be more authentic. Dumb hipsters.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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