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DOS Emulation Arrives For the Raspberry Pi
An anonymous reader writes "Homebrew Coder Pate has released a DOS Emulator for the Raspberry Pi. Originally released for the Nintendo DS and Android, the emulator currently can emulate a CPU: 80486 processor, including the protected mode features (for running DOS4GW games) but without virtual memory support. The emulation runs at a speed around that of a 20MHz 80486 (which equals a 40MHz 80386) machine. It has support for Super VGA graphics, Soundblaster 2.0, Memory, USB keyboard and mouse. Perfect for playing old classics such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and Theme Park."
Other than as a proof of concept is there any fundamental use for this facility?
Does anybody want to play Doom like it was 1993?
Can someone explain why you wouldn't be able to run DOSBox? Isn't this reinventing the wheel?
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How about the mid 90s FPS Duke Nukem Forever? Oh wait a sec...
I heard you liked DOS.
I remember LAN gaming Duke3d in my dorm on a 75Mhz 486 Toshiba laptop and my frame rates didn't always equal my compatriots who had faster Packard Bells and the like. I find it difficult to believe a 20Mhz 486 would have decently run Duke3d. Oh the other hand, maybe my frame glitches were due to the parallel port to Ethernet adapter I was using at the time...
My main desktop machine for poking about with sound is a Dell Optiplex 755 with a "laptop-style" floppy drive. The Intel floppy controller works really well for weirdass formats like the Ensoniq Mirage with its mixed sector lengths, and disks like the Roland S-series ones where the low-level format is "normal" but the filesystem is weird.
What old musical equipment do you need to create floppies for?
In fact, Duke needed minimum a 66MHz 486 (or was that Shadow Warrior?)
And you'd only be able to run DOOM in low-detail mode emulating a 20MHz 486, as a 33 MHz 386 could barely run it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Many of us have played through the DOS classics a million times and could just grab a PC with DOSBox if we wanted to play any DOS games.
So my question is: where did the author find all the motivation to create this? It's not really a weekend project either.
Okay, this "now on the Raspberry Pi" craze is getting really ridiculous.
No, it isn't. Let's have it become a stable platform with a flourishing software and hardware ecosystem.
Does this mean it would run OS/X as well? I mean, I must have hung onto that stack of install floppies for a reason right? I just can't bring myself to throw it all away.... :P
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Dosbox, an emulation of both the 16-bit x86 chip and DOS, has been around for years and is aimed at running old games. Dosbox has been ported to just about everything under the sun in recent years including my phone.
How does this emulator differ from dosbox? Is it faster, better graphics or fidelity? One nice thing is that it appears to be able to run any version of DOS you want, whereas Dosbox has its own DOS-compatible OS built in. Can you run FreeDOS on it?
Not really so much that it's DOS, but just the innovation. The RPI has given people a platform to experiment, innovate and just have fun. It's refreshing to know there are people out there using their minds for things other than mass-media termination points.
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Will it run? Or is the emulator not done yet?
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The only ones that I remember being ubiquitous were CWSDPMI and DOS/4GW, mainly because they came bundled with compilers of the time. The only other one I recognise the name of is GO32, but that's a CWSDPMI predecessor by the looks of it.
And DOS/4GW was indeed bundled into DOOM.
I think the claims of the capabilities are stretching it a bit in terms of sheer processor power, the features needed in the virtual machine it runs, and the amount of usefulness there would be in emulating games at pathetic rates that even your smartphone can out-do.
No, it isn't. Let's have it become a stable platform with a flourishing software and hardware ecosystem.
You can run all the popular Linux distributions on it; with a pretty full Desktop experience (all the packages are there performance is generally pretty good). So I think we are there.
The trouble is the ARM world is evolving pretty fast. The Raspberry Pi is so much faster than the Kirkwood based stuff that was filling the same niche spaces before it. I am really glad that $35 + a little extra for some storage and a power supply gets you a computer that is "good enough for most projects" that is great.
I don't want to see things get so tied to the RasPi that big FOSS projects get to tightly coupled to it. Because just like the Pi has replaced the Kirkwood stuffs; someone is going to put together an even more powerful, even more efficient just as cheap ARM SoC together sooner rather than later. I'd like to see the community benefit as greatly.
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Regardless of your dismissiveness, it is a scene that is self-sustaining. Nothing you do to try to engage in petty insults will change that really.
That's kind of the point of this whole article.
You naysayers are pretty irrelevant. This stuff will continue despite your attempts to be a big fat wet blanket.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Theme Park and Jurrassic Park are seriously the best games ever made, lol. Oh and I believe the original Exile III from Spiderweb Software was also originally DOS so that's up there with them. It was like Skyrim with 16x16 2D characters but just as good of a quest structure and storyline.
As a Unix user, I expect to be able to run any software I own on any microprocessor architecture I can manage to get my hands on. That's just the way that Unix is supposed to work.
If I get a PI, then I expect it to run all of my non-commercial software that has source code available for it.
Just comes with the territory.
mysql, apache, mate, firefox, slrn, mame, mythtv, gimp, sane, libreoffice, xbill... pretty much everything except my Loki and Steam games.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yes, a lot of people enjoy playing retro DOS games, especially LucasArts adventure games.
If your definition of "a lot" is a number less than 1000 then sure.
With only 1000 users, gog.com could not exist. AFAICT old dos games represent most of their business.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Old adventure games, especially the LucasArts ones, have such humour in them that it's really hard to find equal games in 2013.
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-VOGONS /vr/ (retro games)
-GoG
-4chan
-Abandonia
All active DOS gaming communities.
There are certainly more than 1000 people playing DOS games today.
What's the deal with games = 3D shooters these days? Except for a few real gems (System Shock spring to mind) a shooter is a shooter, and modern hardware means modern games (mostly) have smoother frame rates and prettier graphics than their predecessors, while the gameplay remains mostly unchanged. Well, okay, I'll admit gameplay-oriented level design seemed to be far more creative in the old days before all that creative effort got redirected into making things pretty rather than interesting.
For my money the real value of emulation is the gems that have never really been surpassed and don't benefit dramatically from better graphics, and genres that have largely been abandoned. Shadow Magic was a lot prettier than Master of Magic, but focused on a far more tactical game completely lacking in grand strategy. Galactic Civilizations did a far better job of reinventing Master of Orion, but added so much detail that a casual afternoon of galactic conquest is hardly an option. Dungeon crawlers have all but disappeared, replaced by mindless hack-and-slashes like Diablo.
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You can get a perfectly good little Linux running computer for $50 and you're whining about it? The Raspberry Pi Foundation was set up with the goal of getting more children to do programming at home and in school. That is their purpose. The board is as cheap as it is partly because Broadcom are supporting the initiative. I don't know what you mean by "the device doesn't work right". Of course it works right. Hundreds of thousands of people are using them.
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Can it run the MS-DOS version of MAME? Has anyone tried to see if it can run games up to, say, 1990~1995 with a 30/60FPS framerate with at least 32kHz audio without hiccups?
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I've been intending to buy one forever, but with this plugged into the TV and if my old Sierra Games floppies will read, this would be great fun for the kids. I've been avoiding introducing them to the FPS games, which IMO are boring and stupidifying.
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But, how do I get all my old SSI role playing games onto it?
I can hardly wait for the return of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups...
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Then how about you spin up a board that is better? Or better yet, get the NDA agreement with Broadcom in place so you can help fix the issues. It is easy to throw rocks at the dirty glass building, but it's harder to grab the glass cleaner and help fix the problem.
Where I don't exactly like the NDA requirements of Broadcom, it seems a reasonable compromise to meet the cost goals. I suspect that a lot of the issues you have with your Pi have work arounds or are being worked if they are known. I suspect that you could easily EBay your working Pi if you really want to get rid of it, and I'll bet it won't cost you all that much overall.
I think Pi has struck a pretty good balance between cost and functionality. I'd love to have more RAM, multiple cores and faster CPU clock, but you are simply not going to be able to do that for $35. The Pi is obviously *cheep* but mostly works, and given the cost constraints a rather good deal.
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If we assume that games listed as "windows + mac" are dos games running in dosbox while those listed as "windows" are native windows games then it seems that 7 out of the 10 games in their top sellers list are windows games.
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DOTT is one of my favorites
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Apologies for my crotchetiness but I have memories of trying to run Duke 3D on a 50Mhz 486 and it was painful. I remember it well because I upgraded with a Kingston Turbochip (133MHz AM5x86) and the difference was amazing. The single most impressive upgrade I have ever done to a computer.
Anyways Duke 3D on 20MHz 486 won't work.
You can get a perfectly good little Linux running computer for $50 and you're whining about it?
No, I think the cubieboard is a great machine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You have X server and everything else sucking up the PI's limited memory
As far as I know, DOSBOX it self uses SDL (for portability). So instead of going after the whole X server, it would be possible to use a lighter SDL backend (framebuffer device, etc.) to avoid needing the whole X running.
That said yes it a bit of a wheel re-advent; but so was DosBox, DosEMU existed for what a decade before it?
Unlike what the name might suggest, DosEmu isn't an emulator. It only provides DOS APIs (mainly BIOS, and a few I/O ports for specific hardware that was programmed that way). The code itself runs natively on the CPU. Thus it requires a CPU which is able to run 16-bits x86 code (so its limited to 32bits Intel/AMD processors, because they have a "Virtual 86" mode to run 16-bits code alongside 32-bits. It does not even work on 64 bits processors, as there is no "Virtual 86" mode to run 16-bits code. Once the processor enters 64 bits mode, the "hardware virtual box" offered by Virtual 86 isn't here anymore).
It's close to the idea of Wine, it's very similar to the dos box of Windows (That's the same reason that the dos box got dropped out of the 64bits flavours of windows - their dos box also relies on Virtual 86 to provide the virtual sand box to run 16 bits code in it).
DosBox, on the other hand, isn't juse an API interface, it's a full virtual box emulating a complete PC. It does emulate the CPU too (like any other emulator - for exemple like a GameBoy emulator) and thus can run on anything on which you can compile it.
It also support dynamic recompiling, so it gets good performance for architectures it can target (currently: the x86 family, and ARMv4)
So they didn't really re-invent the wheel, they mostly solved different fundamental problems. That's why DosBox happened.
But, where we can criticise is that DosBox came with its own set of code to emulate the peripherals. DosBox and DosEmu could have shared much more (in terms of sound emulation for example) but each followed its way.
In this context, again - some of this project does make sense (they target a different CPU meaning the code could be better optimised for the RPi) but they'll have to reinvent the other parts. Thus prix86 emulates far less different options for audio (only FM + stereo digital) than dosbox (which in addition supported GUS-like wavetable synthesis, and MT-32-like MIDI).
Nothing wrong with having more options.
Well, they could have re-used some of the peripheral emulation of DosBox. On the other hand this might be power hungry for the small RPi (MT-32 is quite complex to emulate, and DosBox's OPL-FM is unoptimised and designed for fidelity rather than speed).
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You should have bought one of those then!
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
QEMU and Dosbox are already ported to ARM and Rasbian, so what does this do that it couldn't do already (albeit slowly). I've even seen Dosbox running on ARM powered Android device though the lack of keyboard in most of them would get in the way I would think of using it in a meaningful fashion.
You should have bought one of those then!
I couldn't agree more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Send it to me. I wouldn't mind having a headless <5W NIS server for my home network.
Most of the things discussed on /. aren't popular or common. I'm not sure I know a single person I interact with face-to-face who owns a Raspberry Pi, but it obviously doesn't make it irrelevant.
I think their top sellers list only covers the last week or so, because most or all of the games on it were on sale last weekend.
There's lists of games that use DOSBox here and here. They're a year or two out of date but probably not far off, since most of the recent additions to GOG.com are Windows games from the late 1990s or 2000s or modern indie games.
...without the dodgy onboard ethernet, and got USB right...
I was a victim of the so-called ethernet and USB issues before I returned 3 of the 5 boards as defective. I've got 5 good 512MB boards - one is running Raspmbc streaming video without a hitch, and the other is pumping 2 MS/S over the USB from a wideband receiver and doing DSP to decode ADS-B packets that are then sent to FlightRadar24. I've seen NO ethernet or USB issues since the bad batch boards were replaced (these were originally shipped out around Christmas, 2012).
As an aside, I believe that many of the supposed power supply issues were really bad boards. The mantra on that site (that turned into the cure-all) was 'You have a problem? It's your power supply, idiot!". I think a lot of prospective RPi supporters were turned off and turned away by that condescending attitude. I ignored it (let's see - 2 boards work perfectly with all 5 power supplies, 3 boards fail consistently with all 5 power supplies - what's the issue?), got good boards, and am a big fan.
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Ya kinda begged for that interpretation.
"...is there any fundamental use for this facility?"
Especially with the use of "fundamental" many people will infer that you think these things are useless.
To answer your question. Doom II and Duke 3D are still in my top 5 games of all time. Is gaming a "fundamental use?" Who decides what qualifies?
I wrote my first ray tracer in 80486 assembly language, I might just want to see it run again. Is nostalgia a "fundamental use?" [sigh]
Rather than griping about something that doesn't harm you on any way, you can fulfill your needs by designing your own hardware and platform for exclusive open-source enthusiasts such as yourself.
Look up projects on home brew computers made with the ARM, 6501, and/or discrete components. It can be done, your needs aren't satisfied by this product, so by all means go and make your own.
With all due respect, back in high school I owned a Packard Bell 486SX 20MHz. Every time I have ever told anyone that, even as a historical curiosity, I have had to follow it with "yes, they did make them that slow".
Did you know that DOOM had a "low detail" mode? I did, because that was the only way I was going to get the 486SX 20MHz to run it (after I upgraded the RAM to a whopping 6MB of course). It was unusuably slow otherwise. And when games like ROTT came out? They wouldn't even run unless they were in low detail mode. And lord help you if you accidentally hit the Turbo button, setting you back down to 8MHz.
So I hope for this thing's sake that it runs a bit faster than that otherwise DOOM is going to just flat out not work worth a damn.
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My first PC was 386 DX 40Mhz, Duke Nukem required much stronger hardware.
However I think it's a bad idea to use DOS emulation for games like Duke or Doom because they are open source and you can play native builds on Linux.
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Why can't FreeDOS simply be ported to the Pi? I know that the original DOS may have been written in 80286 assembly, but is the same true about FreeDOS? Or is it written in C? If they were going to undergo such a project, why not do it fully - do a mapping of the 80286 => ARM (the one used in the Pi), decide which registers would be used for what and so on, and redo the entire OS in ARM assembly if FreeDOS is written in assembly. If it's written in C, shouldn't porting it be somewhat trivial?
Cool, I wrote Stunts on a 16mhz 386 so this should be powerful enough to play it.
The raspberry pi is a smartphone. Just with no phone bit... or touch screen or battery or wifi or bluetooth or pretty much anything really.
Ok so it's a PCB with smartphone SoC, some USB ports a usb->ethernet bridge and some GPIO pins.
It costs $49, the raspberry pi costs $35.
That's 40% more.
It's more capable but its more cost. .
But is it because people don't want it, or the corps won't let them have it? because a programmer friend of mine and myself were working on a project to make playing these old games as simple as "clicky clicky" for Joe and Jane average but quickly ran into the minefield that is copyrights and trademarks and found a hell of a lot of those old gaming dev houses are now owned by bloodsuckers that dream of one day turning that old "IP" into iPhone money but never get off their lazy asses and do the work.
Considering how sites like GOG exists and make money and there is enough money to be made that actual NES consoles and the like are still being made I'd say there is a market there, its just too much of it is caught up in the IP minefield so Joe and Jane can't have it made simpler and easier because the person who did that would be sued to death. Slowly but surely we are seeing companies like Valve dip their toes in (such as having all the Sega Genesis games for sale through Steam, although Sega wants insane amounts for these ancient games) but it really has to be done by a supermegacorp with a shitload of money in the bank, nobody else can afford to brave the minefield.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Because it's fun to do, perhaps.
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I'm not sure I know a single person I interact with face-to-face who has even booted up DOS for recreational purposes in the last 10 years.
Have you met me? You probably would not know that I play some retro games at times too. It's not exactly a fantastic conversation piece. But just because I don't shout from the rooftops that I have DOSBox installed with quite a library doesn't mean I don't do it.
Maybe you should ask some of the people you interact with face-to-face. You may be surprised.