DOSBox Sees Continued Success 271
KingofGnG writes "DOSBox, the emulator designed to run DOS games on modern operating systems (and not necessarily on a PC), has been chosen as project of the month for May on SourceForge. It's the latest award granted to a piece of software that 'simply does what it is supposed to do,' as the authors say. After having amassed more than 10 million downloads, it will soon be getting an update that's been awaited for almost two years."
Not only for PC games (Score:4, Interesting)
However, for the last three years (at least), DOS/Box now loads Q&A and at least the Q&A search and export features work just fine.
This is one fine product.
Re:I love DosBox (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also getting very popular on torrent sites with old games... and I love it. I can download a whole list of old games I grew up with, all packaged up in a .app. Double click and 'it just works'.
Right now I'm playing Carmageddon and Command and Conquer for old time sakes.
Dosbox ROCKS! (Score:5, Interesting)
Dosbox is fantastic for those times when you want to relive the moments when you first got into pc games (at least for anyone born before say 1984 or thereabouts).
Many of the games we now regard as classics, were written for DOS. Many of those games even pioneered whole genres of computer gaming.
Such games that come to mind include Wolf3D, Doom, Command & Conquer, Warcraft, Need For Speed, Microprose F1GP and the list goes on.
They may not have been the first in their genre, but they were certainly the games that defined the genre. Current game developers would do well to look to the DOS classics for inspiration, not so much for ideas, but for how to create a true classic.
Dosbox works incredibly well right now and I wish its developers every success in its continued development.
Re:I love DosBox (Score:5, Interesting)
This is probably the most common sentiment you'll find in reference to DOSBox. Everyone just loves this project... I think it really is because it has one singular focus and succeeds whole-heartedly at it. Also, the project has done a great job of remaining very gracefully platform agnostic. It's brought back the old Keen series and Little Big Adventure and such to me, on any system I might want to play it on.
Now that even games on Steam are starting to ship packaged with DOSBox, you really have to take some time to reflect on how much this has done for an archive of almost forgotten and still very valuable games.
Good for games, not so much for business apps (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd sooner call it DOSArcade or DosGameBox or something of the sort, as unfortunately the focus is entirely on games. Nothing wrong with that - I like playing the odd classic that I can't otherwise (no such old hardware and all that).
Example.. Symphony.. old as dirt spreadsheet app and for whatever reason seemingly can't be replaced by the newfangled bits of Excel, Calc, etc.
It's currently running on an old, old machine that still boots Windows 98 and runs okay there.. but that old, old machine is going to die eventually. Already tried running it on a new machine under XP but no matter what, it always suggests there is not enough expanded memory.. despite there being plenty available in the exact same configuration as on the Windows 98 machine.
So DOSBox to the rescue? Well, yes, it will certainly run.. but not print. DOSBox doesn't do printing.
Very well, grab a special hacked up version that allows printing. Yay, it prints - but it prints garbage at the beginning of each page and fails to catch page breaks.
So remove the printer codes (remember those?) in Symphony - no more issues, but now the printed layout is all wrong, too.
I do realize this is just a single app - but for something that can emulate the wazoo out of a variety of graphics cards, video cards, etc. I found it disappointing that the state of printing (which one may tend to do from a business app) from DOSBox is what it is: experimental at best.
Re:Dosbox ROCKS! (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple of things I found amusing - first, I was born in 1986, and yet I still got into PC games in DOS. I started formulating this reply as soon as I read that you thought one had to be born before 1984 for this to be true :)
But then the games you mentioned are not the ones I had in mind at all... I did play those games (I especially liked Wolf3D and Need for Speed, from that list - as an aside, I hate where they went with the Need for Speed series after the original...) but the games I grew up with were earlier ones, including a lot of side-scrollers and simpler games like that.
My fondest memories are of Apogee/3d Realms side-scrollers like Secret Agent and Crystal Caves. Then, of course, the X-Wing series came along - pretty much the greatest thing ever invented to a nerdy kid who liked flying (my dad is a pilot), computer games, and Star Wars (and you can't forget Dark Forces - that was a great game, along with its first sequel).
And I completely agree - I stopped playing games a few years ago not because I don't like to play games, but because the games are just not the same as they were. I don't find myself having anywhere near as much fun as I did, unless I simply play the old games. I stopped seriously playing games sometime after Rainbow Six 2. That was, for me, the last great era, with games like that as well as Battlefield 1942 and several great combat flight simulators. It's all gone downhill since then :)
Re:Dosbox ROCKS! (Score:5, Interesting)
It will be the hit in any office... when it prints (Score:4, Interesting)
I know quite a few companies that spent a killing in DOS applications back in the days, and who are either too cheap or too strapped for cash to replace those apps with newer ones, so they're stuck with having an ancient box around that still runs DOS. If you happen to have an old machine, don't throw it away, companies will pay for those machines if, and only if, they run DOS 6.22 (3.something, I forgot which one, would even be better) fine.
Now DOSbox would be the saviour... IF it could print! Of course those ancient machines need to output their data somehow, and while the ones that fortunately just store data and spit it on discs can actually benefit from DOSbox, apps that need to create a hardcopy are just out of luck (at least about 9 out of 10 times).
Print support in DOSbox would end the aera of legacy machines littering offices worldwide. THEN it would be the absolute app. And another foot in the door of offices for free software.
Roland MT-32 emulation (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that MT-32 emulator code has been included in ScummVM and bunch of other places, I really hope that they include it directly in Dosbox. There are some builds that contain the Roland thing, (such as http://www.si-gamer.net/gulikoza/ [si-gamer.net] ) but I'd rather have those included with the project itself.
DOS MMORPGs (Score:3, Interesting)
I like DOSbox because it lets me play Shadow of Yserbius on ImagiNation Revival [googlepages.com]. A first-person perspective (but still-frame) multiplayer RPG world originally offered by Sierra On-Line and called The Sierra Network and later ImagiNation Network. A group has gotten a server running that simulates the old dial-up systems, but over TCP/IP, enabling many players at once.
For me, Shadow of Yserbius was the first MMORPG I played, and still may favorite. It is a fairly short game, and cheating is trivial to do (your character data is stored on your local machine), but if you play it fairly it is quite enjoyable and challenging.
Re:I love DosBox (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh, that reminds me. Few years back I did some reverse engineering of Commander Keen using DOSBox.
I tapped the emulation loop and wrote replacement functions for each address. So, for example, whenever address 0x1713 of the Keen segment was executed the function add_monster_1() would be called. It would do its thing and, if I had translated it correctly, the game would appear unchanged. I did this for a lot of functions:
http://www.quantumg.net/keen1.c.txt [quantumg.net]
The result was much more enlightening than reading asm code. For example, John Carmack used the same code for doors in the game as he did for monsters. In a sense, doors *were* monsters, they just didn't have as complex "thinking" as some of the other monsters in the game. I could also confirm that there were no more "cheat keys" or secret levels in the game than the ones that had already been advertised :)
I later tried to convert this to compilable source code using libSDL for the graphics but that project has been lost to me.. it's probably floating around on one of my old linux machines.
Re:X Wing (Score:2, Interesting)
Absolutely. Tie fighter IMHO was by far the best.
I loved it because it had the opposite difficulty style of most games. In most games you are a really tough ship/guy, who needs to fight off hordes of weaker guys/ships. But in Tie Fighter you WERE the dinky POS, two shots and you were fried. For me it made the experience more intense. You couldn't just fly into a group of bad guys and start blasting. You had to have really good situational awareness, because surprises would kill you without a second chance.
Later in the game you would get the Tie Advanced and Tie Defender, which had shields and missiles. But because I spent the first half the game being terrified of being shot, that style of flying stuck with me. Leave the shields weak and put the power to the engines. It ended up making the game a little faster rather then more tank like. The Missile boat was great for the story line, and it was fun to fight capital ships with. They gave you the old "We don't have any good ships left so heres a crappy one ticked out with a bunch of missiles, go get'em tiger."
And finally, Admiral Thrawn. Seriously if they make anymore Star Wars he had better be in them. The Thrawn Trilogy books were awesome, I love that he made it into the game.
Re:I love DosBox (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably because no one (with the capacity to do it) cares about windows media files...
I've run QBASIC, dBASE IV, Windows 3.1 in DOSbox! (Score:4, Interesting)
QBASIC for some quick-n-dirty programming when linux shell scripts or spreadsheets aren't enough, but C or PERL is overkill.
dBASE IV, complete with DOS 4GW extended memory manager runs just fine. Woohoo.
I also have the original floppies for Chessmaster 3000 (yeah it's ancient). I could not get it to run under WINE. But CM 3000 is so ancient that it supports Windows 3.1 and Win95. When they were throwing out old computers at work, they threw out the Windows 3.1 floppies with them. I took a set home with me. I couldn't install from the floppy drives, but I was able to image the floppies as disk files, and tell DOSbox to treat the image files as floppies.
Win 3.1 was a graphical shell that installed on top of DOS. DOSbox's emulation is good enough that Win3.1 installed properly on top of DOSbox. Now I can pull up the DOSbox prompt, "CD \WINDOWS" and type "WIN", and up comes ye olde Program Manager.
I also run the original Tetris under DOSbox. I use a cheat. Tell Tetris that you're using a joystick, even if you don't have one. That slows down the game to make it more playable.
Re:Not only for PC games (Score:3, Interesting)
The other point is, it would be great to run Dosbox as a webbrowser plugin.