4 ms·

Disclaimer: I'm loosely involved with the Archive, helping with the DWeb Meetup. I love this. The Archive has been helping emulation a lot, but hosting full ro

Disclaimer: I'm loosely involved with the Archive, helping with the DWeb Meetup. I love this. The Archive has been helping emulation a lot, but hosting full rom sets, and javascript-based emulators. It's a great fit with the idea of video game preservation. MS-DOS games are an interesting problem: on one hand, Dosbox is very powerful, on the other hand, it does require a good chunk of familiarity with the original platform. After all, who's going to know to run setup.exe, what IRQ and DMA are? Thankfully I've never ran into the EMS and XMS fun, but I can imagine that some aspects of DOS would feel very arcane to younger people. So for the Archive to make those games available, easily playable, it's a whole chunk of older computer knowledge that's being made available to all.

hackcasual 7y ago
That's the great thing with Dosbox though, it means a consistent experience for what was probably the least consistent consumer gaming platform.
Moru 7y ago
For us using other computer brands at that time, EMS and XMS felt arcane already then...
- organsnyder 7y ago
  It felt arcane for those of us who were daily MS-DOS users, as well. I remember when I first installed QEMM, which addressed these issues in novel ways. It wasn't perfect, but it made things much more pleasant.
WorldMaker 7y ago
> Thankfully I've never ran into the EMS and XMS fun, but I can imagine that some aspects of DOS would feel very arcane to younger people. Yeah, game playing as a young person in that era was wild. I recall at one point I had an entire bootloader full of multiple choices of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS pairs based on which EMS or XMS needs I had. Some games would require one config, others a second, Windows 3.11 sometimes a third, (then when I had OS/2 installed, that was yet another set boot options). Then there were fun crazy things like: boot into Win 3.11, for its protected mode fixes to activate (not that I knew at that age that's what was the magic, that's a more recent learning), immediately quit Windows, then the launch the game. (Similarly, there were at least a couple games that I recall ran better in a DOS window in OS/2 than anywhere else. Again, probably fun combinations of protected mode fixes and EMS/XMS management TSRs built into OS/2 versus the other commercial ones games were often bundled with, or should have been bundled with but forgot or packaged an ancient broken version because it was cheaper…) So much of it at the age I was doing all of that was trial-and-error based almost solely on obscure error messages and trial-and-error. I remember being really proud of my boot-loader scripts saving multiple configs and making it easier to switch between them, rather than what a lot other people I knew were doing of just constantly changing their one set of AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS and having no idea what last worked for some previous games and always trying for some lowest common denominator that ran the most things they could as best as possible. (I had to maintain some of those types of configs for a couple labs I was unpaid labor for, but that's another set of tales.) It's kind of fun looking back and having a slightly better idea of the "magic" behind a lot of the trial-and-error, though as much as I can reminisce about it I also probably wouldn't want to ever do it again. So much better to have emulators automatically deal with that stuff today.

hackcasual 7y ago

That's the great thing with Dosbox though, it means a consistent experience for what was probably the least consistent consumer gaming platform.

Moru 7y ago

For us using other computer brands at that time, EMS and XMS felt arcane already then...

organsnyder 7y ago
It felt arcane for those of us who were daily MS-DOS users, as well. I remember when I first installed QEMM, which addressed these issues in novel ways. It wasn't perfect, but it made things much more pleasant.

WorldMaker 7y ago

> Thankfully I've never ran into the EMS and XMS fun, but I can imagine that some aspects of DOS would feel very arcane to younger people. Yeah, game playing as a young person in that era was wild. I recall at one point I had an entire bootloader full of multiple choices of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS pairs based on which EMS or XMS needs I had. Some games would require one config, others a second, Windows 3.11 sometimes a third, (then when I had OS/2 installed, that was yet another set boot options). Then there were fun crazy things like: boot into Win 3.11, for its protected mode fixes to activate (not that I knew at that age that's what was the magic, that's a more recent learning), immediately quit Windows, then the launch the game. (Similarly, there were at least a couple games that I recall ran better in a DOS window in OS/2 than anywhere else. Again, probably fun combinations of protected mode fixes and EMS/XMS management TSRs built into OS/2 versus the other commercial ones games were often bundled with, or should have been bundled with but forgot or packaged an ancient broken version because it was cheaper…) So much of it at the age I was doing all of that was trial-and-error based almost solely on obscure error messages and trial-and-error. I remember being really proud of my boot-loader scripts saving multiple configs and making it easier to switch between them, rather than what a lot other people I knew were doing of just constantly changing their one set of AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS and having no idea what last worked for some previous games and always trying for some lowest common denominator that ran the most things they could as best as possible. (I had to maintain some of those types of configs for a couple labs I was unpaid labor for, but that's another set of tales.) It's kind of fun looking back and having a slightly better idea of the "magic" behind a lot of the trial-and-error, though as much as I can reminisce about it I also probably wouldn't want to ever do it again. So much better to have emulators automatically deal with that stuff today.