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DOSBox-X: Free, cross-platform and complete DOS, Windows 3.x and 9x emulation
- roody15 6y agoThis looks promising.
- simcop2387 6y agoAnyone interested in this should also check out pcem, https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ it's emulating the hardware rather than the interfaces.
- iso8859-1 6y agoWould be cool if they had emulated it in VHDL/Bluespec/Verilog, then you could run it on an FPGA.
- simcop2387 6y agoThere's work for that for the Mister system, https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer
- bayindirh 6y ago3dfx emulation! Could play some of my old favorites with this!
- eloeffler 6y agoGTA! :) It was so impressive when I first installed a Voodoo 2 card and launched it to see insanely smooth graphics ╰(°▽°)╯
- Razengan 6y agoGTA 2 still has the best radio selection in the series. Like KJAH and Funami FM’s Teriyaki-chan <3
- qwerty456127 6y agoThat's insanely cool! I have never had a 3dfx card and only kept begging Santa with no luck when I was a kid. Finally, I can play the games which required it!
- bayindirh 6y agoI still have my Voodoo2 card with me, with different processors on board. Albeit I have no PCI slots and VGA is not very favorable at modern resolutions. I'm excited to play Need for Speed 2 SE & Carmageddon 2 actually.
- rixrax 6y agoGlide / 3dfx game list: http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1758 http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1758
- npsimons 6y agoInteresting. IIRC, at least some of those (Descent and Descent II) have source available.
- shimonabi 6y agoI've been playing with PCem on Linux the last week. You must enable network with a parameter when compiling! I can emulate Windows 98SE on a Pentium 133 MHz with my 2500U AMD Ryzen laptop. It's convenient, since you can copy your DOS games on the machine over the network. I successfully installed the 3dfx Voodoo 2 driver and the games run just fine.
- Delk 6y agoSounds interesting; I hadn't heard of PCem before. Does it always require a BIOS image from an original computer, though? Or are those just for some potential machine-specific functionality or something? The table of emulated systems lists ROM image file names, yet no ROM images are included (of course, as they're under copyright and proprietary).
- steerablesafe 6y agoA question I don't see in the FAQ: why the fork? Although I already see that it has a ton of features on top of the features of DOSBox, and their scopes differ quite a bit.
- wiz21c 6y agoIIRC it's because DosBox doesn't progress much (well, TBH, they don't release much, but their svn is quite active) DosBox-X may also be better at some timing critical stuff such as demo's.
- wiz21c 6y agoI confirm that DosBox-X runs Imphobia disk magazine which is doing some very accurate vsync timing (basically switching color palettes several times during the screen refresh to display 48 colours on a 16 colours EGA display)
- TonyTrapp 6y agoIn addition to what has already been said, DOSBox has a strong focus on games and quite often they decide to not fix something unless it directly impacts a game. Many people were not happy with this, because it would mean that trivial (and also not so trivial) fixes to make some demos, trackers or business software run were never applied. In particular they refuse any patches for the latter (probably scared of possible liablity). Edit: Vanilla DOSBox is also unlikely to add support for more hardware (e.g. MMX or early 3D accelerators) because they don't want to maintain it and it won't be needed by most games.
- sumtechguy 6y agoIn my head I am thinking one of these dosbox branches is also pulling it up to C++17 or something like that, and the main team has no interest in that really. The eXo project has been using about 6 different branches of dosbox depending on the game for particular features. Mostly they use the main branch but for some bits the game just does not work in all modes. Now that PCem has VHD support I could see them ditching dosbox all together (unlikely). But they will probably not use dosbox for 9x games due to size.
- arthuryip 6y agoIt is great! But for running old Windows software, Windows 3.x/9x license is required, while no DOS is required for running DOS software.
- unixhero 6y agoSigh
- fortyseven 6y agoYes, dad.
- app4soft 6y agoThere are already two threads on DOSBox-X posted on HN month and two month ago.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dosbox-x.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dosbox-x.com
- emteycz 6y agoWithout any comments though. Given the interest here, seems like the community simply missed it, so a repost was beneficial. A month is OK amount of time to wait before posting.
- bilegeek 6y agoI don't know why they don't provide a deb, but assuming all the build dependencies are installed, converting the rpm via Alien works fine. Also, be aware if you are using your existing DOSBox directory: games that require installation might not work if installed via the original DOSBox.
- qwerty456127 6y ago> Also, be aware if you are using your existing DOSBox directory: games that require installation might not work if installed via the original DOSBox. Why? I have installed them on bare metal aeons ago and only copied since then. All I had to change occasionally was sound card details.
- bilegeek 6y agoIt's probably rare, but I speak from experience (specifically with the game "Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb"). Installed with DOSBox, worked fine; when opened in DOSBox-X, graphics were all screwed up, and all the settings were set upon install, so I would have had to reinstall anyways. This was more than a year ago, so maybe it wouldn't happen today given how many new releases they have, but I don't feel like testing it out. Still, great project, and I prefer it over the OG DOSBox.
- dmitriid 6y agoI’m tempted to install Win95/98 on it, run Borland Delphi 4 from 1998 on it, and develop a UI in fraction of the time and resources it takes on the Web. The result will probably still run on modern Windows, too
- memsom 6y agoIt would be better to use NT4 or Windows 2000. Delphi had a habit of crashing hard under 9x whilst debugging and taking the OS with it. I used Delphi from 1 - 5 commercially and we never used 9x because the experience was a lot less usable. I did use maybe, Delphi 3 under Windows 98 at home, but it would never have been for anything important.
- dmitriid 6y agoThanks for the hint!
- keyle 6y agoThat has crossed my mind actually, bring me back to my youth. Just seeing the screenshot of win98 on pcem gave me strong nostalgia.
- benibela 6y agoThat does not actually need DOSBox, it runs great with WINE: https://i.imgur.com/YgOw2Zc.png https://i.imgur.com/YgOw2Zc.png
- dmitriid 6y agoSorry for breaking HN conventions, but: Oh My God
- arithmomachist 6y agoI'm tempted to install Turbo Pascal for a deep nostalgia trip. I grew up in a small-ish town in Appalachia, and when I ran out of math classes to take in high school I started learning to program. They had put together a little "computer lab" circa 1990 when cash was a little easier to come by for a public school, and hadn't updated them since. It was 2004, and their intro programming course was still taught in Pascal. We hacked on a version of Turbo Pascal that might have dated to when the Soviet Union still existed, and I remember that cheery blue terminal interface fondly. It left me with an irrational life-long love of text-based interfaces.
- drblah 6y agoI have a fun anecdote involving DOSBox. Back in 2012 I worked at a large manufacturing company. They had an old IBM PC running IBM DOS which controlled a vital system at the beginning of their production line. This machine had been chucking along since 1992 and now someone high up had been made aware that it could be a potential risk if this machine stopped working. It was therefore decided that this PC should be replaced/upgrade if possible. After investigating I learned it communicated with a PLC through the RS-232 interface and ran some special sauce software from a company that stopped existing in 1995. Previous upgrade attempts involved virtualization, but that did not work since the program ran too quickly on modern hardware. My solution was to copy everything from the old HDD to a new computer, install DOSBox and configure the serial port. The first few attempts caused some sirens and alarms to go off in the building, which was "exiting", but after fiddling with the emulation speed I managed to get it to work. To this day, unless something drastic has changed, a billion $ company is running DOSBox in production (and I literally mean production). Also, a side note. The old PC was still connected to a modem with a dedicated phone line. At some point it had been remotely operated through some kind of Norton remote control software. I made sure to turn off the modem and did not bring it over to the new DOSBox setup. Imagine if someone had war dialed into the machine... They could have caused a major disturbance and potentially started a fire.
- raxxorrax 6y agoWouldn't it be easy to just rewrite the software if you leave the PLC? That said, as long as it works...
- loloquwowndueo 6y agoYou must not be a programmer if you think it’s generally “easy” to “just rewrite the software”
- raxxorrax 6y agoFor RS232 connected to a PLC I would assume it to be comparatively easy. Maybe it is not, but it is probably easier than for modern usb or network attached devices, since you can easily spy on transmitted data. I would also assume that the PLC just gets some commands from the master. Granted, these might be too many assumptions.
- mysterydip 6y agoBetween DOSBox (and its various forks) and PCem, it's a great time for retro gaming/app playing and development! I wonder if the games of today will ever get the kind of aftermarket support that the DOS era has, given DRM and OS hooks and the like. It seems companies would rather games today be disposable and incompatible tomorrow so you can either buy the sequel or re-buy the game again on the next platform.
- jbarrs 6y agoI feel like emulation will always be catching up with the latest systems, though running some modern AAA game in a virtual machine would probably need a super beefy PC (though we could probably expect that to be available by the time that becomes necessary). Hopefully then a virtual machine can satisfy the DRM. However, I do worry about games (or, in some cases, the DRM on some games) that require the player always be online. If the game or DRM servers are taken down in the future and the developer doesn't release a patch to remove the always online requirement, the game could end up being unplayable. If it's popular enough, people may reverse-engineer third party servers, but this can present more challenges, e.g. getting SSL certificates from a CA your device trusts; on a PC you could manually trust the certificate, but on a console you likely don't have that option.
- grishka 6y agoOh, modern consoles and their push for digital distribution combined with effectively unbreakable DRM. Some games are available on physical media, but some are not. Good luck preserving those that are not when those servers go down.
- ArtWomb 6y ago>>> it's a great time for retro gaming/app playing and development It's amazing. The combination of consumer SoC boards, next gen emulation, 3D printing and AI techniques like super-resolution are generating not just archival efforts, but active development. I just love that there is a very active market for RetroPie kits ;) https://www.experimentalpi.com/Retro-Arcade_c_12.html https://www.experimentalpi.com/Retro-Arcade_c_12.html
- tpoacher 6y agoI wonder if this FINALLY allows Discworld Noir to finally work again!
- JadeNB 6y agoI'd never heard of Discworld Noir, but now I want nothing more!
- ByThyGrace 6y agoPlease ping back if you make progress in such a worthy endeavour.
- speeder 6y agoIf this let me play some games better I will be very impressed... Some games still run poorly on DOSBox, despite it being games focused... and of course then there is Win98 games that are a pain, I wanted to play "Gangsters" but that game use a unholy mix of GDI + DirectDraw to draw UI elements and modern windows 'run' the game but freak out completely, getting confused on how to draw the UI.
- bsharitt 6y agoNice. I mostly use DOSBox for my DOS games and ones that work with Windows 3.1(Civ 2, Sim City 2000, and Solitaire mostly), but it'll be nice to be able to do Window 9x stuff with 3D acceleration without having to break out the old Pentium II box.
- aasasd 6y agoDerailing the thread to the topic of Dosbox in general (as is tradition): on Android, ‘Magic Dosbox’ works quite nicely thanks to the feature of adding custom widgets on the screen, for keyboard or mouse keys and, in the paid version, combos. The app is freemium, but it's pretty cool and cheap so personally I'm not even bothered. Also, Retroarch has a Dosbox core, and Retroarch with some cores works on the PS Vita handheld console, and as a result there's Dosbox on Vita. However, it's said to be quite a pain to set up for a particular game, with text configs. For jailbroken-PSP owners, Dosbox is apparently ported as a homebrew app. I'm vaguely looking forward to trying System Shock on Vita, but with my luck I'm not holding my breath.
- 0134340 6y agoDosbox also runs on Xbox One via Retroarch. So in essence the Xbox can be a retro Windows gaming machine as well. PCem also has a very primitive core. If only Dosbox-X had a core we could run Windows on Xbox which is still possible, I think, using Dosbox or PCem.
- known 6y agohttps://github.com/open-shell https://github.com/open-shell for classic windows look/feel
- ejj28 6y agoReally excited for Windows 9x emulation, I have an elderly relative who still plays the first Age of Empires, and a few years ago when they upgraded to Windows 10 the game stopped working and they had to wait for and buy the remastered version.
- wing-_-nuts 6y agoYes! This is huge. I can finally play civ II without using wine, which was always a little wonky.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- schuke 6y agoIt’s quite remarkable Windows was compatible for so long!
- Nition 6y agoIt's amazing really. I was playing the original Theme Hospital (1997) just yesterday on Windows 10 with no issues[1]. [1] Okay a couple of issues. It needs compatibility mode for the colours to look right. But that option is built into Windows so I don't really consider that a failure of compatibility. And the installer is 16-bit and won't run on 64-bit windows. But some years ago I made a copy of it after install and the actual installed game is 32-bit and runs fine.
- simcop2387 6y agoFor a lot of those 16bit installers, WineVDM works wonders. https://github.com/otya128/winevdm https://github.com/otya128/winevdm It's not perfect compatibility for all 16bit programs but it does tend to work well enough at anything I've thrown at it.
- snake_plissken 6y agoMechwarrior 3 is another game that needs a Windows 9x. I can never get it working in VM Player, excited to try it out on this.
- refracture 6y agoI installed Windows 95 and 98se in DOSBox-X, it's pretty neat. Unfortunately my main motivation, an old Windows game called The Divide: Enemies Within runs poorly, either with software mode or using the emulated voodoo. On vintage hardware I could run the game at 320x240 with a good frame rate on a Pentium 100 mhz, but this setup doesn't allow anything lower than 640x480. Sigh.. In anycase this is a great project, and it's nice to be able to run Windows 9x in dosbox, something standard dosbox did not do reliably.
- tempodox 6y agoMy use case would be to use it on macOS-10.15 to run DOSsy apps, but it doesn't work: ‘The application “dosbox-x” can’t be opened’. No indication as to why exactly. The current original DOSBox does work, however. So, at least for that OS, the current verdict is: Mission failed. Maybe future releases will fix that? Why the devs put a clearly nonfunctional app up for download is beyond me.
- dleslie 6y agoI've found the Win9x support spotty at best. It hangs indefinitely when installing IE5 and the internet tools suite, for instance.
- ineedasername 6y agoWhat is the legal status and availability of 3.x and 9.x?
- tpurves 6y agoMy main recollection of DOS was never ending fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys to try and free up enough conventional memory to run some game... Does DosBox help emulate back all that nostalgic experience?
- BruiseLee 6y agoUnfortunately it gives you 632KB of conventional memory out of the box and this should be enough for everybody... But you can still load up some TSRs to recreate the experience.
- tus88 6y agoWARNING - it's much, much slower than DosBOX due to more accurate emulation. This means it won't run some games fast enough.