4 ms·

Does anyone do gamedev using FreeDOS? I'd wager a low power machine running FreeDOS and running "dos-like" games would be pretty niche, kinda like a demoscene

Does anyone do gamedev using FreeDOS? I'd wager a low power machine running FreeDOS and running "dos-like" games would be pretty niche, kinda like a demoscene thing but building games on FreeDOS always kinda was something I wondered about.

skissane 5y ago
People write games for DOS emulators (especially DOSBox). Mostly mods of existing DOS games (our son loves Commander Keen mods), but more rarely new from scratch games as well. However, the problem with developing games/mods for an emulator such as DOSBox, is you may find they run fine in the emulator but don't work in real DOS. Some years ago, I had MS-DOS 6.22 running under VirtualBox and our son was using that to play DOS games. He wanted to play this Command Keen mod he saw on YouTube, but it kept on crashing with an "out of memory" error. Eventually we tried it on DOSBox instead, there it worked. I tried to free up memory by tinkering with CONFIG.SYS/etc, but it appears to be impossible to get that much free conventional memory with real MS-DOS, even when making fullest possible use of UMBs and the HMA. I never tried FreeDOS, but it might have the same issue.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Commander Keen mods??? I know what I'm doing with the rest of my weekend...
7thaccount 5y ago
There's a vibrant C64, ZXSpectrum, and Amiga demoscene with even commercial games shipping with physical editions complete with the little knickknacks that games had in the 80s (they usually make the games free to download as well of course). I've had fun playing some of these games too. I know there are some free pascal folks making games that target DOS, but I'm not sure how many.
badsectoracula 5y ago
I didn't use FreeDOS to make, but there was an MS-DOS game jam a couple of years ago for which i made a 3D platformer/adventure game[0] (it might sound a bit too big for a jam since most are like 2-6 days but that jam lasted for about two months, i made the game in about five weeks spread within those months). Later ported to other platforms too (and made a few minor improvements in terms of fixing bugs and improving performance - though the game itself is basically the same as it was when the jam ended). But it does run in FreeDOS, in fact there is a video Jim Hall (the author of the article and the FreeDOS maintainer) made where he plays a bit of the game[1]. Note that since that version both performance and some bugs have been improved/fixed (also i'm working on a new update that improves the performance even further (i've actually made a full playthrough on a 133MHz P1 laptop i have here). The development itself was done on Windows though and i recently ported the editor to Linux[2]. I haven't done anything else since then but the engine was written to be separate from the game and i want to separate it from the source too at some point. I did consider making a game for the dungeon crawler jam last year but i wasn't very motivated as 7 days felt too little for making something interesting (IMO) and only made a small prototype for walking around [3] (that was done before the jam to ensure the engine was usable for making a game like that, but i lost interest before the jam even began :-P). Also it wasn't specifically for DOS or retro machines in general, i just thought of reusing the engine since i had it lying around and was usable enough. [0] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGxn0Bl9U4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGxn0Bl9U4A [2] https://i.imgur.com/xpEjHJE.png https://i.imgur.com/xpEjHJE.png [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6uij0lFLQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6uij0lFLQw

skissane 5y ago

People write games for DOS emulators (especially DOSBox). Mostly mods of existing DOS games (our son loves Commander Keen mods), but more rarely new from scratch games as well. However, the problem with developing games/mods for an emulator such as DOSBox, is you may find they run fine in the emulator but don't work in real DOS. Some years ago, I had MS-DOS 6.22 running under VirtualBox and our son was using that to play DOS games. He wanted to play this Command Keen mod he saw on YouTube, but it kept on crashing with an "out of memory" error. Eventually we tried it on DOSBox instead, there it worked. I tried to free up memory by tinkering with CONFIG.SYS/etc, but it appears to be impossible to get that much free conventional memory with real MS-DOS, even when making fullest possible use of UMBs and the HMA. I never tried FreeDOS, but it might have the same issue.

klyrs 5y ago
Commander Keen mods??? I know what I'm doing with the rest of my weekend...

7thaccount 5y ago

There's a vibrant C64, ZXSpectrum, and Amiga demoscene with even commercial games shipping with physical editions complete with the little knickknacks that games had in the 80s (they usually make the games free to download as well of course). I've had fun playing some of these games too. I know there are some free pascal folks making games that target DOS, but I'm not sure how many.

badsectoracula 5y ago

I didn't use FreeDOS to make, but there was an MS-DOS game jam a couple of years ago for which i made a 3D platformer/adventure game[0] (it might sound a bit too big for a jam since most are like 2-6 days but that jam lasted for about two months, i made the game in about five weeks spread within those months). Later ported to other platforms too (and made a few minor improvements in terms of fixing bugs and improving performance - though the game itself is basically the same as it was when the jam ended). But it does run in FreeDOS, in fact there is a video Jim Hall (the author of the article and the FreeDOS maintainer) made where he plays a bit of the game[1]. Note that since that version both performance and some bugs have been improved/fixed (also i'm working on a new update that improves the performance even further (i've actually made a full playthrough on a 133MHz P1 laptop i have here). The development itself was done on Windows though and i recently ported the editor to Linux[2]. I haven't done anything else since then but the engine was written to be separate from the game and i want to separate it from the source too at some point. I did consider making a game for the dungeon crawler jam last year but i wasn't very motivated as 7 days felt too little for making something interesting (IMO) and only made a small prototype for walking around [3] (that was done before the jam to ensure the engine was usable for making a game like that, but i lost interest before the jam even began :-P). Also it wasn't specifically for DOS or retro machines in general, i just thought of reusing the engine since i had it lying around and was usable enough. [0] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGxn0Bl9U4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGxn0Bl9U4A [2] https://i.imgur.com/xpEjHJE.png https://i.imgur.com/xpEjHJE.png [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6uij0lFLQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6uij0lFLQw