3 ms·

DOS emulation is not a very battery-efficient way to play '88-98 games on the go, so projects like these seem to cater to that specific need, letting people run

by chem83 3y ago

DOS emulation is not a very battery-efficient way to play '88-98 games on the go, so projects like these seem to cater to that specific need, letting people run DOS natively. The Toshiba Libretto was a nice, small machine, but finding one in good condition is super hard. Toshiba Portégé was another, but after Pentium-II models, they took away the OPL3 card in favor of something more Windows-friendly (AC97), which doesn't have good DOS drivers. Now there's SBEMU (https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU), which can emulate SB/SBPRO/SB16 on top of newer PCI-based sound cards, including AC97 ones, solving that problem. Now it's possible to have sound on a Pentium-II, III, M and Atom machines running DOS, like a Sony Vaio P.

marttt 3y ago
Have you tested SBEMU? I wonder how well or hassle-free it works in reality. I'm interested in creating a SvarDOS [1] machine for some tasks, inclding some low-end audio processing, probably with some custom "program". 1: http://svardos.org/ http://svardos.org/
- chem83 3y ago
  Some folks on YouTube have it running on laptops running FreeDOS. It’s not perfect, but many games seem to work.
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> DOS emulation is not a very battery-efficient way to play '88-98 games on the go They don't mention the battery capacity or specific 8086 variant used but modern ones use to average 2W of consumption; there are zero power saving modes; and the guy even says that when using 8087 the mini-laptop must "be plugged in all the time". So I rather doubt real hardware is the most efficient way, specially when e.g. with virtualization you can easily have 20+ hours of DOS on a subnotebook.
- chem83 3y ago
  20+ hours playing games with audio support on a VM? I’d love to see that kind of performance on, say, the GPD Win 4, but it sounds exaggerated. Where could I find this?

by chem83 3y ago

marttt 3y ago

Have you tested SBEMU? I wonder how well or hassle-free it works in reality. I'm interested in creating a SvarDOS [1] machine for some tasks, inclding some low-end audio processing, probably with some custom "program". 1: http://svardos.org/ http://svardos.org/

chem83 3y ago
Some folks on YouTube have it running on laptops running FreeDOS. It’s not perfect, but many games seem to work.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

> DOS emulation is not a very battery-efficient way to play '88-98 games on the go They don't mention the battery capacity or specific 8086 variant used but modern ones use to average 2W of consumption; there are zero power saving modes; and the guy even says that when using 8087 the mini-laptop must "be plugged in all the time". So I rather doubt real hardware is the most efficient way, specially when e.g. with virtualization you can easily have 20+ hours of DOS on a subnotebook.

chem83 3y ago
20+ hours playing games with audio support on a VM? I’d love to see that kind of performance on, say, the GPD Win 4, but it sounds exaggerated. Where could I find this?