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Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs
- haunter 4mo ago>install DOSBox for Mac Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one. Nowadays the three most popular one would be DOSBox-X, DOSBox Pure, and DOSBox Staging https://dosbox-x.com/ https://dosbox-x.com/ https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed/ https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed/ https://www.dosbox-staging.org/ https://www.dosbox-staging.org/ https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging
- HelloUsername 4mo ago> there are DOSBox forks, most popular one would be DOSBox-X Straight from the article: > there are actively developed alternatives like DOSBox-X
- thaumasiotes 4mo ago> Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one. What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox?
- nsxwolf 4mo agoThe Slirp backend for the NE2000 networking driver is the big one for me.
- haunter 4mo agoRead what the others offer GUI config, load games from zip and image files, controller support, save states, various sound, graphics, and network enhancements etc. There is more to this than simply being a DOS emulator.
- parl_match 4mo ago> What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox? Quality of life improvements? Expanded (experimental) hardware support?
- badsectoracula 4mo agoLast time i checked (and DOSBox hasn't made an official release since then) the vanilla DOSBox isn't able to run the game i made for an MS-DOS game jam a few years ago[0] because it doesn't implement RDTSC properly (that the game uses for timing). All currently developed DOSBox forks work properly. Also the forks add some additional niceties, e.g. DOSBox Staging has some very nice CRT filters that basically make games look almost like the real thing (i have some actual CRTs to compare). DOSBox-X has a GUI to setup options while the emulator is running which is very convenient. [0] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra
- derefr 4mo agoSame thing I'd want to be "interesting" about any emulator. Focusing on just graphics for a moment (but there are equivalent examples in other domains): 1. Running games that only ran at 10FPS on original hardware at a smooth 60+FPS, by calling the game's own rendering logic more frequently than the original hardware could "afford" to, but without breaking game logic (i.e. by forcibly decoupling the game's physics ticks from its presentation ticks); 2. Using out-of-viewport but in-{tile/frame}buffer data to expand the viewport to fill my screen (which can be very janky under some rendering paradigms, due to offscreen parts of tile/frame buffers being dynamically partial-updated with a loading seam; but which can work very well under other rendering paradigms, like the SNES's mode 7 where the tilemap was usually just fully populated once at mode-switch time); 3. Making games that used vector-graphics for at least part of their display, and soft- or hard-rasterized those vector graphics into the native low-resolution framebuffer, instead rasterize those graphics at my display's native resolution; 4. having the emulator recognize particular bitmap assets (tiles, sprites, 3D meshes/textures) the game is telling it to render, and swap these out for hand-crafted HiDPI / high-poly versions of those assets from an asset-pack file (as opposed to relying on the caprices of a DLSS-like upscaling model.) Mind you, to have features like this work well, they often leave the realm of "interpreting the control-register pokes from the game differently", and enter the realm of "the game being patched to take advantage of the capabilities of the emulator." Then, as with these GOG games, you're no longer just shipping a ROM "and an emulator configured to run it well"; rather, you're shipping a co-designed product: an emulator tuned to run that ROM, and a ROM tuned to run in that emulator. --- By doing this, you technically leave the realm that MAME-like "archival preservation" emulation usually aims for, of "faithful emulation" of both a game's logic and its presentation. However! "Faithful emulation" folks shouldn't despair. The nice thing about this technique, is that this is all done by wrapping the original ROM in an emulator + shipping runtime-applied IPS patches. In other words, the original game ROM is still there, unmodified, under an "isolation layer"; and everything being done to modify it is done using "reversible, conservation-grade" techniques. Which means the emulator can provide a launcher UI to turn any of those presentation "enhancement" features on-and-off. If you're the "faithful emulation" type, you can just turn them off! (And, under this paradigm, even with the "enhanced emulation" features on, the game logic is still preserved as-is; you're only modifying the presentation. The original game engine is still running; the original instructions are still executing cycle-accurately to how they should. So the "game feel" is preserved perfectly. If you were good at the original game, you'll still be good at playing an "enhanced emulation" of the game; nothing will be "off" about it. Even input movies recorded against the un-enhanced game should replay unmodified against the enhanced game!) Contrast this to the average "HD remaster", where the game is at the very least recompiled for a new platform (with different timing guarantees), if not entirely rewritten atop a new engine. In that process, there's no "isolation layer"; no way to guarantee a preservation of any part of the original game logic in the remastered artifact. And like George Lucas, game developers coming back to their own works 20–40 years later, just can't help but want to tweak things. So these HD remasters end up breaking "game feel" in all sorts of ways.
- xp84 4mo agoIf I'm reading the article right, they are saying that macOS is giving the scare warning on it - this implies that DOSBox is an x86_64 binary and not ARM native. If true, that implies development is on life support at best, since any actively-developed project targeting Mac OS would likely have shipped an ARM version within 6 years of the ARM transition. So anyone who wants to ever run Mac OS 27 or buy a Mac after next year will probably have to find an alternative (or port DOSBox mainline to ARM themselves!)
- sunnybeetroot 4mo agoMany apps are showing this warning, likely because they include a slice of the deprecated architecture even though they do have Apple silicon.
- themadturk 4mo agoI believe Dosbox-X had native Apple Silicon support…at least it has an Apple Silicon installer.
- TonyTrapp 4mo agoThe last significant DOSBox update (ignoring 0.74-3 which was not significant) must be over 10 years ago by now. In that time, forks like DOSBox-X have made tremendous progress in compatibility and accuracy. The original DOSBox is essentially frozen in time at this point, with many things not being emulated correctly.
- nout 4mo agoI like DOSBox pure, because that allows you to put the full games into a single zip file and so you then essentially have the equivalent of per-game file on consoles.
- pezezin 4mo agoIndeed. My favourite one is DOSBox Staging due to the built in CRT emulation, it gets the feeling very close to the original displays of the era.
- rigonkulous 4mo agoThis is awesome, and I can't wait to have the time to set this up and install my GOG library .. but one thing has been bugging me for a long time about my GOG library, and that is: local multiplayer network gaming was awesome then. So .. is there going to be any chance of getting multiplayer networking setup for some of the GOG's? Has anyone accomplished this in the DOXBox-*'en .app'o-sphere yet?
- fragmede 4mo agoDosbox-X has network support via NE2000 drivers.
- rigonkulous 4mo agoOoh, that is really great to know - thank you! I will start with that first ..
- lastdong 4mo agoMy favourite project to run these old games was Boxer (1). Based on dosbox, it creates a runnable self contained disk (app) for each game or set of games / software. It is pretty neat, but I am not sure if it has been maintained recently. 1 boxerapp.com
- 1313ed01 4mo agoI do the opposite and put all games together, with DOS BAT-files to launch the games. I boot up my virtual dream DOS machine by just starting DOSBox-X and then I launch the games the way they are meant to be launched, from the DOS COMMAND.COM command-line. And as I mentioned in another comment, all of that is in one big DOS git repo. Nice thing with DOSBox-X is there is a built-in command to set config parameters, so for games that require special settings or to slow down etc that can be set up from its launcher BAT file. All games share the same dosbox config file with default settings.
- lastdong 4mo agoThanks, I’ll check it out
- giobox 4mo agoBoxer was wonderful in its day, I think it also became the basis of the official GOG Mac DOS game releases for a while too: > https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/mac_dos_game_editing https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/mac_dos_game_editi... I've hoped for years someone would pickup the source and get it going again, it's essentially abandonware right now, no changes in nine years. The website is like a time machine back to the peak skeuomorphic mac app era. It still has the nicest UX of any of the DosBox variants I've tried. In this era of agentic rewrites, modernizing this app is probably the cheapest it has ever been too... > http://boxerapp.com/ http://boxerapp.com/ > https://github.com/alinebee/Boxer https://github.com/alinebee/Boxer
- grobibi 4mo agoCheck out boxer-plus https://github.com/Solid7s/Boxer-Plus https://github.com/Solid7s/Boxer-Plus
- benoau 4mo agoThis is why Rosetta 2's looming retirement sucks.
- smith7018 4mo agoI get why Apple wants to remove it but it genuinely sucks. I can't imagine it costs them a lot to put it into maintenance mode and just support 20 years of macOS games and apps going forward. They want developers to fully move to ARM but older titles or software whose developers have moved on/passed will be lost to the sands of time.
- fragmede 4mo agoI imagine that the area it takes up on the chip is non-trivial and so it'd cost them a ton to continue to have it.
- wat10000 4mo agoIt’s software.
- rimunroe 4mo agoI thought Rosetta 2 was a purely software layer
- fwip 4mo agoRosetta 2 is software, but there are design decisions made for the M-series chips that are specifically made to improve the ability of Rosetta to work in a performant way. The main one I'm aware of is the x86-TSO memory-ordering mode - most ARM chips don't support this, but the M-series have it so that Rosetta can toggle it on for x86 emulation. I'm not sure what the total cost of these are, but it's not zero.
- kbolino 4mo agoThere's another big one, 4K page support. The MMU can be told to set up a virtual address space with smaller, x86-compatible 4096-byte memory pages instead of the default 16384-byte pages.
- 47282847 4mo agoIs it really necessary to first install and copy from a Windows machine?
- 1313ed01 4mo agoI never had any issues using WINE to install GOG games, but maybe running WINE on a Mac is not as easy now as it was back when I did that on a x86 Mac? I always run the GOG installer in WINE and then copy the game into my git repo for DOS stuff, make sure the game works, git commit it, and then I know it will always just work and I will not have to think about that again (plus I can version manage all settings and save-games for all the games and also sync between my different machines without relying on any cloud service).
- f055 4mo agoHmm i guess this would require figuring out how to extract game data from an .exe installer GOG distributes. I guess AI would figure it out in like 3 minutes ;) I’ll check later.
- McGuffin 4mo agoYou could try https://github.com/dscharrer/innoextract https://github.com/dscharrer/innoextract (installable via homebrew).
- nihilismislove 4mo agoHeroic Launcher makes it even simpler, also for non-DOS Windows games (both very old and newer) - https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
- b3lvedere 4mo agoHeroic Launcher is awesome on the Steam Deck
- f055 4mo agoBut I wonder if Heroic can install HoMM2 on a Mac if no Mac binary is available on GOG.
- univocal 4mo agoI have to admit, I've tried using Heroic Launcher both on macOS and on a Steam Deck and in both cases the experience has been rather frustrating. Maybe I was just unlucky, but any game I tried was broken in a way or another, or stopped working with no clear explanation (weird segfaults at start) just a few days later. I've tried GOG DOS Games, GOG Windows Games, Steam Games under Proton, nothing was particularly usable. Got the very same games working under Faugus Launcher and Dosbox-X. The UX is a bit worse but my games run without any issues, and I've stuck with those since then.
- CodesInChaos 4mo agoHow so? I don't think heroic can install a native DOSBox when the game ships a windows DOSBox. Or was that added recently?
- tmtvl 4mo agoApparently (<https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/wiki/How-To%3A-DOSBOX-and-SCUMMVM https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher...>) Heroic supports launching games with DOSBox Staging or ScummVM.
- grobibi 4mo agoThis seems like a good place to mention boxer for macos. Sadly discontinued in 2016 https://boxerapp.com/ https://boxerapp.com/ which was then continued via boxer-plus which adds apple silicon support https://github.com/Solid7s/Boxer-Plus https://github.com/Solid7s/Boxer-Plus edit: I think it has apple silicon support. I am getting mized messages when I look it up.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- haberman 4mo agoIf this works I wonder why GOG doesn’t do it automatically.
- m463 4mo agogog does do this - many classic games are already wrapped in dosbox. The thing I've noticed is that many games are wrapped in different versions, like older versions for older games, etc.
- jmyeet 4mo agoI really respect all the work done by enthusiasts to, for example, make DOS games work on other OS as well as all emulators more generally. Obviously all these binaries can be decompiled into assembly. I really think this is somewhere where Claude can do a lot of heavy lifting to reconstruct source code in a higher-level language that can then be built into something that can run natively on other platforms. AI might be able to do that work directly too. Now this might have some legal issues. Emulation and recompilation (with distribution) are fundamentally different (legally speaking). Still, it'd be a nicer solution.
- p0w3n3d 4mo agoNumerous games avaiable on GOG are playable via ScummVM. Just install it on Mac and download the installer. This includes my beloved Monkey Island series including 1,2,3 and you might try 4 (status Bugged on https://www.scummvm.org/compatibility/ https://www.scummvm.org/compatibility/) <ADVERTISEMENT> and other great titles like Gobliiins, Police Quest, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Indiana Jones, Sam & Max hit the road, The Day of The Tentacle and many many more.
- caycep 4mo agoat this point, considering ppl have gotten classic MacOS to run in the browser, maybe that will be the future at some point...
- simscitizen 4mo agoI'm not sure if this works well for more demanding games, but recently I wanted to let my kid play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail and just built a webpage for those games using js-dos. It worked well enough for those games.
- vunderba 4mo agoI've seen JS-DOS used for id software stuff like DOOM so I think it's plenty capable. The person who created js-dos runs https://dos.zone https://dos.zone as well which has a bunch of abandonware running on the browser.
- vifly_net 4mo agolearn a lot and get a lot of old memory too
- iagosilva 4mo agoSergio