I have a fun anecdote involving DOSBox.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>To this day, unless something drastic has changed, a billion $ company is running DOSBox in production (and I literally mean production).<p>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.
Really 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.
A question I don't see in the FAQ: why the fork?<p>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.
Derailing 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.<p>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.
Anyone interested in this should also check out pcem, <a href="https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/</a> it's emulating the hardware rather than the interfaces.
I've been playing with PCem on Linux the last week. You must enable network with a parameter when compiling!<p>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.<p>I successfully installed the 3dfx Voodoo 2 driver and the games run just fine.
Between DOSBox (and its various forks) and PCem, it's a great time for retro gaming/app playing and development!<p>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.
I 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..<p>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.
I’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.<p>The result will probably still run on modern Windows, too
I 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.<p>Also, be aware if you are using your existing DOSBox directory: games that require installation might not work if installed via the original DOSBox.
If this let me play some games better I will be very impressed...<p>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.
Nice. 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.
There are already two threads on DOSBox-X posted on HN month and two month ago.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dosbox-x.com" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dosbox-x.com</a>
My 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?
<a href="https://github.com/open-shell" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/open-shell</a> for classic windows look/feel
My 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.