Stumbled across the DosBox project today while trying to get an old DOS game to run under win2k. I was merely trying to get it to do sound and run at the proper speed (VDMSound and SoundFX worked but were tricky), but DosBox is particularly cool as it's a full emulator and will run DOS apps in a window.

Now I'm digging out old DOS games on floppy disks.

Anyway, it's pretty nifty and worth having some fun with. Check it out.

Do you think it'll support Privateer 2? What about the old demo scene?

Edit: I see that Privateer 2 doesn't work with the previous version. It doesn't look like anyone's tried it with the current beta.

Dunno about either. I should try some of the old ASM competition stuff on it.

One thing I find very interesting is that one enterprising soul has even tried extending it to emulate the Roland MT-32. I had a bunch of old games that sounded really awesome on the MT-32. I don't have it hooked up to the PC any more as it's in my guitar rack now and is the sound source for my bass pedals. Eventually I'll try to get the MT-32 emulator version of DosBox working, but for now I'm happy with the adlib/soundblaster emulation in there already.

Now I just need to figure out how to get it to stretch the aspect ratio of a 320x200 game so that it's more realistic looking. As it stands right now, it displays such games in a 640x400 window, meaning that it looks a little stretched. Even playing full screen, it still doesn't stretch to fit the screen. Odd...

does it fix timing issues?
i was able to get sound working with vdmsound the other day, but omf 2097 plays at about 100000% speed. which sucks. and cpukiller and moslo dont work right with it.

does it fix timing issues?

Yes, on the one game that had timing issues for me, I was able to adjust the speed linearly by setting the option:

[cpu]
cycles=2500

in a custom configuration file for that particular game. The adjustment is pretty smooth and linear, so that I am able to tweak the setting to be just right. 1000 was too slow, 4000 was too fast, for example. I'm still tweaking that particular game. Stellar 7, by the way, is the game. And yeah, I specifically tried both CPUKiller and MoSlo, and neither worked for this game, but DosBox did.

nice. trying it now

Thanks Tony! That's something I was looking for

Cool. And there's a discussion forum called "Vogons" where folks can help you with it if you're stuck (and you don't act like a complete newbie as in "duh, I don't know how to press alt+enter to toggle full screen).

"Vogons" is a cute acronym standing for "Very Old Games On New Systems" and they cover other similar topics there such as the sound driver emulators and such. The address is vogons.zetafleet.com.

I don't have to listen to any of their poetry do I?

Heh -

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