DOS Box is cool!

[Greg]

I used to play Master Of Orion (old DOS game) fine under WindowsXP until I had to replace my motherboard. Seems the new MB uses a bit of physical memory that prevents DOS programs from working anymore.

No problem, with the release (v0.58) of the new DOS Box from http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/ I can emulate dos in a window or full screen with working sound etc.

Only works for DOS real mode games, a list of supported games is there. Give it a go. Mmmmm MOO, better than MOO2 and MOO3, how I missed you...

[Gator]

I wonder if it works better than my Virtual PC5. I've found the DOS audio doesn't seem to emulate just right because it emulates an SB PCI. I'll try it out tonight, and maybe I can play Out of This World and Companions of Xanth again with audio :D

[Gator]

well, it emulated the sound perfectly which is great, but jesus the video and game itself seem REALLY slow. Is there anyway to speed it up?

[Greg]

Originally posted by Gator
well, it emulated the sound perfectly which is great, but jesus the video and game itself seem REALLY slow. Is there anyway to speed it up?

Maybe. When you run the game, press CTRL-F11 (I think) to increase the mhz. You can keep increasing the emulated CPU until windows performance says it is using 100% CPU, then it will have no effect, in fact it will run slower.

I think the default is 1mhz or 4mhz, I can run 12mhz using only 80% CPU on an Athlon xp 2100. If this doesn't help, then you need another program because this is a CPU, SoundBlaster and VGA emulator, not just some DOS drivers etc. If it does help, then use a config file to set it the way you want. Just copy and edit the default config file then run DOS Box.

My command line looks like:
"C:\Program Files\DOSBox\dosbox.exe" -conf "moo.cfg" -c "mount c c:\games\orion" -c "c:" -c "orion.exe"

and MOO.cfg just has the lines:
[sdl]
fullscreen=true
[cpu]
cycles=12000

[Chalnoth]

"Only" 80% CPU usage on 12MHz? Wow that's one hell of a lot of wasted processor power...but I suppose these games shouldn't need that much, and those that are processor speed-dependent should play great.

[Gator]

12mhz is the max of this program?! sweet lord that's slow! I used to run Xanth on a 486 DX4-100, I can't downgrade to 12mhz. I guess that's why it seem so slow. doh!

I'll try tweaking when I get the chance, but I don't think 12mhz will be fast enough at all :(

[Greg]

No no, 12mhz is not the max, it just gives you an idea of how slow it is to simulate a CPU in software! Virtual machines typically run 20-500 times slower than hardware, so it's lucky we're only trying to emulate a computer for older games.

You could probably get 16-20mhz out of 2ghz PC if you try. So you're simulating a 286-386sx range of computers.

12mhz was just the choice I made to run the game I was playing at a reasonable speed and still keep it well under 100% cpu usage so the rest of windows runs happily without interfering.

If possibly you really want WindowsXP to provide legacy compatible drivers and run the game on the CPU, but as we find, there are sound issues for some chips/cards and bios clashes, and some things like the game Zone66 where Tran (programmer) decided to use pretty much every interupt in the 386 and write his own operating system (dos extender anyway) which clashes with WindowsXP protection. Since that ran in protected mode, DOS Box won't help there anyway.