I would very much like to see a Voodoo emulation in DOSBox for the DOS Glide games. However, it's very far into the DOSBox development. We will probably not see something like that within the next 2 years, if ever. They could take the Glide emulation written for MAME by Aaron Giles (with his permission of course).

Adding cpu hungry software voodoo emulation to already cpu hungry dosbox won't be good for speed 😀

Yeah 😀 I fully aware of that. But CPU speed won't be a problem 20 years from now 😉

Harekiet, I note that you didn't state that adding some kind of wrapper would be a bad idea 😉

Consider just how many games this request actually covers and then consider the man hours to provide such a facility.

Quake has got a great Win32 OpenGL wrapper so why exactly do you want to run the DOS version (apart from a different platform...). Not sure about GTA but didn't that come with a Windows game as well?

You guys are almost asking for DOSBox to become a replacement for something like Virtual PC but of course cross platform and runs everything you can think of 🤐

Well I would certainly say that accelleration should be an essential addition at some stage, but not anytime soon. Though 99.9% of dos games that have accelleration work in windows, im sure there are a few that dont. Which is where dosbox would come in when that day comes.

Reckless wrote:

Not sure about GTA but didn't that come with a Windows game as well?

The game GTA has become freeware and can be downloaded from the Rockstar Games page: http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/gta.htm

This is not the "original" game. Instead it has been updated so it runs perfectly on new systems.

I personally can't stand the mentality of 'the game also works in windows so drop the idea of getting Dos Box to be compatible' That poisons the idea for us adventurous linux users, after all. 😀 WINE is an alright thing, but I still am hardpressed to find even an old game that works 100% perfectly with it on my systems. Amazingly enough, a reletively recent game (Master of Orion III) works rather well in WINE, but I still have a few issues with it.

I completely agree that a Glide/OpenGL compatibility piece for Dos Box should be very, very, very low on the priority list, it should not be that low on the list simply because "Those Games work on Windows"

Why re-invent the wheel? There is a very nice glide wrapper for windows called zeckensack's Glide wrapper, wouldn't it be posible for DosBOX to forward to said wrapper all the glide calls made by dos games? I mean, DOSBox already intercepts the calls for XMS and EMS. Why write a glide wrapper from scratch when there is already one that does the work rather well?
The disadvantage is that the wrapper obviously runs under windows (since none of the games were ported to linux). But this wrapper is written in C/C++ and NASM so it can be ported to run in x86 linux.

wouldn't it be posible for DosBOX to forward to said wrapper all the glide calls made by dos games?

I have no idea what I am talking about ... but I think the big problem here is recognizing those Glide calls. Once the DOSBox runtime system knows it is dealing with a Glide call, it might indeed be possible to forward the calls to an (outside) Windows driver.

I will stop now, before more of my foot gets firmly locked in my mouth.

If such emulation were ever to be a possibility, it would really be pointless unless it utilized the real 3D hardware in a person's computer. That would keep the performance cost down to a manageable level. Using a Glide wrapper would have to be a necessity.

a) DOSBOX is very demanding on processor speed.
b) Games using 3D apparead at the time where Pentias were around.
Imagine having a game which required e.g. Pentium 100 running together with Glide emulator (af course I expect that it would use 3D card).
Before 10 Ghz processors become normal, it would be just technical demontration of principle (but it would not be playable).

Mirek

mirekluza wrote:

a) DOSBOX is very demanding on processor speed. b) Games using 3D apparead at the time where Pentias were around. Imagine having […]
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a) DOSBOX is very demanding on processor speed.
b) Games using 3D apparead at the time where Pentias were around.
Imagine having a game which required e.g. Pentium 100 running together with Glide emulator (af course I expect that it would use 3D card).
Before 10 Ghz processors become normal, it would be just technical demontration of principle (but it would not be playable).

I agree that emulating 100-200 Mhz cpus would be a drag, is there any chance that in the near future dosbox adds x86 dinamic recompilation? Most of those games ran on 16 mb or less, so I think it would be quite feasible, no?

There is a "dynamic" core in 0.61. It is much better in CVS (though still a bit buggy).

Mirek

*nods to above post* It is good to note everything is running either much faster (for the most) and smoother in all cores (normal and dynamic for sure.) Doesn't mean it works prefectly yet though...