First post, by barfoot
- Rank
- Newbie
I've been fooling around with DOSBox for about 6 months. It has been fun times mixed with failure and success and reliving some great memories. One thing that I've noticed that really seemed strange to me is how many of these games absolutly HATE fast computers.
Lets take a few examples:
Terminal Velocity. I freakin loved this game (and still do). I was excited that it ran so well in DOSBox and, with my recent computer upgrade, I couldn't wait to play that game with the Cycles cranked way up to see the game at its best. Boy was I dissapointed. It seems that the programmers didn't expect computers to EVER be able to render this game at greater than around 40 FPS. Once the game starts getting really fast it just total freaks out. The screen stutters like crazy and and all the timing is off (shots fire too fast or too slow, enemies don't move right, etc). This does not seem to be a DOSBox issue, its just how the game was made. I find it amazing that the developers seemed oblivious that comptuers were going to get faster.
How about Zone 66? Another great shooter. One thing that makes this game really good is the fantastic demo-style music. But wait folks! If your computer is too fast, you don't get music! Sure, you get sound effects, the game runs great, but no music. From what I can tell, this isn't a DOSBox issue either. I'm going to be researching this one some more to figure out what's going on. Did the developers think "Oh, in the future, when people have really fast computers, music won't be popular anymore". Really, how hard is it to play a MOD file? Not too hard, I've programmed a simple MOD player, it doesn't take much. Heck, even Impulse Tracker runs flawlessly in DOSBox.
What really gets me is in 15 or so years, are current games going to be having the same issues? Have developers changed their methods at all? Are today's programmers looking to future hardware as much as current technology? When I run Half Life 2 in 10 years and it starts running at like 1,000 FPS, is it going to freak out? I would hope not. Was the timer resolution so low back in the days of DOS programming that the games just couldn't deal with many updates per second? I doubt it. If I'm not mistaken, the timing in Windows is actually less accurate than in DOS.
Emulation always gets me thinking about the future. What will I be emulating 10, 15, or even 20 years from now? I can only imagine I'll be running some Windows emulator and then in that be running DOSBox. I just can't give up those classics, you know?
