DosFreak wrote on 2020-02-05, 23:40:
It was okay, until it deteriorated into yet another quarrel about the shittiness of the Build Engine.
canthearu wrote on 2020-02-06, 00:12:
All this is just the nature of the DOS gaming beast.
People who were there for it understand, those who weren't just won't understand why the experience is so weird and different, to say, the Playstation 4 experience. Or even the NES/SNES experience.
Exactly. DOSBox was clearly designed to give not just the ability to play DOS games but also give the DOS usage experience. Since this is what you get with the default DOSBox build, many users to whom this experience is foreign, will be put off. Such players will be better off buying their DOS games preconfigured from GOG (which was indeed mentioned in the Doomworld thread).
dreamer_ wrote on 2020-02-06, 01:52:
It was easier to play games on my old 486DX2 with 4MB of RAM on MS-DOS than it is to configure the same games to work properly in DOSBox.
No, it wasn't. You have nostalgia bias ("rosy retrospection") which is just as real as survivor bias. 😀
I say this with confidence because I still have a working pure DOS PC myself, which I sometimes tinker with and play games on.
dreamer_ wrote on 2020-02-06, 09:28:Am I crazy to believe, that DOSBox for average users should be as easy to run as some SNES emulator?
Not crazy, no, but unrealistic. This is not the mindset that DOSBox was designed with (as I said above), and I don't think it could be designed in any other way. Consoles of that genres are closed systems - there is the BIOS, and then the ROM and that's it. A ROM was self-contained. DOS was a full-fledged (albeit limited) operating system, and games that were shipped for DOS did not contain all the code that needed to run it. So DOSBox has to emulate a lot of DOS behavior as well, and that includes a lot of flexibility and customization and tweaks, because DOS games often required different tweaks on real DOS systems as well.
It's possible that the default host settings in the DOSBox config are not optimal, maybe this is what you are referring to? However, I believe they were chosen to be the most compatible, even at the cost of performance. However, maybe I'm wrong, based on the examples you provide above. It's possible that DOSBox defaults are too tailored to Windows, since this is where most of the user base is?
Bruninho wrote on 2020-02-07, 20:38:
I didn't say it does not need to be improved, but I do believe it can be. And should be.
But it does not need to be "dumbed down" for the "smartphone generation".
Yes, well said.
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