Sure the market is small. But it's another market and sooner or later some suit will go after it 😁

Steam and GOG all started with a small idea and look where they are now.

Retro is good business. We couldn't afford stuff as kids, but now many are professionals and have deep pockets. We just need something to spend it on 🤣

Seriously if we all sat down and did the maths and figures of all the retro stuff we purchased, the suits would all get excited. I'm sure most of us here spent quite a bit of money so far...

If the business was that big, why didn't some private enterprise come up with something like DOSBox long before it became a viable open-source project?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I'm sure most of us here spent quite a bit of money so far...

Dude, there really aren't that many of us here.

Jorpho wrote:

If the business was that big, why didn't some private enterprise come up with something like DOSBox long before it became a viable open-source project?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I'm sure most of us here spent quite a bit of money so far...

Dude, there really aren't that many of us here.

Plenty of companies did. There have been software only PC Emulators going back to the 80's. Here's just one example

http://page6.org/archive/issue_32/page_38.htm

Notice the date. 1988.

Your link is to a program which slowly runs (early) PC software on an Atari ST. That is rather distantly removed from DOSBox.

Jorpho wrote:

If the business was that big

It's not big, but maybe I didn't express myself well.

It's small business (so far), but it's another revenue stream. If the numbers add up, the bean counters and suits will fund such projects. ANY extra profit is welcomed.

I think the fact that we see classic games on Steam, GOG, iPhone, Wii and likely on other platforms says it all.

Regarding DOSBox. Well what "enterprise" would have funded such a development? No single entity represents "all retro games". It's a highly fragmented industry.

Everyone wants a little bit of the cake, but nobody is willing to fund such a big project. But then DOSBox came along and someone put 1 and 1 together. Now they don't have to invest much and make some profit.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

If the numbers add up, the bean counters and suits will fund such projects. ANY extra profit is welcomed.

...

Well what "enterprise" would have funded such a development?

I think you are continuing to not express yourself well.

Jorpho wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

If the numbers add up, the bean counters and suits will fund such projects. ANY extra profit is welcomed.

...

Well what "enterprise" would have funded such a development?

I think you are continuing to not express yourself well.

Hmm

It wasn't worthwhile for companies like EA to develop an emulator for (only) their (few) games. But then DOSBox became available and GOG offered infrastructure and customer base. So they did the numbers, it checked out and they signed on the dotted line.

So it went from: Big investment + some profit to small investment + some profit which tipped the scale.

So basically they got someone else to do the big investment for them and now they are happy to have this revenue going.

Does it make sense now?

Jorpho wrote:

Your link is to a program which slowly runs (early) PC software on an Atari ST. That is rather distantly removed from DOSBox.

No it isn't. It runs DOS software on hardware that it wouldn't ordinarily be capable of running on, which is what DOSBox does. There were similar programs available for the Amiga, Sun, and many other machines.

If you need a better example, there is Connectix Virtual PC which was later bought by Microsoft which allowed DOS and Windows software to run in an emulated environment on Macs and which Microsoft later adapted to PC's. That software goes all the way back to the 90's.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

It wasn't worthwhile for companies like EA to develop an emulator for (only) their (few) games. But then DOSBox became available […]
Show full quote

It wasn't worthwhile for companies like EA to develop an emulator for (only) their (few) games. But then DOSBox became available and GOG offered a infrastructure and customer base. So they did the numbers and signed on the dotted line.

So it went from: Big investment + some profit to small investment + some profit which tipped the scale.

So basically they got someone else to do the big investment for them and now they are happy to have this revenue going.

Does it make sense now?

Then you cannot say that "ANY extra profit is welcomed". Rather, you are saying that extra profit is welcomed only if it does not require a huge investment.

sliderider wrote:

No it isn't. It runs DOS software on hardware that it wouldn't ordinarily be capable of running on, which is what DOSBox does. There were similar programs available for the Amiga, Sun, and many other machines.

If you need a better example, there is Connectix Virtual PC which was later bought by Microsoft which allowed DOS and Windows software to run in an emulated environment on Macs. That software goes all the way back to the 90's.

Even if any of that software is capable of running sophisticated DOS games at a reasonable speed, none of it was actually available for the PC. Ergo, not like DOSBox.

I said, "why didn't some private enterprise come up with something like DOSBox long before it became a viable open-source project?" By "long before" I still meant at some point after it started to become difficult to run older DOS games on a current PC.

Jorpho wrote:

Then you cannot say that "ANY extra profit is welcomed". Rather, you are saying that extra profit is welcomed only if it does not require a huge investment.

Well that right there is the difference between making a loss and a profit 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

Then you cannot say that "ANY extra profit is welcomed". Rather, you are saying that extra profit is welcomed only if it does not require a huge investment.

Well that right there is the difference between making a loss and a profit 😀

In common parlance, a profit on a huge investment is still a profit, sir. A loss is something that does not have net profits at all.

Well I think the most exciting thing happening around here is the Voodoo emulation. It feels like a stepping stone to getting full Glide emulation and allowing tons of Windows 3D games to be fully functional down the road. There are already plenty of Win9x games that don't work right on recent hardware and OSs (even XP sometimes).