The last time I fiddled with Win95 Dosbox masochism which by the way I highly advise not to do despite what all those "Half life on my phone's dosbox android's" on youtube tell you, it was the Jan 2014 Daum, and even then it has severe directdraw problems like indexed alpha not working on sprites.

Dosbox-x, ykhwong took its source and badly at that, probably due to bad timing.

Dominus wrote:

Dosbox-x, ykhwong took its source and badly at that, probably due to bad timing.

I've been meaning to give DosBox-X a try. I think Win95 will be a good test of its capabilities.

leileilol wrote:

The last time I fiddled with Win95 Dosbox masochism which by the way I highly advise not to do despite what all those "Half life on my phone's dosbox android's" on youtube tell you, it was the Jan 2014 Daum, and even then it has severe directdraw problems like indexed alpha not working on sprites.

I can't say I'm quite THAT masochistic. 🤣 But I'll admit, the mere existence of non-PC versions of DosBox annoys me just because of how poorly suited it is for things like phones, tablets, and consoles. Even running it on the Raspberry Pi seems questionable to me, since I doubt that little ARM chip can provide the necessary horsepower to do anything useful with it.

Dominus wrote:

Dosbox-x, ykhwong took its source and badly at that, probably due to bad timing.

The only problems with current versions of Dosbox-x are that display scaling doesn't work (on Windows, at least), and the dynamic core was removed, which renders a lot of Win 95 games, even early ones, unplayably slow. It is more compatible than ykhwong's build, however.

Personally, I don't think Dosbox is terribly suited for running Windows yet. It's a shame too, as there really aren't any good options that are ideal for use with games.

Yes, while Dosbox (or rather Dosbox based) is IMO a very good shot at getting Windows 95 games to play it is not there yet and probably never will unless someone forks it. Dosbox-x was a good start but IMO went overboard with trying to support too much and recently decided to drop Windows support (though rather dropped support of running Dosbox-x ON Windows) which doesn't matter to me but probably a lot of other people...

Silanda wrote:

Dominus wrote:

Dosbox-x, ykhwong took its source and badly at that, probably due to bad timing.

The only problems with current versions of Dosbox-x are that display scaling doesn't work (on Windows, at least), and the dynamic core was removed, which renders a lot of Win 95 games, even early ones, unplayably slow. It is more compatible than ykhwong's build, however.

Personally, I don't think Dosbox is terribly suited for running Windows yet. It's a shame too, as there really aren't any good options that are ideal for use with games.

Hmm, is there any way to compile the latest DosBox X with the dynamic core?

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Hmm, is there any way to compile the latest DosBox X with the dynamic core?

Not easily. I must have been having an off day, because it's not actually disabled (although it didn't work in the build I was using at the time, for some reason). It no longer works well enough to use Windows though (even WfW 3.11), so someone would need to fix it.

I run windows 95 ok on standard dosbox. The real trouble comes with windows 95 having the need to use disc images, which it naturally corrupts at the drop of a hat, much like the real hardware would corrupt if you pluged out the energy cable back then. My 'solution' to this is to copy the windows image to a in memory filesystem in the dosbox conf file. This is possible in linux/android because all of them come with one built in that just maps to your computer physical memory. Then i boot that and don't care about how i abuse it.

Still, it''s volatile only so to play games with it, and not waste space having a 'windows' for every game i normally put the games in other images. These can also be copied to shm if you''re worried about corruption (if you have huge tracts of memory anyway), just be sure to keep at least one persistent drive for saves.

One thing that bothers me is that indeed dosbox scalers can't handle windows or win games resolution changes particularly well. On full screen, instead of showing the scaled image of 800x640 to 1366x786 whatever they show black space around.
I normally use
[sdl]
fullresolution=desktop
windowresolution=original
and that shows the normal image enlarged until it hits the height limit but not distorted by streching with black bars around the side, just like i want it ( i grew to really dislike streching ).

I tried this:
[sdl]
fullresolution=original
windowresolution=original
and the graphics card driver sees that and goes 'wants archaic resolution in fullscreen? better stretch to not insert blackbars' ugh, philistines.
(EDIT: btw i found a xrender command to 'fix' this temporarily: xrandr --output LVDS --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect" (LVDS is a monitor id so it might be different for you). On reboot it will reset unless you take special measures (on rc.local for instance).

Of course, even i am not crazy enough to install cd emulators in windows 95 just to play super large win95 games with several cds that still have to be stuffed into disk images to actually be seen by the OS. Unfortunately the usability picture is much better on windows 3.11 just because mounting a cd or drive on the conf file automatically shows it there and it allows 'larger than maximum' space in hdd images, which isn't the case in windows 95 sadly.

I just best Diablo on windows 95 using dosbox daum and I've been playing starcraft. Both run like a dream.