First post, by tsm
- Rank
- Newbie
Since I had nothing better to do, I installed VirtualBox and set up a DOS 6.22 installation to try some games.
When I was still installing DOS, I realized that this virtualization program is aimed at newer OS's, because it has a problem with MDA text mode. Sometimes it doesn't do newlines, so every line of text appears on top of the screen and covers the previous one (actually this only seems to happen when I issue a virtual CTRL-ALT-DEL combination to reset the machine, so shutting it down and restarting it is a sufficient workaround).
I successfully installed a mouse driver and a CD driver. Then I downloaded the Sound Blaster 16 DOS drivers from the Creative website. I successfully installed them, although VirtualBox offers no MIDI/OPL emulation whatsoever, so DIAGNOSE.EXE would complain and wouldn't let me customize port number, DMA and IRQ.
I tried running a couple of games I have on CD, "The Big Red Adventure" and "Azrael's Tear", plus the "Fasttracker 2" music editor, some cracktros and a music disk I got on Pouet.net.
All the cracktros ran too fast and without sound. Actually only one of them featured digital sound, but it ran silent too. All the others had OPL sound, which of course didn't play. The music disk, which was a collection of MOD and XM tunes, worked well with perfect sound, but its mouse interface was almost unusable because of lack of smoothness.
Fasttracker 2 would come up and then freeze.
The Big Red Adventure ran very well, with digitized speech. It was a bit too fast and of course had no music.
Azrael's Tear was surprisingly smooth and fast. I tried walking around in various rooms and the speed was perfect. On the other hand, it didn't recognize the Sound Blaster, had a choppy mouse pointer and had some keyboard problems: sometimes when I released the coursor keys, the character still moved for a while. It's a shame because this game isn't really playable in DosBox (at least on my PC). I also tried it with VDMsound but it was either choppy or too fast.
I can confirm what I read around the Internet: VirtualBox is unbelievably fast. Most people say it's difficult to set up a comfortable DOS environment into it, but I disagree: it all depends on your knowledge about computers and DOS. It just takes time because MS DOS isn't built in and you have to actually install it. The main problem about playing DOS games in VirtualBox is that the software was born with a different purpose. With some more compatibility and some kind of OPL/MPU401 emulation, it would be a very interesting alternative to DosBox when it comes to CPU-hungry games.