I've thought about this several times. The boot speed shouldn't really be a major issue, as a DOS system boots a hell of a lot faster than a modern Windows 7 or 8 system. Running a DOS system from a CF card gives it really fast drive access times, and instead of bothering with games on floppies, they could be installed on the CF card, and you could have a nice NC like menu system to select which game you wanted to run.

I'm sure it's possible to build a system like this. The question remains: Who would buy one?
I think the majority of people who want to play old DOS games, either are happy using DOSBox, or they want the full DOS experience that only a proper retro system can give. I know that personally, I'd never trade my retro box for a console, even if it could run all the same games, even if it could run them better. I'd miss out on the fun of setting it all up, fiddling for hours getting that really stubborn NIC to work, try out a different driver to free up that extra KB of base memory.

It's a nice idea, but I'm not sure there's a market for it.

Oh, I'm just talking about making one for myself, not really talking about selling it or anything like that. Besides, then you'd get into licensing issues for the games (although a lot of them can be freely used). Just talking as like a fun little personal project, specifically also to see if I can get something nice going that also has a nice console-looking case.

The main issue with this for me is the need for a keyboard.

It doesn't lend itself to playing on the TV on the couch.

This kind of reminds me of what I want to do when I build my PCI Socket 3 rig. I want to mount a CF reader in the front, and have a few different cards loaded with different OS configurations for different games. Granted, that's as console-like as my project is going to get. 😜

Gamepad support in DOS games is just too limited for that. Only the D-pad and four buttons, with very limited customizability. You'd be confined to a few genres of games. If you are in Japan there are more than enough interesting consoles to get 😀

It's just an idea for a project, not because I've got a lack of games to play or anything like that. Already have a retro rig for gaming. Actually I'm more interested just in the theorizing about how you'd build such a thing, what you'd put inside, how small you could make it, etc.

But yeah you'd have to wonder whether you'd even go with a gamepad or just with a keyboard. I guess I could make a list of games that you can play with. There are plenty of games with joypad support tho so you could just capitalize on that. And since the idea I had was originally for floppy disk games, I think they're generally pretty simple as opposed to later CD based games.

1. Build a very small system using one of those Intel Atom motherboards like this, which come with the Atom processors attached. Get the smallest CPU casing for it. Or get someone to custom build one.

2. Get one of those micro USB card readers with a micro SD card, or get a small USB drive.

3. Install a very light Linux distro on the microSD card or the USB drive, and customize the distro to load only Dosbox with it's core required dependencies.
If required, install a Dosbox frontend and make the Linux boot directly into the frontend (for Linux - DBGL).

Set the BIOS to boot into USB first.

4. If a frontend is installed, then install Joy2Key for Linux - you can assign keyboard commands to the gamepad/joystick.

5. Once this is done, you can select the games which will be displayed in the frontend via the gamepad or joystick directly, without the need to use a keyboard.

Advantages :

Using the motherboard enables the user to add USB peripherals whenever required. Also enables easy USB joystick/gamepad installation. It has on board video, so no need to install additional graphics card, which may take up the smallest space as desired for a 'Dos console'.

Linux and Dosbox for Linux takes care of all the hassles of sound card 'installation' and speed control.

As such, a Dosbox frontend is highly recommended, especially if a console-like experience is desired to use the gamepad as the main controller.
This enables to the user to use the gamepad in conjunction with the Joy2Key mapper utility. If extra buttons are present on the gamepad, it may be possible to assign Ctrl-F9 to quit the running game back to the frontend to choose another game to load.

Also you can emulate mouse buttons with the joy2key.

Disadvantages :

A streamlined Linux package just for running Dosbox with it's core dependencies is required. Requires knowledge to make that distro to boot directly into Dosbox, or a frontend. I think this can be done easily by those who know how. Preferably a new distro built for this purpose will be wonderful.

A streamlined Linux will be a lot easier on system resources than Windows.

I haven't used Joy2Key for sometime now, and that too I've only used the Windows version. I hope you can assign the key-press combinations with ease.

'Dos Console' will be limited to the Arcade and Action games for Dos. Other games are best played with the keyboard + mouse, which shouldn't be a problem if using the motherboards as mentioned above - which come with free USB slots.

Of course, the games have to be installed first on another system after installing the Linux Distro with Dosbox and the frontends.

Alternately, you can install a 2.5" hard drive, but may require proper HDD holder within the small casing.

Preferably a double-decker like CPU case will be helpful to install the Power Supply at the bottom and the motherboard on the top decker, or vice versa, so as not to elongate or enlarge the cpu case too much.

I ran Dosbox on my Xbox 1 years ago. I managed to get Xwing going but it wasn't really fast enough.I haven't checked for a newer Dosbox build but you can only expect so much from a 733MHz Celeron even with access to the dynamic x86 DOSBOX core.

ScummVM and various DOS/Windows game ports are available too though. I played some Full Throttle and Curse of Monkey Island. 😀 I play Quake 2 on there occasionally and it does 1280x720 at 60fps. Xbox's HD capabilities are very handy for this and for emulation too.

There is a massive amount of homebrew ports for that console. Besides ports for PC stuff you have insane console/arcade efforts like CoinOps. Really mind blowing.

Playing Windows game ports on Xbox sounds interesting but I also have to question it a bit. Any cheap/small form factor HTPC nowadays will do the exact same thing, and even far better. Usually you buy a console to play games that are unique to it, not to play stuff that's also possible on any PC.

That being said, I have experimented with homebrew emulators and media players on the PS2 a long time ago. I found that not even the NES emu would run satisfactory (some games had sound glitches IIRC), but then again the Emotion Engine is probably not so well suited for the task as the Xbox CPU. Actually there are even efforts to bring PSX emulation to the PS2 despite it being hardware compatible, to circumvent copy protection...

I modded my Xbox back in 2005 I think. So it's not a new acquisition. 😀 My main motivations were curiosity with the modchip install, playing games off the HDD (fast and quiet), emulation and homebrew. I used it for years as a networked media player with XBMC.

It can emulate N64 and PS1 pretty well. Older consoles emulate perfectly and the 720p/1080i capability makes them look great. I also really get into the arcade emulation. The homebrew efforts are super slick on it in general, and they are designed to be navigated on a TV with a gamepad.

Of course a HTPC can do most of this too. I do that as well. But I have admiration for the Xbox homebrew efforts and the convenience.

Since bsnes/higan had uncovered the inaccuracy/quirkiness of popular emulators I find it hard to go back to them for serious play. Their truly redeeming quality for me is that they allow for online play but sadly this aspect is mostly ignored by developers nowadays. Eight year old builds are all that's available for the most part. Even with Dolphin I could not get online play to work.

Besides that I have never understood the need for widescreen stretching or even fancy algorithms (puke). May be a bit of an unpopular opinion here.

Also, the whole "getting the most out of what's there" approach on consoles always deserves respect, whether it'd be commercial or homebrew efforts 😀

Thanks a lot for that run-down, Malik.
Yeah, I guess using modern hardware and DOSBox would really make things a lot easier compared to using old hardware and loading pure DOS.

d1stortion wrote:

Besides that I have never understood the need for widescreen stretching or even fancy algorithms (puke). May be a bit of an unpopular opinion here.

Oh yeah I definitely agree. I wanna see pixels. That's what I saw when I played them on my monitor, after all. Upscaling algorithms just remind me that I don't have the real thing anymore.

What hardware would you use for a DOS console, though? CPU can range all the way from 8088 to P4 and many of the very early CPU's are no longer in production so how would you source them? Some of the later CPU's would also be too fast for the very early games to run without speed issues and there would be issues with the lack of support in DOS for newer technologies. A DOS console would also need to have everything on one chip or board so what video hardware do you include? Sound hardware, too. Your favorite video card/sound card combination might not work well with every game and someone else may have a different favorite combination. If you're going to make a box with a card cage for video and sound cards, then at that point you may as well be selling new PC's made using vintage technology.

Again I'm just making one as a pet project, I'm not talking about some kind of mass production, so sourcing the material won't be a problem (you can buy a ton of old stuff on eBay for example).

There are gamepads out there that are intended to plug into the keyboard port and that actually map buttons to keypresses directly. I've posted about them before.

Yeah, something like that could be used. Or maybe the Gravis Gamepad. A lot of these old (1990 and before) games have joystick support, so I'm sure something can be used. Of course it would limit the games you can play, but that's OK, this is just an experiment/toy anyway.

• I've tried this three times in my life:
• Many many years ago with a retired 486DX4-100 + hacked keyboard + VLB VGA card ran through an RGB to NTSC encoder, dependent on a TSR to output 15 kHz video. It worked but it was very fiddly - roughly half of the games would bypass the 15 kHz video modes or deviated in their video timings just enough to mess up with the TV's sync circuitry. Having to lug a VGA monitor around for troubleshooting = not fun.
• A few years later I tried again with a Pentium 233MMX using a Trident PCI VGA card with built-in TV out + SNESKey with parallel port SNES gamepad interface. It worked way better but I didn't like how the card interlaced and underscanned every video mode, even those low resolution ones that'd look quite good and sharp on a 15 kHz LDTV, making everything way too small, flickery and blurry. Overscan and deflicker parameters were only adjustable on Windows, making it useless for DOS gaming.
• Recently I tried it one more time by running DOSBox on my Wii - Low resolution modes look very sharp on a 480i CRT through YPbPr (finally!) but I couldn't for the life of me get the Wii remote working as a controller for simple platform games. I didn't like being tethered to a USB keyboard for couch gaming so I lost my interest. Maybe I'll pick up a wireless keyboard in the future to give it another go.

133MHz wrote:

• I've tried this three times in my life:
• Many many years ago with a retired 486DX4-100 + hacked keyboard + VLB VGA card ran through an RGB to NTSC encoder, dependent on a TSR to output 15 kHz video. It worked but it was very fiddly - roughly half of the games would bypass the 15 kHz video modes or deviated in their video timings just enough to mess up with the TV's sync circuitry. Having to lug a VGA monitor around for troubleshooting = not fun.

I don't know that much about video signals, but doesn't hardware exist to bypass this by upscaling/timing video to a certain degree?

Yes, but when I did that they were scarce, expensive and mediocre (at least the consumer ones within my reach). They'd interlace/underscan every video mode, even the 200~350 line ones which are meant for low-def progressive CRT displays, resulting in a blurry unreadable flicker-fest. When I got a game running in 320x200 displaying correctly on my friend's (large for the time) 27" SDTV through my contraption, it was beautiful. It looked pretty much like a gaming console from that period, with a solid picture and great text readability.