Man what a frustrating experience. It's like ALMOST being able to play moo2.
Seems insane to me that my g5 can't play a dos game fast enough. Oh well.

YAY macintosh.

/sarcasm

It's a Macintosh. You knew getting in that the processor was a POS comparable to PC's at the time. No one to blame but yourself.

I'm not blaming anyone.

I'm just surprised that it's not able to handle such a simple program emulation like dos.

Didn't know it was this piss poor.

I could get an older used pc laptop and run dosbox quite without a hitch or any slowdown I assume. Craigslist is man's best friend.

It's a Macintosh. You knew getting in that the processor was a POS comparable to PC's at the time. No one to blame but yourself.

Now, that statement made me raise my eyebrows. It's utter bullshit. Don't get me wrong, i've never owned a Mac (and probably never will, as PC's are what i need and want), but saying "the processor is a POS" only because said CPU can't run DOSBox's x86 dynamic core code (which is the problem i think) is a bit much, and a rather silly basis for forming a conclusion. I'm no coder, but i think the core could be implemented on the CPU, after all. I guess there are lots of people that wouldn't judge their PC's quality by the ability to run demanding DOS games on them, too.

Oh, and on topic: if DOSBox really is running too slow on your machine (which is hard to believe, maybe other Mac users can chime in - could still be a config issue) you could try a different emulator like BOCHS or Qemu, though you'll have to install DOS and go through the old config.sys/autoexec.bat setup routine (memory optimizations, drivers, etc.) before being able to play the game. There will be other drawbacks, too. I remember when i started using DOSBox i ran Magic Carpet SVGA mode in BOCHS for speed comparison. The game was running much faster in BOCHS than it did in DOSBox, but it had no sound at all and a few other issues.

I was not referring to the fact that dynamic core not running on the PowerPC means it's a POS. If you read my post you would see where I said "comparable to other PC's at the time". Nowhere in that post did I mention DOSBox.

http://www.pcworld.com/zoom?id=112749&page=8& … table&zoomIdx=1

Mabye if you did own a Mac you'd know what you were talking about before you raised your eyebrowes. 😉

There's really no point in trying other emulators to run DOS games on that machine. They'll either run too slowly or be incompatible with DOS games. The best bet would be VPC but it would be a very old version, nowhere near as compatible as DOSBox and not really worth the bother.

There are only 2 solutions if you want to use DOSBox on that processor:
1. Code dynamic recompilation for that processor.
or
2. Do not play processor intensive DOS games. (Almost all games after 1995)

DosFreak wrote:

I The best bet would be VPC but it would be a very old version

My experience, still on a PowerPC G4 with Mac OS X 10.4.11, Virtual PC run games faster than DOSBox, it depends on the game whether DOSBox or Virtual PC is the choice.

Last version of Virtual PC (on Mac) is version 7.0.3, but has been discontinued when Macs switched to Intel processor types a while ago.

My experience, still on a PowerPC G4 with Mac OS X 10.4.11, Virtual PC run games faster than DOSBox, it depends on the game whether DOSBox or Virtual PC is the choice.

The Problem with Virtual PC on PoerPC is not the speed but the part that you didn't quote

nowhere near as compatible as DOSBox

In my experience with the PC version of Virtual PC around that time, it was nowhere as useable with Dos games and applications as Dosbox is today. But yeah, PC version, not the Mac version...

IIGS_User, do have any ideas on how I could possibly run this game on my computer?

Any other mac (non-intel) people out there?

Are there any simple straight forward emulators for dos other than dosbox that might do the trick?

All you need to know is in the posts above. Read them.

rotk6 wrote:

IIGS_User, do have any ideas on how I could possibly run this game on my computer?

The only hint I can give is to increase frameskip rate, but that would result in a comic-style game.

I compared PC version of Lode Runner in Virtual PC/Mac with DOS installed and DOSBox. Only DOSBox makes it playable, VPC runs it too fast.

rotk6, believe us when we tell you that it won't run good on your Mac. There is nothing to be done. Sorry...

Well, you could always resort to sledgehammer method and buy yourself an x86 machine - a used 2 GHz PC with onboard graphics & sound shouldn't cost more than 50 €/$.

You know... I am actually on the prowl for one right now Xelasarg. Hopefully I get one soon.

Great minds think alike. 😁

How fast can a G5 run Win9x in VirtualPC or some other Windows emulation package? Moo2 came in both DOS and 9x versions, on the same disk I think. VirtualPC used to be a Mac exclusive and ran on PPC 601s so it must be pretty optimized eh.

But really you could just grab any old relic PC and run this game natively too. The sys requirements are a mid-range Pentium. It runs awful speedy on a Pentium II. 😉 The game definitely must be patched too or it is bug ridden and has memory leaks that slow it down as more and more turns go by.