Re: The best dos emulators out there besides dosbox?

Posted on 2015-02-09, 00:59

by

by madcrow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

PCem is pretty darn good. It's missing a few things here and there, and its support forums seem impossible to join, but it has great hardware support if you want something more accurate than DOSbox.

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My "new" computer

Posted on 2014-04-11, 16:54

by

by madcrow

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I recently got an old box that I'm hoping to turn into a retro gaming box. Here's the specs: - AOpen AX6LC Motherboard with i440LX Chipset - 333 MHz Pentium II CPU - 128 MB RAM - S3 ViRGE DX graphics card with 2 MB RAM - Generic OPTi 82C931-based sound card. All in all, it looks like a good box to …

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Release criteria

Posted on 2014-04-04, 14:41

by

by madcrow

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

I recently moved to a different Linux distro, and feeling lazy, decided to install the system package of DOSBox rather than building from SVN myself. Then I realized that distros only package formal releases and that running stock 0.74 puts me four years out of date and went and built from SVN …

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Re: Matrox G400 advice

Posted on 2013-02-10, 14:16

by

by madcrow

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I had a G400 for many years. With the latest drivers, it did quite well on just about any fixed-pipeline game that I threw at it. It was only the ride of shaders and hardware T&L that killed off the usefulness of that card.

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Re: IBM PC350 Video card advice

Posted on 2013-02-04, 21:04

by

by madcrow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Just go with a Voodoo. The PC 350's onboard 2D graphics chip is actually quite good so you might as well take advantage of it instead of looking for an all-in-one external solution (most of which wouldn't work with old Glide games and the like anyway)

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Re: Hardware you regret parting with, or you wish didn't die

Posted on 2013-01-01, 18:49

by

by madcrow

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My biggest disposal regret is my old IBM PC300. It had 64 MB of RAM, a Pentium MMX 233, a good mix of PCI and ISA slots and one of the most elegant white desktop cases of the late 90s. As for hardware death, my biggest regert is the death of my Northgate Omnikey Ultra keyboard.

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Re: A game reason to add SHARE support or fix the VSHARE.386 bug...

Posted on 2011-12-12, 21:36

by

by madcrow

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

If you search vogons you will learn that it never worked. It just "appeared" to be working and this was rightfully fixed, be it intentionally or not. The problem with it only appearing to work is that data corruption is very very likely when programs actually do make use of the share functions. So …

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Re: A game reason to add SHARE support or fix the VSHARE.386 bug...

Posted on 2011-12-12, 20:55

by

by madcrow

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

maybe it might be time to go bug hunting Nope. Any particular reason why not? I don't know much about the internal architecture of DOSbox, but I would assume that fixing regressions (which the breaking of VSHARE was, given that it worked until some point after the release of 0.72 and before the …

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A game reason to add SHARE support or fix the VSHARE.386 bug...

Posted on 2011-12-12, 20:12

by

by madcrow

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

For a while, the DOSbox team has decided that SHARE.EXE functionality isn't useful for games AND also decided that fixing whatever whatever bug appeared after DOSbox 0.72 that began preventing Windows from loading the protected mode version (VSHARE.386) that had previously functioned as a workaround …

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Re: PCI emulation (for 3D accelerators)?

Posted on 2011-09-12, 18:27

by

by madcrow

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

Don't listen to the naysayers. I, for one, am looking forward to the ability to play Panzer Dragoon with the best image quality.

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DOSBox quirks and design decisions

Posted on 2011-09-12, 18:25

by

by madcrow

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

Currently, DOSBox is just about the best (only) thing out there for people who want to run vintage DOS games and demos on modern computers. Still, there do seem to be a few odd design decisions that I'd like better understand. First is the 31 MB limit. Where does it come from? Why was it chosen? Was …

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Re: Grrr. Somebody broke QEMU

Posted on 2011-01-10, 21:00

by

by madcrow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

I'm too lazy to go outside the XXXX repositories to build an old version of YYYY..... Me too...and you just listed my main pet peeve about Linux. Until that is "fixed", I don't see Linux ever making it to the desktop mainstream. :disapproving: /off topic Well, in general I like Linux better. It's …

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Re: Grrr. Somebody broke QEMU

Posted on 2011-01-10, 19:56

by

by madcrow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Virtualbox? But yah, Win95 support sucks on it. The last QEMU that worked well for Win95 (for me) is 0.11.1 I'm too lazy to go outside the Fedora repositories to build an old version of QEMU, so I guess that means no retro Windows on my laptop. I guess I'll just have to stick with doing my retro …

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Re: Interview with GOG.com on the usage of DOSBox.

Posted on 2011-01-10, 15:52

by

by madcrow

in Milliways

in Milliways

more sound cards emulation (like sb awe 32) AFAIK this would require ROMs with SoundFonts - maybe GOG .com could negotiate with Creative to include them in DOSBox ;) Not really. It would just require a way of loading Soundfonts, similar to the way that we emulate GUS hardware but don't include any …

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Re: Grrr. Somebody broke QEMU

Posted on 2011-01-10, 15:43

by

by madcrow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

lol QEMU has been like that for quite some time. If it isn't one problem it's another and if something gets fixed for 9x it'll be broken again by the next version. Use a different emulator. VPC or Vmware Player. I would, but VPC doesn't run on Linux and VMware Player needs some extra CPU …

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Re: GM MIDI Tone Generators/Sound Modules - from best to worst

Posted on 2011-01-10, 15:40

by

by madcrow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Mau1wurf1977 wrote: I was under the impression that under DOS loading patches can be challenging. It works very well from within Windows as long as you can launch the DOS game from within windows. I don't know about AWE32/64, but loading patches for GUS under DOS is ridiculously easy.

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Re: Windows 2000, what can it be used for?

Posted on 2011-01-10, 15:36

by

by madcrow

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Win2K is useful for D3D8 and D3D9 games, where it tends to deliver better performance than Vista or 7. The main reason to choose it over XP for those kinds of games is that it doesn't do any of the phone home/activation crap that XP does, so that you can just load it onto any machine and get right …

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Re: GM MIDI Tone Generators/Sound Modules - from best to worst

Posted on 2011-01-10, 15:12

by

by madcrow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

I just wanted to note that the crap sounds in things like the AWE32 and the GUS are mainly the fault of bad patches being loaded. Many superior alternate soundfonts/patchsets are available and can turn the bad cards into much stronger performers.

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Grrr. Somebody broke QEMU

Posted on 2011-01-10, 15:07

by

by madcrow

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

I've recently been trying to set up Windows 95 in QEMU 0.13.1. So far, it's been an epic failure. The darn thing always freezes about 4% into the hardware detection. I've tried disabling ACPI and HPET emulation. I've even tried disabling network card emulation. None of it works. It always freezes. …

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Re: ne2000 reports FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF, therefor does not work.

Posted on 2009-12-10, 13:18

by

by madcrow

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

This may be a silly question, but if official DOSBOX doesn't emulate a network card then how does the IPX emulation work? How do networked games see a network card to talk to when no such card is emulated? Is the IPX protocol emulated at some higher level or something?

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