TrashPanda wrote on 2021-12-23, 02:59:

You are right DOSbox does have its advantages and I can see why some people will consider it superior to the real hardware and w […]
Show full quote

Falcosoft wrote on 2021-12-22, 21:12:

Would you name a few of that limitations? I seriously think that your argument about the 'varied PC DOS hardware' is much more […]
Show full quote

TrashPanda wrote on 2021-12-22, 13:26:

...
I dont like DOSbox, Ive used it briefly in the past due to GOG packaging their DOS games with it, it always felt like a poor imitation of the real thing and had too many limitations that it will honestly never overcome due the nature of early PC DOS hardware being as varied as it was.
...

Would you name a few of that limitations? I seriously think that your argument about the 'varied PC DOS hardware' is much more an argument for DosBox than against it.
E.g. it's a mission impossible to find a retro DOS laptop that supports all the possible sound/music options offered by DOS games.
Namely SB/GUS for digital sound and FM/MT-32/General Midi for music.
The same is true for video: CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA VBE support at the same time.
As for the CPU part you can freely adjust the performance for speed sensitive games and so on...
In this respect DosBox is nowhere a limited/poor imitation of a DOS PC, but much more an emulation of a never existed dream DOS PC.

You are right DOSbox does have its advantages and I can see why some people will consider it superior to the real hardware and well good for them I wont stop them from being happy with it.

I find it limiting in ways that people who extoll DOSbox simply dont understand and will likely never understand, I guess its because I lived in the DOS era and used and worked with that hardware and software extensively. For me using the original hardware is like returning to an old book, one you have read a hundred times but haven't touched in years but its immediately familiar to you. Sure I could just buy that book in Ebook format and read it on my Ipad rather than picking up the real thing .. but is it the same .. no its a poor imitation.

If you have ever smelled an old book or picked one up and felt the old paper or walked into an old library filled with old books you might understand what I mean, DOS era hardware is the same, it has a smell to it the sounds the feel of it and it might be surprising but each bit of hardware has character especially as it gets older.

DOSbox is that Ebook and Ipad, its convenient but it has none of the feel or character and you are limited by what the developers are able to emulate correctly.

You might just think this is a bit of old guff and thats ok but I've tried to give an explanation of sorts and if you have read this far, thankyou.

I absolutely understand your attitude and honestly I share most of your feelings. I'm still actively making programs for DOS (in DOS because it's so close to the metal) and usually the first thing I do even in case of newer PC's is to install DOS and check what legacy features have been fcked up by new hardware:
( http://falcosoft.hu/dos_softwares.html )
But when you mentioned limitations of DosBox regarding various old hardware it sounded to me as an objective/technical argument against its compatibility with old DOS games.
I felt this somewhat unfair since this very aspect of DosBox is the one that clearly superior compared to real gears.
Even in case of a retro desktop PC you have to carefully select components ( e.g. 2/3 legacy ISA sound cards and expensive external Roland/Yamaha Midi stuff) to achieve something similar that DosBox can offer.
And in case of retro laptops you have simply no chance to achieve this.

About DosBox, it is useless to explain what is bad imitation, like fake cheese, or "fish" sticks, or wine imitation.

IMO for a majority of DOS games, DOSbox gives you 90% of the real experience, real and ideal hardware gives you the last 10% .... laptops compromise on things... For a handful of games you might get the real and ideal 100%, for a lot of the rest you might be down to around 50% even if they're just a year or two either side of where the laptop is ideal. This might be due to screen scaling issues, bad letterbox or postage stamp, sound issues, it's got SB emulation but on IRQ 11 and it's one of those stupid games that will only take 5 or 7... keyboard issues can occur, can't remap keys on a game and laptop needs an awkward function key combo, or it's a bastard game that reads the scan codes from the numberpad directly and you can't do anything but use a full keyboard. For these and several more reasons, a laptop system is a lot narrower and notchier gamer than a desktop is. I kinda "deal" with that by using a fast-ish PII system and relying on fullscreen win98 dosmode, where I get better control of screen scaling through windows driver features, and the sound emulation is more reliable. Also I can use slowdown utils. The gfx are kinda overspec for plain DOS no 3D API games, which is good, because laptops from the time of those games might have had a gfx chipset that was a year or so behind the times from a desktop POV. But, I still can't range as far along/across the DOS games continuum with that laptop as I can with the netbook or centrino machine with DOSbox installed. Define a tight group of games, close in age and requirements and cool, you can get 100% of the experience on a carefully chosen laptop, add a few more games, your average is down to 95%, start imagining you can play a whole years worth of game releases and you're probably down to 70% because of those stupid ones... DOSbox machine is holding 90% though.

edit: Neglecting the gamer laptops of the last decade or so, and the fact that regular laptops really closed the gap to "average" desktops in the noughties, the only vintage laptop I've got that performs nearly on a par to it's desktop cousins for games that were written for that class, is a Turbo-XT class machine, a heavy old clamshell. The reason it's so close is because PC Speaker was the sound output of choice, the screen while a slow LCD is bearable for many games of the era, which on 8088s were not fast. Look to MS Flight Sim as a benchmark for the expectations of games then, tops out at 3 fps I think on XT. Also many machines had long persistence phosphor on the display, so games might have been deliberately slow or clearly drawn in some instances so they didn't look like a mess on those, hence remain tolerable on slow LCD. A machine with a plasma panel would probably be 100% as good as mono desktops.