Doesn't the latest Dosbox support network? If not, I'm pretty sure there's a custom build that supports it.

That sounds like a good idea, but the only problem is, is that most of the other machines on my LAN are too slow to run Warcraft II under DosBox (many of them are just spare Pentium II/III boxes), so I have to run it directly.

EDIT: Never mind, I'll just run it under '98. 😁

Another option is to get Warcraft II Battle.net edition. That is a native windows version of the original game.

That's actually a pretty good idea. 😁 I'll see if I can score a few copies off of Ebay one of these days.

Can't dosbox and windows 98 comunicate with each other?

They can, but not in a meaningful way (unless you also run DOSBox in W98).

With my build they can 😉

Show-off!

Yeah, look what cool things I can do 😉

1st) rip/copy all the CD Music off of Warcraft 2 disc as MP3 or FLAC

2nd) install Battle.NET edition

3rd) play music in media player while playing the game

4th) enjoy awesome experience with quality music 😀

The best Warcraft II music experience is taking the original midi tracks and playing them on a Roland SoundCanvas or similar. To bad they changed from Midi to pre-recorded music on the Battle.net edition. As it degrades quality and increases size.

What synth did they record the tracks from to make the pre-recorded music, I wonder?

I don't know about the Battle.Net edition, but the CD audio tracks on the regular Warcraft II CD were made with the SC-88 I think, which is higher quality than the MIDIs playing through an SC-55. It's close, though. But the SC-88 has higher quality samples.

gerwin wrote:

The best Warcraft II music experience is taking the original midi tracks and playing them on a Roland SoundCanvas or similar. To bad they changed from Midi to pre-recorded music on the Battle.net edition. As it degrades quality and increases size.

Did you actually notice the degradation? I think it sounded the same to my original War2 CD music 😀

It is like comparing CD quality synthesizer output to something like a pre-recorded 128 kbps mp3 file. Agreed it is not much of a quality problem. But you do lose the flexibility to use the synthesizer or soundfont of your preference, like a Yamaha or a Korg.

A similar thing happened with the Tie-Fighter Windows 95 version: the imuse midi system was replaced with pre-recorded audio. Originally the music changed according to the gameplay situation (action, victory, suspense...), in the '95 version it was just static background music. bleh.