dunno. I had quite a bit of fun with xwing with keyboard only 😀

DosFreak wrote:

Sorry but it's true. If you cannot use DosBox for some reason then use GameTap (bleh)

Gee, is GameTap not comparable to DOSBox? I haven't gotten around to trying it yet myself, but I had thought they would surely go that way.

Put in my two cents on the blog post as well. In case it gets deleted I'm posting it here too:

Most interesting flame war. With all respect to you, Virtual PC Guy, obviously you have your product, but I just find it odd that you'd demonstrate old PC games on it when it's going to get the crap beat out of it by an OS emulator.

Fortunately X-Wing was a well written enough program to not suffer too horribly from timing or other issues. But given any of actual innovative games in their time, Virtual PC falls completely apart. Star Flight 1 (1986) fails just as a modern "reference PC" should (read: unplayable). Second Reality, the ground breaking demo by Future Crew, successfully locks up Virtual PC. Both run flawlessly in DosBox.

Even competing on Virtual PC's "turf", I was able to put DosBox (cycles=max, core=dynamic) and Virtual PC side by side playing the same Mpeg full screen at 30 fps in Windows 3.11. (Actually, just for the record, DosBox had one core pegged at 88% while Virtual PC needed all 100% of the other core to match.) Obviously in an environment like Windows 3.11, Virtual PC is forced to emulate a great deal of privileged CPU instructions, which is what places it on par with DosBox.

I say all this to put forth a conspiracy theory: Windows Vista (and XP 64-bit) lack the NTVDM. So what's to replace the VDM? Why Virtual PC of course! This is why DOS games aren't just more than a passing focus on this blog. As I pointed out earlier, these are all well behaved games that run surprisingly well under the NTVDM, no Virtual PC required. It's Microsoft's old strategy of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish all over again. Convince the masses that the "free" Virtual PC product is a bigger, better replacement for the NTVDM and/or DosBox/DosEmu/Bochs and keep market share. I put "free" in quotes for a couple of reasons:

1) It's only free as in beer, not free as in speech.
2) Virtual PC functions as a loss leader for Microsoft on a lot of fronts, not simply legacy application support.

Despite my grand conspiracy theory, the only real losers here are those that think that Virtual PC is even relevant to legacy PC gaming, just like someone who would confuse the goal of DosBox as being about modern PC emulation. DosBox has features that would take man-years to incorporate into Virtual PC (short of GPL violation, of course!) and while I'd certainly welcome the competition from Virtual PC, I just don't think it's going to happen.

In case it gets deleted? It is gone already. And comments have been closed. Guess the conspiracy theory was not that far from the mark 😀

Well i see it more as they're trying to say "look we even run some old dos
games, even though there exist better solutions like ..." just omitting the
second part of the sentence 😀

Too bad the thread was closed. It was a nice discussion and could have been pretty informative for VPC only DOS gaming users. oh well. If they don't know about DosBox by now or are not interested enough to use it after reading that thread then screw 'em. 😀

I've been reviewing Windows 3.11 in DOSBox and it runs faster than in VMWare (I'm using DOSBox 0.70 and VMWare Server 1.03). I've tried WordPerfect 6.1, Corel Draw 4.0, Operation: Inner Space and Alis Grips Studio in 1024x768x65K.

So... how do you feel after defeating VMWare, Virtual PC and Dosemu?

VMWare seems to do a pretty nice job at handling selfmodification,
think it exceeds dosbox at build-games (duke3d). VPC and qemu
are about 10x slower than vmware (dosbox is only a bit slower,
but it looks like dosbox refreshes the screen data more often).

Vpc is better at business and running windows 95 and later oses.
Dosbox is way way way way way better at gaming and is also useful for business with the printer support to bad i don't know how to compile so i can use the lpt1 and lpt2 printer support because without that using a word program would be considered useless and i want to print some of the car information on ford simulator 2 and in that game you can print info.
Can someone please give a copy of dosbox with the lpt1-4 printer support as the page with the lpt1-4 download does not seem to be working for me.

I don't think it was trolling, if I had tried to post there it probably would have been.

DOSBox for DOS games, SCUMMVM several adventure games (heck even some AGI games now).

For windows stuff go for WINE (it supports win16 stuff pretty well in my experience), qemu for anything else (or virtual box). Yeah all Free Software, runs on multiple platforms...

And I run all those things under Ubuntu Linux, Free as well...

Hmm...
That would get deleted post haste.

Anyway good going, I'm sure people saw it and may tell their friends about DOSBox.

boyofdestiny wrote:

For windows stuff go for WINE (it supports win16 stuff pretty well in my experience), qemu for anything else (or virtual box). Yeah all Free Software, runs on multiple platforms...

Interesting though it would be, there's no WINE for Windows yet that I've heard of.

Jorpho wrote:

Interesting though it would be, there's no WINE for Windows yet that I've heard of.

Actually there apparently is, but at the moment the Wine FAQ says it's more intended for developers as a testing environment. (Hope I'm not overstating it or misinterpreting it out of ignorance)
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-530da6f64d194 … ab937e60d3c2c1c
There's a year old snapshot at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php? … ckage_id=112520
but I think anyone wanting to try running it, does so at their own peril.

Would be highly usefull for 16bit installers and games on 64bit Windows in the future, if a glide emulator could be built in then that would be even better.

This is very true. I downloaded and tried Virtual PC 2007 (which is free now) and it sucks very badly. I'm running a 3.2ghz Pentium D EE with 2gb RAM system specifically custom built for gaming and it ran horribly bad.

After uninstalling it I downloaded DOSbox and it runs superb.

This is very true. I downloaded and tried Virtual PC 2007 (which is free now) and it sucks very badly. I'm running a 3.2ghz Pentium D EE with 2gb RAM system specifically custom built for gaming and it ran horribly bad.

After uninstalling it I downloaded DOSbox and it runs superb.

VPC used to be a fine product. And before DOSBox it really was the only decent way to play old DOS games on newer machines (unless you had 2k/XP and used VDMSound or SoundFXNT).

Then one day Microsoft bought it.

The product stopped making any further advancements at all. At least MS recognized this and started offering it for free. I mean even free it can't compete with the likes of Parallels and VMWare, both of which I'd gladly pay for rather than use VPC.

I wouldn't use any of them for DOS gaming now. That is the job of DOSBox. And frankly this may sound trollish, but anybody who thinks running DOS under VPC is better than DOSBox, is either deluded or being motivated through financial means. DOSBox may be hard to use for some, but for anybody who ever spent hours configuring bootcon, xms, ems, upper memory blocks, conventional memory, device drivers, TSRs and all the other crappy stuff in DOS just to play some game; DOSBox is a godsend because it removes all that nastiness and lets you get right to doing what you really want to do: Play the games.

As for VPC. Heh. That product has been sliding down the tubes ever since MS bought it in 2003. It is no shock that there are still a few fans out there that steadfastly stand behind it. VPC 2007 is so similar to the last version I bought, VPC 5.x that it isn't even funny. As for Virtualization... VMWare is currently my product of choice on that front.

Well, all the OS emulators at the moment are of no interest to me as long as they don't emulate 3D cards.

If you look at the line up of all PC games up to now, the pain point used to be mainly DOS games a year or 5 ago but with Dosbox in the picture, this pain point has shifted to ... Windows 9X games. There's still a lot of games that refuse to run in Windows XP (Silver to name one) or games that have speed issues (Commandos Behind Enemy Lines).

The bad thing is that, unlike DOS where a retro P100 PC would run the huge majority of games at ideal speeds, the Win9X era spans several generations of PCs and uses different hardware standards. Glide came and went before Windows XP came alone, the era went from a P100 to a PIII800 and then there's software differences like DirectX, Quicktime (ugh), etc.

So what I would still want is a program that can emulate these different systems - let me have hard drive images with a TNT2 emulated, or a Voodoo 2 so I can finally run those Windows 95 & 98 games that never worked well in WindowsXP.

I didn't read carefully the last posts, by the way:
VPC is aimed at so called "productivity tools" and virtualization has its way.
So you know:
-if you want to play old games use DOSBox
-if you want to run OS's and programs and some early Windows games use VMWare.

Unfortunately VPC took a few steps backward as M$ took control over it.

Still,
Some people are DOSBox freaks and they would try to run anything into it, just for fun. Once you know your favorite game can be played anytime it feels like Linus's blanket;
I do not blame those who do the same with VPC.

Well, all the OS emulators at the moment are of no interest to me as long as they don't emulate 3D cards.

"They" had promised they would support 3D cards in VPC (quote needed)

butterfly wrote:

Well, all the OS emulators at the moment are of no interest to me as long as they don't emulate 3D cards.

"They" had promised they would support 3D cards in VPC (quote needed)

That would be sweet but I doubt "they" would do a good job of it 😉

I really doubt the veracity of that statement. Connectix only ever supported emulation in it's simplest state. Virtual Game Station never had any form of hardware based 3D acceleration support.