You are wrong 😀 They are few and far between, but I think we have had 2-3 persons of the fairer sex asking questions here.

Maybe they're so intelligent that doesn't need to ask questions...

Why are there always questions asking if women are on forums?
I never see threads asking if there are men on the forums? I guess it's possible that if 90% of the technology field was female then mabye there might be such threads.

Yes, there are women that use DosBox but like most of the technology field the vast majority are male.

...says Mr. "I can guess your gender from the way you're posting" DosFreak (:

Zup: that post made my day (;

My guess would be: as DOS was used in a time when the IT business (and anything related) was not as "sexy" as today (in terms of number of jobs, salary, or general interest), and gaming was not as accepted as is it nowadays (it's hard to ignore a multi-billion industry, after all), most users of that OS were male. It's a fact that "techie-related" stuff is (or was) dominated by men - don't ask me why. Of course there were women in IT jobs (i met a few back in the day), or women interested in gaming, but they were few and far between.

If that's valid, then the logical conclusion has to be that the majority of DOSBox users are male, too. I mean, playing the games you used to play when you were young is the main reason to use emulators, isn't it? Why would anyone go though the hassle of installing and configuring an old DOS game? DOSBox makes it very easy, but it's still much more complicated than playing a Windows game, or a game on a console/handheld. Windows 95 kinda opened up gaming for a much larger audience (including non-techies), which is IMHO one if Bill Gates' biggest achievements, whether you like him and his company, or not.

Of course women also use their pc to play games. For example, my wife is crazy about playing "frozen bubble". But to use an emulator to be able to play an old DOS (or AMIGA (EUAE) or ATARI ST) Game? Never. Never ever.

I think Addict has made a good point here:

My guess would be: as DOS was used in a time when the IT business (and anything related) was not as "sexy" as today (in terms of number of jobs, salary, or general interest), and gaming was not as accepted as is it nowadays (it's hard to ignore a multi-billion industry, after all), most users of that OS were male. It's a fact that "techie-related" stuff is (or was) dominated by men - don't ask me why. Of course there were women in IT jobs (i met a few back in the day), or women interested in gaming, but they were few and far between.

For most women a computer is ONLY something useful. It is useful for writing texts, to browse the internet etc.. But for men it is not only useful: They want to try out things even if they are not useful. Take me: I have set up a complete win3xsystem under dosbox ... just out of curiosity. I don't NEED it for anything, I don't even have win3x games to play. But my wife would never do something like this. Why?

All the girls I know that used to play DOS games either got frightened by Dosbox' complexity (it's not that complex is it?) or had never heard of it. And then couldn't be bothered to get it working unless I did the work for them.

Girls just are different to guys in this regard (well, the huge majority): they don't have the urge to mess and fuck around with stuff to make it work. If they can't figure it out in a handful of minutes, they pass it by and spend time on things they find more worthwhile. Since Dosbox takes at least an hour to figure out, I think unless they have a game they really really want to play, it may be too much for them to be bothered. Men are more stubborn and unwilling to give up :p

Women have male slaves who set up Dosbox for them if they want to play Settlers 2. Males are just stupid and think they would be controlling technology. The simply dont realize how much they are exploited. 😜

I don't know any girls that use dosbox but males are usually better at techie stuff but dosbox taking a hour to learn dosbox took me: 2 months to learn! I'm playing legit games on the thing and never really got to use dos excpt for when i typed c:/jazz in the dos prompt and opened a jazz shortcut an when i typed in dos mode c:/jazz and i liked using a dos prompt to open it more then just using a double click and i did that quite a few times.

I wonder how long it will take you to master the art of punctuation. Your posts are like a stream of unrelated words, and i've given up on trying to find a meaning in them. It's not worth the effort.

<- ^^

also dosbox only took less than 10 mins for me to learn (of course having prior dos experience helped)

I use DOSBox and other emulators because of nostalgia but believe me, not many girls would spend hours at a computer for anything different than chatting or chatting while working

Heh. I was just thinking about this last night, as I am definitely the "odd man out" (or, to put it more accurately, the "odd woman out") on this forum. 😉

I have a huge computer game collection and I'd say about one fourth to one third of them are DOS games. I spent quite a bit of time lurking in these forums and tried to keep my mouth shut until the time came when I felt I had studied enough about DOSBox to ask reasonably intelligent questions (or, at least, didn't cause you to all roll your eyes heavenward). I learned quite a bit this way.

DOSBox fascinates me and I'm trying to learn as much about it as I possibly can. And I've got about 20 DOS games loaded up right now that are waiting to be played and/or I'm in the process of playing.

Back to Case of the Serrated Scalpel, Dragonsphere, The Dame Was Loaded, World of Xeen.......... 😁

Any women would not spend 2 months learning dosbox. I should have found that how to use msdos instruction book earlier.

Marian wrote:

Back to Case of the Serrated Scalpel, Dragonsphere, The Dame Was Loaded, World of Xeen.......... 😁

Ooo a girl/woman who loves Dragonsphere! MARRY ME! 😳 😉

My collection of CD ROMs, DVDs and disks consists about a third of DOS games too but say, 5 years ago, it was easily over half of all my games. At a guess I'd say at least 300 of my 1000+ games are for DOS - although I've been hunting down more and more oldies on ebay now.

I used to avoid buying 3.5" disk games because they often come with damaged disks but I decided that the manuals and box were more important considering I would never use the disks anymore anyway (better download the game with the crack included anyway so I don't have to ruin the code-wheels/manuals).

Anyway, a bit off topic. It *is* very hard to find any girl that's even just interested in my hobby of collecting old games. Most don't think much of modern games let alone 15+ year old ones. That's is, until I manage to get them to play Monkey Island or any of the other great adventure games 😉

I am glad to hear regular tendencies are starting to change. I think Underdogs admin. is a girl (we must love ms-dos games for sure). 😎

The dosbox email addres gets quite regularly a help request from women. Maybe they prefer to mail instead of using this forum.

Qbix wrote:

The dosbox email addres gets quite regularly a help request from women. Maybe they prefer to mail instead of using this forum.

Probably want to avoid all the "R U HOT" and "MARRY ME!!!1eleven" comments 😜

yeah, it's funny how many males on forums and irc goes into a gender shock NO THERE ARE NO WOMEN ON THE ITNERNET.

red_avatar wrote:

Ooo a girl/woman who loves Dragonsphere! MARRY ME! :shocked: :wink: […]
Show full quote

Marian wrote:

Back to Case of the Serrated Scalpel, Dragonsphere, The Dame Was Loaded, World of Xeen.......... 😁

Ooo a girl/woman who loves Dragonsphere! MARRY ME! 😳 😉

My collection of CD ROMs, DVDs and disks consists about a third of DOS games too but say, 5 years ago, it was easily over half of all my games. At a guess I'd say at least 300 of my 1000+ games are for DOS - although I've been hunting down more and more oldies on ebay now.

I used to avoid buying 3.5" disk games because they often come with damaged disks but I decided that the manuals and box were more important considering I would never use the disks anymore anyway (better download the game with the crack included anyway so I don't have to ruin the code-wheels/manuals).

That's what I have been doing, as well. I've been buying up more old DOS games on eBay now that I have the means to play them. I never thought I'd be accumulating more DOS games at this stage of the game, so to speak. My avoidance of having done so in the past and my rationale for doing so now are explained in your paragraph above.

It's good to know that Qbix receives requests for help on DOSBox privately (in the sense of knowing that there are women who ARE interested in such things, not in the sense that I'm sure it puts another damper on his valuable time). 😉 Broad generalization here, but I do think that many women tend to want to spend time talking with a person rather than interacting with a machine and would get intimated by the nuts and bolts process that a use of DOSBox requires. And I also suspect that some are probably intimidated by this forum, as well, in the sense that they might feel that a bunch of trigonometry students wouldn't take kindly to someone asking how to add and subtract. That's a bit like how I felt, at first, so I just sat around in the lecture hall and put my nose to the grindstone and studied my homework. 😉