First post, by sfsdfd
Guys:
I love your software. Really. Given both the waning quality of backwards-compatibility of Windows systems, and the fact that many of the best games we've ever played are pre-polygons, DOSBox is an incredibly important project for fans of gaming.
So here's a question: If there's a great demand for playing older games, and if DOSBox is well-suited to running them, why aren't more people using it? Why isn't this project as popular as MAME, for instance?
I'll tell you why I think this is the case. This has to be tough love - because, honest, I really love your project, but I've gotta point this out.
The biggest flaw with DOSBox is the fact that most games have to be endlessly tweaked to get them running right. DOS games were hard enough to get right on native, 100% compatible boxes - how many of us struggled endlessly to get speech in Dune 2? - now add 0.001% incompatibility, resolution problems, VDM, and virtual devices. Frankly, it's a mess.
Now, why is this a flaw with DOSBox, and not just a fact of life with these old games? Because DOSBox should simplify this process, not complicate it. The fact that it doesn't is a huge blow to the project.
This isn't pointless criticism. This is constructive. I have a proposition for resolving this problem.
This forum has already developed a very long, extensive guide to getting specific games to run. Anyone who wants to use this information has to apply it, recipe-style, by hand. This is wasteful.
Many platforms solve this problem in a much more elegant way. MAME, for instance, doesn't require the user to write a script for patching together all of the hardware. Gamebase doesn't expect the user to type in all of those arcane C64 codes like "SYS 2048". They have large libraries of game-specific settings, and they apply the right one based on which program you've selected.
Why doesn't DOSBox do this? Why not have a configuration database, so that when you load up Tomb Raider.exe, it automagically loads the right environment string, device drivers, and memory settings? In fact, this wouldn't even take much work from your end - we users would happily contribute the game-specific scripts. You just need to write the code to bootstrap a known EXE with the right profile.
Deep in my core, I want to see this project become everything it could be. I also view this tweaking as DOSBox's biggest shortfall - frankly, it's the primary reason I don't use it very often.
Thanks for reading.
- David Stein