DosFreak wrote on 2020-02-05, 23:40:
Amazingly the thread wasn't that bad. OP is of course wrong but it does make you wonder even more how the smartphone generation or whatever comes next generation will regard DOSBox in the future.
Ehh, I agree that OP of that thread is wrong, but I also think it's wrong just to outright dismiss such opinions. DOSBox is not an easy software to use, there are many, MANY "papercut" issues that make it really problematic. When user tries to play e.g. Wolfenstein 3D using his new computer bought in 2020 and learns the game from 1992 is stuttering what is he supposed to think? Such user might not know what OpenGl is, and he's supposed to know why `output=ddraw` someone suggested in a reddit thread from 5 years ago does not work on a new macOS? And even when surface is configured correctly, game will stutter anyway because dosbox defaults to cycles=3000 in this case.
I monitor various DOS and retrogaming related subreddits and questions about basic DOSBox usage are raised all the time. An average user trying to configure emulator bounces off, because the program behaves differently than any other modern sofware out there. It's not just "smartphone generation", it's anyone under the age of, say, 30, trying to use DOSBox for the first time - if you've never seen a DOS prompt in your life, then you're completely lost. Nowadays, expected experience for playing a game is "click download", "click play". Normal experience with DOSBox consists of: perusing through configuration file full of options unrelated to the game itself, browsing a manual without hyperlinks, googling for (often wrong or outdated) answers on various fora, creating a game-specific configuration file, and manually creating game-specific shortcut for the file, etc, etc.
Only a small percentage of users eventually reach this forum to ask for help - most people lose interest in using DOSBox, thinking it's simply half-baked solution. This is survivor bias in action - rare fixes landing in SVN trunk are addressing only concerns of expert DOSBox users, while general improvements are never being implemented.
Don't dismiss users who have problems with using DOSBox, learn why they are having problems instead.
[edit]
canthearu wrote on 2020-02-06, 00:12:
All this is just the nature of the DOS gaming beast.
People who were there for it understand, those who weren't just won't understand why the experience is so weird and different, to say, the Playstation 4 experience. Or even the NES/SNES experience.
I don't agree. It was easier to play games on my old 486DX2 with 4MB of RAM on MS-DOS than it is to configure the same games to work properly in DOSBox.
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