DOSBox 0.74-3 vs. DOSBox-X 0.82.20 - ADG Filler #78

[@OMGCaptRaven]

Oh wow! Thanks to this I finally found a game I played as a child again - Thexder 95! I saw your Thexder footage and immediately recognized it, even though I never played any other game in the series apart from 95. Now I just hope that someday I'll stumble upon this weird 1st-person wireframe motorcycle exploration and fighting game that I played as a kid but which I can't for the life of me remember the name of. But apart from that, thanks a lot for this video! I was always interested in exactly this - a good and comprehensive comparison between different Dosbox versions. I would love to see even more on this later on. Much

[@Pixelmusement]

+OMGCaptRaven BTW: If you wanna blow your mind a little more and have a PS3 or PSP sitting around, go look up "Thexder Neo" ;)

[@nodakamakadon]

Thexder 2 is my peak of the series.

[@Pixelmusement]

+stuntaneous What we need is Thexder 2 with Thexder Neo aesthetics. ;)

[@Lovuschka]

TRON 2.0?

[@lustechsource5197]

Awesome video! Your video made me find out the DOSBOX team has more up to date versions of DOSBOX and we have to use unofficial ports to easily use those. Thanks!

[@FoxMulder78]

I like DOSBox ECE (Enhanced Community Edition); it's like vanilla DOSBox + some nice patches. 😎👍

[@FeelingShred]

wow another one I never heard of, thanks... How about SVGA games like Screamer 2 on it? Do they run smoothly?

[@FoxMulder78]

@@FeelingShred Just tried the GOG version, mounting the included GAME.GOG image, and it works perfectly.

[@HelmutKohlrabi]

I prefer DOSBox-ES, has OpenGL ES 3 support and comes with a port of lottes crt shader.

[@maxmuster7003]

I am on an Android tablet with the magic dosbox app(OpenGL ES) + hackers keyboard app installed for to run my special batch files for dosbox. Feel free to copy and paste. dosreloaded.de/forum/index.php/Thread/2214-Mit-Batch-Files-Debug-fernsteuern-kleine-COM-Files-erzeugen-und-ausf%C3%BChren/

[@FoxMulder78]

@Sadist Fake Bootleg Tiki Yes.

[@simnostalgia]

I have tested some games with DOSBox-X and my first impression is good: now Adlib sound goes much better (Sands of Fire, ADS or Flight of the Intruder) and it resolves the graphic issue on Airbus A320. On the other hand, joystick emulation doesn't seems to improve, as you comment above.

[@Fender178]

Very interesting version of DosBox geared towards accurate emulation. Also they want to have users be able to run the older versions of Windows as well from 3x to 9x/Me. I am sure given enough time just like with Console emulation they will optimize their version of DosBox to combat the frame rate issues. Also another game that you could have tried out that uses PC speaker sound is Commander Keen.

[@jackdaniels1883]

Very interesting. Looking forward v0.75 and your new comparison video.

[@FeelingShred]

Thanks for this, I wasn't even aware Dosbox-X existed... The real test would be the SVGA games like Screamer 2 (mostly this one), Carmageddon, Grand Prix 2 or Witchaven (Svga mode of course) It was a bummer downloading Screamer 2 and realizing most people with core i5's are not able to run the game smoothly. And to think that game ran fine on my old 486 (it was not even a pentium) I really hope Dosbox' developers break the final wall of emulation, for once and for all: SVGA

[@troymcclure7693]

I had Pentium 100 MHz at the time and Screamer 2 definitely didn't run smoothly in SVGA on that machine so I doubt it was 486. Even the first Screamer wasn't playable in high resolution on 486. But instead of the standard Dosbox 0.74-3, use a latest SVN build which you can download compiled for example on Dosbox ECE page (together with enhanced ECE build) or Emucr. Since the release of Dosbox 0.74, the developers did at least two significant and one small speed optimization and in my opinion, the SVN build is about twice faster than the standard build. On i5, anything for DOS should run fine in 640x480.

[@FeelingShred]

Well now that I think about it, I think back in the day I would run the STARTL executable instead of START65H. From what I gather out of this, further optimization of the SVGA code will not be taken as a priority for the short term (or maybe it will now, that's why we discuss things after all) The problem I have with this approach (it's not really a problem, it's more my rambling and whining, I don't deny it guys, I'm on your side, don't take me wrong ok, there's just something wrong about the way I phrase things and I can't seem to change it, bare with me...) what was I saying... oh, the problem I have with the current approach is this: we should not be using 100% processing power out of our core i5, i7 or whatever it is to emulate games from 1996 or earlier. That is called lack of optimization. If there's one bad consequence from having all this powerful hardware available is that it can make people lazy. I know it's hard work and I'm learning "C" myself, I have a long way to go but hope someday I will be a contributor to Dosbox myself and hopefully someday I will learn enough to implement my own optimization. The intent of this is not bashing on anyone, it's just provoke some thought to the way things have been handled, I don't deny my approach is a bit confrontational but hey at least I admit it. My hero on the programming world is the guy who developed Banished from the ground up by himself (well, with the advantage of having the whole internet of 2013 to gather instant answers too, but you know what I mean) The game was the first ever 3D city builder game that rendered all units on the screen all the time, has a full 3D dx9 engine built from the ground up and only takes 200MB. That's engineering, that's optimization, that's the kind of stuff I'm all in for. It's easier said than done I fucking get it, but someday I hope we will see a perfect implementation of SVGA for Dosbox and not have to fry our processors for it. Oh, and John Carmack gets a lot of glory but there were guys along the way that were crucial for making Doom and Quake as optimized as they were to run on a 386 and Pentium respectivelly, he could not achieve it alone.

[@Pixelmusement]

+FeelingShred Don't confuse high CPU usage for poor optimization or lazy coding. When it comes down to it, many of these old DOS games don't use anywhere near full CPU on a modern system through DOSBox. Heck, they can't. The nature of the emulation pretty much restricts the actual emulation to a single core, only able to offload a few non-critical, non-emulation-dependent tasks to other cores. So in that Descent II example, that's squeezing out 100 FPS on ONE core of my 8-core 4 GHz CPU pushing pixels through an emulation of a 256 colour SVGA resolution of 640x480. There's absolutely some serious optimization which went into making THAT possible! As for DOSBox-X though, it came to light after making this video that the Dynamic Core may be broken in the current build, which would explain why the framerate wasn't getting up there. If that's the case, I'll make sure to update those results when DOSBox 0.75 is ready and I run the comparisons again.

[@FeelingShred]

@@Pixelmusement Ok, yeah that's true to some extent, I'm judging all of this from the standpoint of my laptop being a 10 year old core2duo 2.10GHz, in which case maxing one core means maxing half of my entire rig and making temperatures much higher than modern processors would have, so my observation it's schewed in that sense. But even then, there's something "broken" (for lack of a better word) in the dosbox SVGA implementation for it not being able to fully take advantage of our graphics cards and still rely on CPU power primarily. SVGA cards back in 1996 had 1MB, 4MB at most compared to todays GPUs, there's no excuse, there's something holding the code down either we like it or not.

[@Pixelmusement]

+FeelingShred Yeah, it's called different architecture. The reason modern GPUs can push so many pixels is because they have hundreds (thousands for high-end) of cores. Each core individually is not very powerful, but all together make for a card that can push pixels WAY faster than the CPU can. In order to properly emulate graphics of any kind, the CPU has to push the pixels of the actual gameplay, all the GPU can do is adjust the final result for displaying on the screen, so there's your bottleneck. :P

[@marciomaiajr]

Your channel is awesome. You deserve more subs.

[@nemtudom5074]

Dosbox 0.75 deserves a mordeth award

[@Pixelmusement]

I think they're trying too hard to make it "perfect" thus why it's been taking so long... Makes me wonder if 0.75 isn't in the cards anymore and instead they want their next official release to be a 1.0? :P

[@coen123]

Of course, if you really want to discuss compatibility vs performance, try running PCem. It is fun to mess around with though, so long as you mind setting up dos hardware/drivers and have enough power to run it on the faster cpu options.

[@Zontar82]

This. It runs basically anything. I use it for win 98 early agmes and sometimes for dos games too

[@AmyraCarter]

DOSBox is just another one of those projects that is always being developed, never dead, never finished. I could name several other projects still in development that I know of.

[@FeelingShred]

for some reason I was mistaking that DosBox source code was never openly released and that was why development kind of halted these last few years... must have read something about the original developer disappearing without ever releasing the code, not really sure of that information now, my brain must be playing tricks on me (again)

[@AlexeiVoronin]

I use "vanilla" DOSBox as well (usually one of the SVN builds, to get all the latest fixes), and it hasn't failed me yet. The only thing it can't do is install some stuff that is sensitive to date/time modified (some patches and expansions are like this), but that's what I keep PCem around for (also for some Win 95/98 games).

[@BeyondTheScanlines]

Really interesting to see the breakdown - I've mostly not followed the development of X, if only because of the migration work I have to do (as my DOSBox stuff is running through Boxer which was a rather great frontend for macOS) to get it all into a traditional setup. Which is probably what needs to happen sooner or later anyway, but certainly going to be interested to see how this develops, let alone 0.75 when it eventually ships!

[@mattfromeurope]

What I really miss in DOSBox is changing configurations on the fly without needing to change the config file and restarting DOSBox. Like a small command line executable or something. I think I've seen this feature on a few SVN builds or even DOSBox-X, but I'm not so sure.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Matthias Wichert You CAN do this in DOSBox-X as it has a menu you can toggle on and off and access all the config settings from there, however I've noted some setting changes take effect immediately, some don't take effect until you reset the emulation, while a handful don't seem to work right at all unless you restart the emulator entirely, so if you're trying to test various settings you still have a lot of work cut out for you. :P

[@AlexeiVoronin]

Actually, some of he more crucial settings CAN be changed on the fly, even in the vanilla builds. You can type in some thing like "core normal" or "cycles 20000" and it will take effect immediately.

[@BaronSFel001]

The shortcomings of PC speaker and Adlib emulation on DOSBox show up prominently in the intro music (for PC speaker) and voice effects (for Adlib) in several titles from the classic Microprose era. To redress that I am weighing consideration of DOSBox-X vs a complete virtual machine package such as 86box. I'm still testing 86box and performance-wise both appear about equivalent with DOSBox-X being much more user-friendly while 86box is more the complete old-school PC experience.

[@Pixelmusement]

Accuracy is definitely less of a concern when you emulate an entire DOS computer rather than just the DOS environment, but then performance becomes a potential problem. If you need emulation accuracy over speed, go with a full PC emulator, but if you want to have maximum performance so you can play the most demanding DOS titles, go with one or more flavours of DOSBox. :B

[@Cyberbrickmaster1986]

I've been using Dosbox PURE in Retroarch which has controller support, save states, etc. It does require a bit of tinkering to use the original keyboard inputs though.

[@maxmuster7003]

I miss VBE modenumbers for widescreen resolution with 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratio similar to modern pcie display devices with a VBE 3 bios in 1920*1080 and 1920*1200. I miss VBE 3 refreshrate controlled video modes in combination with VBE 3 hardware triple buffering, it only supports modenumbers for outdated video modes. I miss for loops in batch files.

[@Roobar_Plays]

I've never even heard of this DOS BOX X, so now I have to try it, specifically to test the sound/music of several games. But I'm also waiting for the next version of 0.74 to come out and I hope it will fix all the sound/music issues.

[@jq747]

Who else was expecting the World Class golf narrator to say, "damn, those alien bastards are gonna pay..."

[@Pixelmusement]

+jq747 Now THAT would be one heck of a golf game! XD

[@TheOnlyToblin]

"Coming really soon" *2 years later* *crickets*

[@Pixelmusement]

Not that they're not still working on it but for some reason it's like they're treating 0.75 like 1.0 or something; Someone over there forgot the purpose of incremental builds. :P

[@BastetFurry]

Hmm, you could make that comparison with Dosbox versus PCem. Be aware, tough, that the later has a slight IO performance issue and that performance will drop when accessing the virtual harddisk in a large manor. Like 3.11 writing to the swapfile. But Sarah is working on that from what i got out of the forums. ;)

[@datriaxsondor590]

PCem has been so quiet the last few months, I almost assumed it was abandoned or something. Good to hear it's still moving forward, as it's easily the best option for anything DOS/early Win9x.

[@jfitnesshealth]

looks like it updated now! May 2022!

[@Pixelmusement]

If it did it's not official yet because the latest official release on the website is still 0.74-3. :P

[@tomvalusek]

What about Lemmings? Does DosBox X emulate it properly?

[@ZemiousKatarn]

Very informative video. I don't have access to a great deal of physical hardware, but I do have a decently modern PC and Laptop, both dual booting Win10 and Linux. I have a few hundred physical discs and many more archived games (And by that, I mean games that I have in storage, but created ISOs and CUE/BINs of), and I've been slowly creating individual configurations for each game / program / environment. I've been using a mix of DOSBox DAUM, DOSBox 0.74, and PCEM to do so..... might be time to add DOSBox X into the mix and see how it fares. Honestly though, you should give PCEM a look. Yes, you are emulating a full PC, but it DOES have hardware support for some games that "just works" in ways that I just can't get DOSBox to even attempt. Granted lots of those are Windows 3.1, 95, and 98, and not DOS. It has basically meant that I can use DOSBox for DOS games, PCEM for older Windows games, and Windows 10 natively for everything else. There are really only a couple games I have yet to get fully working (Here's looking at you, Motocross Madness).

[@Specter227]

Kind of an unrelated question: Is there any DOSBox fork that supports save states?

[@Leeki85]

DOSBox SVN-Daum has them.

[@FeelingShred]

never actually used this feature myself, so I don't know if it can be trusted blindly, save your fucking games too dude xDDD

[@AlexeiVoronin]

Save states = CHEATING And it's probably the most disgusting form of cheating too.

[@Specter227]

@@AlexeiVoronin Geez, it was just a question, no need to get upset over something so trivial. Besides, let people play SP games the way they enjoy the best, gatekeeping is really lame.

[@Sheevlord]

@@AlexeiVoronin OH NOES! Someone cheats in a single player game! OH THE HUMANITY! WHAT HAS THE WORLD COME DOWN TO????

[@marccaselle8108]

Does dosbox X handle mortal Kombat 3 ok? The reason I ask is the character selection bug where you get a second to choose your fighter and then it goes to the difficulty select screen.

[@Pixelmusement]

No idea; haven't played the DOS port of MK3 yet. :B

[@samiRetro777]

Hey Chris What Arkanoid version did you play at the beginning ?

[@Pixelmusement]

I always list all games played in every video in order of appearance in the credits at the end. ;)

[@retronicksprogrammingchann2337]

Dosbox-x has resizable window and better mouse integration going between multiple dosbox-x sessions . Both have issues with DPMI apps that are not games.

[@tiaxanderson9725]

Maybe this was added in a later version, but speaking about configuring; doesn't Dosbox-X have a graphical configuration that can be used while the emulator is running? Don't get me wrong, as I have several linux machines running and a good user of PC Gaming Wiki, I *love* a good old fashioned editable text file, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate a good config utility.

[@Pixelmusement]

It does, but said config utility isn't much better than just editing the config files by hand, granted you can make changes and test them without having to restart the emulation. :B

[@pedazodeboludo]

2 years later and no 0.75... I'm hoping it fixes detecting the Roland MT-32 on X-29 Retaliator...

[@SirYodaJedi]

Oh, TIL there is a 0.74-3 version of DOSBox. I was still using 0.74-2.

[@Pixelmusement]

+SirYodaJedi The dash updates are EXTREMELY minor and made to address security issues so for the most part you don't have to worry about upgrading the dash versions unless the specific security issues solved matter to you.

[@SomeBlokeOrWhatever]

I have a problem with Dosbox-X that I have a lot of GoG games that used CDRom. Those come with ISOs in bin/audiofiles/cue format (well the .bin is renamed to .gog, but it's a bin), and in order for them to properly work, with music and everything else, you need to mount the .cue. On regular old Dosbox 0.74 you just "imgmount d file.cue -t cdrom" and it works. On X, it gives an error. Apparently it's a "simple" patch if you build Dosbox-X yourself, like, download the sourcecode and configure it to support this or that, and like, okay, but I don't have enough knowledge on building programs at home to do that?

[@Pixelmusement]

+A Birb That's odd... You'll note I compared Descent II in this video which I have imgmounted as a CUE/BIN pair and it worked fine in both DOSBox and DOSBox-X. Not quite sure why you'd be having an issue like that although my best guess is it might be differences in how the path to the image file is being processed, in which case, supplying the full path to the image file and surrounding it in quotes may do the trick. (Instead of cdimage.cue it would be "c:\games\this game\cdimage.cue")

[@LinksPB]

Excellent work. I don't use any SVN version or forks of DOSBox, I prefer stable versions (even if they have known bugs or certain known issues with some games), but always wondered if I was missing out on something important. Now I know. Do you have any experience with PCEm? I've been using it lately for the older games with timing issues (like Starflight) and also some mid to late '90s games with video issues in DOSBox (like Battle Bugs 800x600 SVGA mode). I'm pretty happy with it.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Pablo Bolognesi Nah. I haven't had a necessity to look into doing virtual machine type stuff yet. :B

[@LinksPB]

@@Pixelmusement If someone had told me a couple of years ago I'd be running a virtual machine to play Starflight I would have told them they were out of their mind. :P Thanks for the reply

[@UltimatePerfection]

How does it run AlphaWaves/Continuum? I find it a very tricky thing to run in DosBox - you either get flickering on the bottom in vga mode or the game runs way too fast in Tandy mode (and no amount of cycle reduction seems to help).

[@Pixelmusement]

No idea; Haven't been able to get a hold of those games yet. :P

[@UltimatePerfection]

@@Pixelmusement Well, there's only 🏴‍☠️one way🏴‍☠️ to do this, at least as far as the DOS version is concerned, physical copies of the Atari ST version are a little more common. In either case, the original dev doesn't get a cent and the company is defunct, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@stevenjlovelace]

Which version do you use for "Shovelware Diggers"? Have there been any failed digs you been able to salvage using the other version?

[@Pixelmusement]

+Steve Lovelace I wasn't actually set up to use DOSBox-X for Shovelware Diggers and still kinda am not, though it would be a good idea to get it prepped for that purpose. :B

[@MechagirlSachiko]

Looking forward to the next episode! Genuinely curious about the game that's gonna be showcased!

[@bwcbiz]

I'll be curious to see which, if any, of these two emulators are able to cleanly host Win 95 first. Wanna play Civ 2 again.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Lo-Res Gamer I'm told DOSBox-X can handle Windows 95, but not easily. There's a LOT of settings which need to be changed, both for the installation and for actually running it, and that performance isn't great. :P

[@joe--cool]

Windows 9x runs pretty well in Virtualbox. Civ 2 is a 2D game so it should work fine.

[@bwcbiz]

@@joe--cool I'd expect it to: It ran fine under WOW32 in XP mode in Win 7. But now I'm at 64 bit WIn 10, so no dice for that option.

[@joe--cool]

If you still have your .vhd from XP mode you should be able to run it on Win10 with HyperV (or VirtualBox) and even keep your installed XP stuff. Only Start Menu integration will probably not work.

[@sriramkulli]

sound and game lag when i increase the cpu cycles

[@Llcooljdj]

Great video!

[@NavJack27gaming]

How do you feel about using a virtual machine to run DOS along side Windows 95, 98, ME?

[@Pixelmusement]

+NavJack27 I've always managed to avoid having to up to now. VMs are definitely a route to take but because you're emulating an entire computer in doing so, performance is going to be severely curtailed.

[@FeelingShred]

I read reports of some very specific games running better on Virtual XP+command prompt than Dosbox, I don't recall the specific games, but I remember it being those late-era games, right at the end of the DOS and the beginning of the win95 era, pretty tough to run those early transition renderers, and DOS games of this era relied on CPU tricks specific to 486 or Pentiums which Dosbox isn't able to pick up.

[@FeelingShred]

And for testing the Virtual Machine XP+prompt route, there's VDMsound which might help for DOS games to run with sound smoothly

[@earthsteward70]

Where can I GET this build? This looks amazing for my tastes

[@Pixelmusement]

+earthsteward70 There's a link to the DOSBox-X website in the video description. :B

[@sriramkulli]

could you give me the DOSBox-X 0.82.20 version please

[@andrewdupuis1151]

I been using dos box long time , I never herd of Dos Box-x until I saw this video. I am just wounding will dos box stop working if they drop 32 bit support on windows ?

[@Pixelmusement]

+Andrew Dupuis Unless we get 128-bit CPUs and operating systems anytime soon you don't have to worry about 32-bit application support disappearing from Windows; It's simply too simple a process to convert between the two architectures and I can't see Microsoft outright deciding to just REMOVE that feature in a 64-bit OS. All of their 32-bit OSes (including 32-bit Windows 10)either have 16-bit application support built-in by default or optional through either additional downloads or feature toggles. :P

[@Pixelmusement]

+Random KZbin Idiot Host OS is relevant for the way the emulator's been compiled. If it's compiled for x64, it will not run on an x86 machine, but if there's an x86 build it will run on almost any x64 machine, save for the extremely rare x64 servers out there lacking x86 emulation for security reasons. Beyond that yeah, host OS is not relevant for software in active development or support because it can just be recompiled. (Though might need slight alterations to account for memory size differences.)

[@Pixelmusement]

+Random KZbin Idiot More than likely. I was most just speaking in general terms regarding 32-bit and 64-bit software. ;)

[@andrewdupuis1151]

@@Pixelmusement thanks on mac they took away 32 bet i mostly use dosbox on pc

[@Pixelmusement]

@@andrewdupuis1151 Apple's been making lots of terrible decisions lately so that doesn't surprise me. :P

[@Darxide23]

2:16 DOSBox 0.75 is coming any day now... _»Glances at calendar.«_ Any day now...

[@Pixelmusement]

I kinda get the impression by this point that they're seeking nothing less than perfection for the next official release of DOSBox. As it stands, DOSBox ECE is basically an unofficial branch which has all of the actual upcoming changes/features, as far as I'm aware anyways, so when the next official release comes out, regardless of how much longer it takes, it will immediately replace ECE. :B

[@Darxide23]

@@Pixelmusement The problem with striving for perfection is that you're never going to find it. And I've also learned to be wary of anything that is the end result. No movie or music album that spent years and decades in development for "perfection" ever turned out any good. Software development is a kind of art and falls under that same rule of thumb.

[@namcos]

I'm going to take a stab-in-the-dark (and completely wrong) guess at the next game: Battlecruiser 3000AD

[@mrgreenteatime]

I loved that game, never fully understood it(I was around 13 back in those days I think) could not survive even few hours in the game, however still remember that intro with some metal like theme, ability to deploy a vehicle on a planet, travel from system to system with your mothership, crew management etc, it all looked cool and overwhelming at the same time ...

[@WadidFOUDHAILY]

Just a comment on the game : popcorn. I played the game on real hardware years ago and it had the same slowdown problem with "newer" hardware. It runs smooth on 8086 8Mhz with CGA but very slow on more recent processors and VGA graphic cards. (I guess the speed calculation routine was outdated and not suitable for i386 processors or newer). So Vanilla Dosbox is closer to real hardware for this specific game

[@lilwyvern4]

Your videos make every early Saturday morning great. I always look forward to them. PS. You like Daggerfall? DF Unity is now vanilla complete and entered its alpha stage recently. I haven't messed with it too much, but at the very least, I can confirm that custom classes work in all their insanely unbalanced glory.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Torcularis TBH, I find it hard to go back to Daggerfall with Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim all existing now. ^_^;

[@RichardCraig]

Why is the first game I wanna guess for next week is SPISPOPD? aka Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles of Putrid Debris

[@JimLeonard]

I think the most compelling reason to use dosbox-x is that the maintainer is actively updating the code, responding to user requests, and fixing them (the MCGA bug was fixed before your video became public, for example). DOSBox SVN by comparison is hardly updated, and the process for getting help or features is not optimal, whereas you can contact the dosbox-x maintainer on Twitter. Will we see a follow-up video next year where you re-compare the two using the correct CPU emulation core in dosbox-x?)

[@Pixelmusement]

+Jim Leonard Possibly sooner. :B

[@JimLeonard]

@@Pixelmusement You can go a year in-between revisiting subjects, there's no pressure...

[@Pixelmusement]

+Jim Leonard Yeah, but this is a topic where I don't want loose ends, especially given that I'm kinda smack-dab in the middle of two sides with incredibly strong opinions on the matter and if I leave this open-ended then I'm left being ignorant to the facts on either side; Better to tie this up as soon as 0.75 drops. :B

[@JimLeonard]

@@Pixelmusement But 0.75 isn't dropping any time soon ;-)

[@Pixelmusement]

+Jim Leonard You say that, but I'm getting mixed messages from the dev team. On the one hand, I have one dev assuring me that 0.75 is close to ready, plus even the main page on the website says 0.75 would've been out by now if not for certain things which took longer than expected, but at the same time, I have another dev who's seeing this video of mine as a passive-aggressive attempt to push 0.75 out faster and is otherwise upset at me over it, but then I have people like you and several others who've been badgering me to just flat out switch to DOSBox-X. The position I'm in here feels incredibly stressful and is going to leave a lot of people unhappy with me no matter which avenue I take and is kinda making me want to just NOT make videos, but then I have no income and am out on the streets because I have a sleep disorder which prevents me from keeping a normal job. THIS is the insane stress I'm going through right now trying to deal with all of this so please, please, PLEASE try to avoid adding to it... please.

[@AxiomofDiscord]

PC-9801 is what DOSBOX X does very well. Well at least at all. I like it better than some other emulators because I am just use to DOSBOX more than other 9801 emulators. now keyboard layout and special characters are hard to get use to but that is just the pains of a foreign language and alphabet computer. I wish they would integrate the text and not need a separate file for that within the folder though. Breaks some of the portability of the emulator and its versatility for batch files and other such configurations.

[@renatowertheim]

can you play diablo 1 on dosbox x

[@divingonthemic]

I'm curious how much you know about developing an emulator. As for the game you'll review, I'll say Bullfrog's Tube.

[@Pixelmusement]

+kataetheweirdo I know the concepts and principles behind how emulators work, but not the actual process as I've never attempted to make one.

[@FeelingShred]

And about Mechwarrior 2 engine, I find interesting that the Mech2 engine (DOS) was later used on Interstate 76 (which is a Windows game) Is the source code for 3D engines interchangeable between DOS and Windows like that? (for people that know about the subject this question may sound really dumb, I apologize in advance) xDD

[@Pixelmusement]

+FeelingShred The mechanics are easily ported, the rendering of graphics and audio is not, although porting audio is generally way easier.

[@joe--cool]

Mechwarrior has a Windows 95 version that came out half a year after the DOS version. It supported Direct3D, Glide, TCP/IP 8 players and more Joysticks via DirectInput.

[@FeelingShred]

sounds good! =D "TCP/IP" reminds me of IPX network protocol, would love to see a video on that one, never actually used it though but a few of my games have it

[@interlace84]

I have a Win98 3Dfx Demo pack w/image on my channel, feel free to check it out but my problem is SVN-Daum is still the only build so far able to run it :'( Wish I could switch, but I rebuilt it in PCEM and though it's slower, having SLI Voodoo2's working is also kinda awesome ^^

[@Mr.madmight266]

I always keep different versions of DOSBox cause they always have at least 1 issue.

[@Spaztron64]

Why not go over PC-98 emulation in a next filler episode?

[@Pixelmusement]

+Spaztron64 I have no PC-98 software and no history with the system thus I am horribly unqualified to talk about it. :P

[@Spaztron64]

@@Pixelmusement oh well that's a shame.

[@thepirategamerboy12]

Yeah, PC-98 support is a very nice feature DOSBox-X has vs. 0.74.

[@anunknowninvididual2005]

DosBox-X can Run PC-98 games by changing the machine to pc98 mode in config file

[@natehiggins2487]

PopCorn, more FPS than Counterstrike!

[@CHWired]

I wish I was smart enough to use either, I want to play some old DOS games...

[@MarkTheMorose]

Do you need help getting DOSbox to run?

[@atlas8827]

try it with pcem

[@karlnigan]

Forget dosbox, PCem is the way to go for machine accuracy...

[@robinmattheussen2395]

Personally, I always use dosbox-staging unless there's something that doesn't work very well. It's focused on ease-of-use, modern code standards and build system, decently documented, has a bunch of features I really appreciate, has very responsive developers, always has clear rationale for why things are integrated, and is developed using all the standard practices you're used to on Github. And I feel the developers take the cross-platform nature of DOSBox more seriously than some other projects. It's the best attempt yet to provide a go-to place for continued DOSBox development IMO. The only time I've used DOSBox-X recently was when I needed 3dfx/voodoo/glide emulation, which staging doesn't have (yet). But that's a very rare use-case. I've also DOSBox-Pure as well, but that was on the (very) rare occasion I wanted to play a gamepad-centric game (almost never happens), because controller support in RetroArch is excellent.

[@WitchyRhia]

360p gang rise up

[@aqualung2000]

Please check out my port as well if you haven't already. It supports pixel shaders for ultra-fast video output at all resolutions, CRT scanline emulation, and accelerated bicubic 2-pass filtering. Based on the 0.74 codebase. More info here and instructions here: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=48303&p=500777 (I'm also happy to help with configuration if needed.)

[@UltimatePerfection]

All I want to know is that if DB-X can run Alpha Waves/Continuum without glitches of either graphical (common dos modes) or timing (tandy mode where the timer that is supposed to count down roughly every second counts down way too fast) so I can finally play it properly. This video doesn't answer that question 😬😡😠

[@Pixelmusement]

+Jagielski Gaming You could always just download it and test it out. ;)

[@ADarkandStormyNight]

I have no idea what he was talking about, but he sounded good talking about it. My only gripe: he did not once mention the Empire of Mike. I feel he failed us all there.

[@TheJamieRamone]

That Linewars game looks like a ripoff of Elite. How duz it compare? Any1?

[@sirlight-ljij]

There is a dedicated review episode of this game on ADG: kzbin.info/www/bejne/m4jNgWqYhtqWars

[@Pixelmusement]

+Jamie Ramone LineWars took some inspiration from Elite in terms of the visuals but is otherwise very much not the same game, as LineWars is all action and the name itself "LINE" Wars is referring to playing it over a telephone line with a friend thanks to its multiplayer capabilities. ;)

[@TheJamieRamone]

@@Pixelmusement Ah, interesting.

[@DeadMouseis]

ya'll are Uh'ware a simple FLOPPY solves All these issues RIGHT... Sblive Dos Drivers Esm386 Himem.sys moslow Ctmouse.exe and all problems fixed...for ones with Nics a Good Dos packet drv fixes that this "Emulation" of what the pc can do with a boot disk is getting silly..."OpenGL" for games that don't need Opengl...

[@Pixelmusement]

+Dead Mouse Running DOS itself on modern PCs can be troublesome at best and an extremely bad idea at worst due to the way modern hardware functions. It's not unheard of to lock up your SATA controller, disable cooling fans, or be completely unable to boot any games which run in a 320x200.resolution. Heck, once I had to replace the motherboard in my Windows 98 machine I started having issues using real DOS and discovered that DOSBox actually ran my DOS games better anyways. (Yes, DOSBox works in Windows 98.) Also, MoSlo is not very accurate and often results in speed fluctuations. :P

[@DeadMouseis]

@@Pixelmusement that is all in yer head..:) bah hum bug :) get a hp think client t610 and a pci sblive with a 44pin 80gb hard drive and rock out ;)

[@datriaxsondor590]

All versions of DosBox really need to focus on borderless window performance, and maintaining proper aspect ratio. I can't imagine many people who like running anything in dedicated fullscreen these days. I know I hate it, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Hopefully upcoming releases may address these issues. They are rather important.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Datriax Sondor Unfortunately, a lot of it has to do with what Microsoft has done with Windows 10. Most people are not experiencing the same problems I am, otherwise it would've been blatantly obvious and Microsoft would have fixed it. As far as I can tell, it's my specific combination of hardware combined with the changes Microsoft has made to Windows 10 since launch which has led to these issues for me and there's not a damn thing I can do about it until Microsoft finally identifies and fixes the problem with an update as I don't have the cash to simply put together a new PC with different hardware. :/

[@datriaxsondor590]

@@Pixelmusement Ya, understandable. Was mostly thinking out loud, in terms of wishing. Win10 is a perpetual blunder imo, screwing up a lot of things, as I remember plenty of problems I faced with DDraw in particular, among others. Rather tired of the "service era" already. The era where, just because something works today, doesn't mean it will tomorrow. Especially with Win10. Still, hoping something may change in the near future, in order to bring borderless around with zero side effects. Would certainly be nice.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Datriax Sondor The DirectDraw deprecation thing was ever since Windows 8. As for the windowed gaming shenanigans, that started with the introduction of Game Mode. Until then, performance with windowed gaming on Windows 10 was perfect for me. :P

[@demogorgonzola]

First? :D

[@Pixelmusement]

+DemoGorgonZola Yep! Congratulations! You have won a lifetime supply of nothingdollars! It's like real money, except it doesn't exist! 8D

[@demogorgonzola]

@@Pixelmusement Hooray, a heap of virtual currency. :) Oh and it reminds my of one of the last scenes in 'Street FIghter' movie where they loot Bison's treasury and find out all the money is worthless M. Bison dollars. BTW. ``Win10 being weird`` and ``switching for different emulator`` Sometime it's just hard to get an all around emulator working in all the cases perfectly, especially when we periodically change OS or hardware and the emulators can bug out even from that. And it probably will get worse as time progresses. That's why some people, like LGR like to have actual period machines to use for older games. For example I run into problems recently emulating some CPS2 games, like 'X-men vs Street Fighter' where the emulator I was using would lock up on reaching final boos stage, but only on a 64 bit (on my previous 32 bit one it worked just fine). Getting an actual cabinet is not really feasible but a different emulator did solved the issue.

[@AmyraCarter]

And a lifetime supply of memes!! lolz

[@demogorgonzola]

@@AmyraCarter LOL, can I haz a gorgonzola-cheese burger as well?

[@Pixelmusement]

+DemoGorgonZola I know, but I share an apartment with my father and make this show on a shoestring budget. I don't have the space or cash to go for a fully authentic experience, nor would most people wanting to get into this sort of stuff, so I take a small measure of pride in being someone going the emulation route and providing important details on that front. :B