Using 86box for Running MS-DOS games

In today's video I test out 86box for running MS-DOS games. It is a PC hardware emulator that uses real BIOS ROMS for as accurate emulation as possible. It ends up working fairly well, although with some caveats that I go into more detail in the video.
86box website
86box.net

[@JimLeonard]

The sound you heard in battle chess is correct. The game used a 1-bit digitized sound technique that provided a loud volume but very distorted samples. It sounds similar to that on real hardware.

[@sparcie]

I remember a slightly different sound from old hardware, I think shifted a bit higher in pitch. It's a little hard to describe, and I found it hard to pinpoint exactly how it didn't sound right. It could be because our old hardware had a piezo speaker instead of a normal cone speaker or something else specific to the hardware we used as kids. To be fair to 86box I think Dosbox gets it far more wrong. The sound issue didn't come across well on youtube, it's more noticable with Hocus Pocus and in the intro to F117a where I heard a weird sound kinda like a radio being tuned. (in addition to glitching in F117a) It happens when there are higher pitch noises particularly.

[@kylehill3643]

@@sparcie There is literally no f'king tutorials! The only tutorial has a different setup then mine!

[@retronicksprogrammingchann2337]

Some systems had better/different pc speakers. I remember my PC sounding slightly different than my friends PC even both were clones.

[@easyerthanyouthink]

I havent read the comments. But if you remeber the pc speaker can on be on or off. No volumes. Only beep . The digitized sound was achived via pulse width modulation of that on of signal to the speaker. No volume, but higher feq may seem louder.. Also remeber id software john and john would hit the video card registers in new ways.... So no standard programing

[@MontieMongoose]

I played many hours on a grayscale 386 without a mouse; Colonization is frustrating, but still playable.

[@foobar-9k]

Regarding those amber and green monochrome displays. I understand that they are just simple filters but... as someone that actually used all the mentioned types of monitors... the amber ones were far less orange, and more like light-yellow. Same with the green ones, the real ones were less green and more in the light-green spectrum. I was lucky, and the first monitor I bought was actually white-phosphorous... SO much better than those amber and green ones I used before! 😀

[@sparcie]

Thinking about it I tend to agree that it doesn't look quite like the real thing. I'm just impressed they have the feature to set a monitor type at all! Most of the emulators I've tried don't have the option at all.

[@DosGamerMan]

Didn't know about it. Thx. Will be checking it out.

[@zgolkar]

Nice! I did not know about 86box. I have tried PCem, quite good particularly with shaders. I was missing just the drive sounds. I wonder how all rank to each other.

[@sparcie]

Cool, PCem is quite similar as 86Box is a fork of it. I found I preferred 86Box because it's a little bit easier to use and configure. Work on PCem ceased unfortunately. I might eventually make a video ranking emulation options for DOS, but I have a few others I need to check out before going there.

[@rodrigoalves-cg6xv]

This video is amazing. s2

[@retronicksprogrammingchann2337]

short of installing Win95/98 is there an easy way to get programs copied from the host system?

[@sparcie]

I usually use a program called winImage to inject the DOS games directly into the hard disk image.

[@GameplayCrush]

I just double click the harddrive image on windows 10 and it mounts it as a harddrive, put stuff on there, then rightclick and "eject"

[@retronicksprogrammingchann2337]

@@GameplayCrush thanks for that. it took me a few minutes to figure out what you were saying with the mounting of images. Just a note for anyone else reading this, make sure your images are in VHD format, regular img images will not mount in 10.

[@GameplayCrush]

@@retronicksprogrammingchann2337 ah my bad, I didn't stop and think that VHD may not be the default option.

[@GreySectoid]

Thanks for the video.

[@foobar-9k]

I would always hit like and subscribe to every youtuber that even in passing mentions BeOS! (and I'm not even past the 0:50 mark :-D)

[@gbraadnl]

How about the fork PCBox ?

[@sparcie]

I assume you mean PCem, which is where 86Box was forked from. They are actually very similar in terms of compatibility and performance, because they share alot of code. PCem hasn't had a new release in more than a year, it seems like there is a new maintainer, so perhaps it will continue. As I understand it most of the difference is in the user interface , but I've not used it in quite a while.