Does anyone still use dosbox?

[Homer_hardware]

Does anyone still use dosbox doom when there is crispy doom and chocolate doom?

 

Just curious.

[Patrick_Plays_Doom]

Probably no one here uses dosbox.........

 

Except doomkid

(well i think he does not use it as a main sourceport, but for making some mods, like i think rowdyrudy2 works on dosbox)

 

 

but Me Personally Do not use dosbox

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

Dosbox has been abandoned so I recommend using its successors instead. Dosbox-staging or dosbox-x. Better hardware emulation, more features, you can even run more modern windows system now. 

Anyway, when i want to play pretend as a doom archeologist, a dosbox variant is the easiest way to get stuff running. By that I mean weird hacked sourceports like RORDoom or plenty editors like DETH or doomcad. Windows is less and less capable to run the old software as years go by. I think it's a heritage worth preserving, and celebrating. 

Whenever you play a 90s wad, and ask yourself why it's made the way it is, trying to go in dosbox and in an editor that was used, and try to make a map with comparable complexity is really eye opening experience. It really makes you appreciate what today's editors and source ports do that we take for granted. You'd be shocked how rudimentary and unreliable some of the editors are, and yet, people made amazing wads with them. For example, I hold Eternal Doom as an incredible technical achievement, and then seeing what tools were used to create it is jawdropping. 

You can't go back to experience these things for the first time, or accurately re-experience them in their context, but programs like dosbox let us at least have a little taste of it. 

Chocolate and crispy are great for that too. The question is just how much convenience you're willing to sacrifice. That's for each of us to decide. 

[Somniac]

If you're making vanilla-compatible maps then its important to test in the vanilla .exe at least once, as Chocolate Doom is still a source port at the end of the day and behaves slightly differently in some key areas: you can negate the savegame overflow in the setup, and load dehacked patches in with the command line avoiding the use of Dehacked to create a modified executable. FWIW I will use Chocolate more often than not.

 

None of that means you *have* to use DOSbox, but if you're someone who remembers using DOS to play Doom originally its nice to occasionally go back to that.

[Rykzeon]

3 hours ago, Patrick_Plays_Doom said:

(well i think he does not use it as a main sourceport, but for making some mods, like i think rowdyrudy2 works on dosbox)

I think I've run rowdyrudy2 in Zandrodum, the animation of weapon changing is cool. I did check in DeHackEd how it works and IIRC it used some additional frames and variable labelled "Unk" (the variable seems used to override X and Y frame coordination) in WhackEd

[AllenB]

I use dosbox for a few things, but not for Doom. Why when there are so many good options. I don't think I've used vanilla since GLDoom came out.

Edited April 24, 2024 by AllenB

[prfunky]

1 hour ago, AllenB said:

I use dosbox for a few things, but not for Doom.

 

Ditto. There's a bunch of old 2d stuff I need dosbox for.

But Doom? Hah!! Left that IPX/SPX network stuff back

when Doom Legacy was new.

[Graf Zahl]

I use Dosbox for things that have no working Windows equivalent but that's it. Playing games with Dosbox is an inferior experience mainly due to the assumptions being made about display hardware back in the day.

[DiavoJinx]

3 hours ago, AllenB said:

I use dosbox for a few things, but not for Doom. Why when there are so many good options. I don't think I've used vanilla since GLDoom came out.

Ditto.  I use DOSBox all the time! Even this past weekend got my Bluetooth gamepad working in it (had a weird issue I sorted out) so I could pick up one of my absolute favorites from the '90s: One Must Fall 2097!

 

But yeah... GZDoom and the ZDL.exe launcher are all I need these days for my Doom life. I started with Doom Legacy & ZDoom circa 1999, and now it's all GZDoom (sometimes in VR even, with that variant).

Edited April 24, 2024 by DiavoJinx

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Not to mention that Night Dive Studios now has the ability to remaster almost every PC and Console FPS ever made in the 1990s and early-2000s with some accuracy in mind to the originals, meaning we are going to see less MS-DOS PC games being rereleased via DOSBox in the future.

Edited April 24, 2024 by Wadmodder Shalton

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

5 hours ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Not to mention that Night Dive Studios now has the ability to remaster almost every PC and Console FPS ever made in the 1990s and early-2000s with some accuracy in mind to the originals, meaning we are going to see less MS-DOS PC games being rereleased via DOSBox in the future.

But how? Besides the small problem regarding legal rights/ownership of all those games, they wouldn't be able to really put a dent in the statistics even if their team was five times the size it is now.

[Plerb]

I'd prefer to use real DOS/Win9x computers if I could, but seeing as the only ones I currently own are both 4.77mhz 8088s, and I don't even have them set up right now, I use DOSBox for most DOS activities. For Doom I almost always use source ports.

[JackDBS]

I attempted to play SWTW on original Boom DOSBOX but nah it doesn't work unfortunately because there's too many damn segs. I do play the original Doom II on DOSBOX because I have it on CD, but the CD load is so damn slow and the CD's version is 1.7 so I don't touch it all too much.

Edited April 24, 2024 by JackDBS

[taufan99]

6 hours ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Not to mention that Night Dive Studios now has the ability to remaster almost every PC and Console FPS ever made in the 1990s and early-2000s with some accuracy in mind to the originals, meaning we are going to see less MS-DOS PC games being rereleased via DOSBox in the future.

Doesn't mean it will happen to all other games. There can be only so much Nightdive has to offer for everyone, and we're not taking the even more obscure releases into further consideration.

[eanasir]

I use DOSBOX sometimes

[OpenRift]

I used to use it all the time, but since I got my Pentium III rig, I've just been playing on that instead.

 

I still use DOSBox for my community game nights tho

[INfront95]

Yes

[Master O]

18 hours ago, Homer_hardware said:

Does anyone still use dosbox doom when there is crispy doom and chocolate doom?

 

Just curious.

 

If you play any DOS games that do not have source ports, then Dosbox is still necessary.

 

For example, games such as (but not limited to):

 

Bio Menace

Carmaggedon 1

Crystal Caves

Major Stryker

Paganitzu

Screamer 2

Secret Agent

Wacky Wheels

Edited April 25, 2024 by Master O

[Argent Agent]

Not very much; one-chip OPL is too limited and ruins some midis. Static limits were also meant to be broken.

[taufan99]

7 minutes ago, Master O said:

 

If you play any DOS games that do not have source ports, then Dosbox is still necessary.

 

For example, games such as (but not limited to):

 

Bio Menace

Carmaggedon 1

Crystal Caves

Major Stryker

Paganitzu

Screamer 2

Secret Agent

Wacky Wheels

Both do have a new HD version though.

[Roebloz]

If I want a vanilla experience, I just use my own Chippy Doom.

[Lippeth]

I didn't have a computer when DOS was more common so DOSBox lets me trip out on nostalgia in the comfort of a modern OS.

[Trigsy]

When I first got into classic DOOM a few years ago, I'm certain I played through all of Ultimate DOOM and at least half of DOOM 2 using DOSBox. At the time, I don't think I had any concept of a source port, but I had known about emulation for years, so I assumed DOSBox was the way. Why else would the GOG installer include it, right?

I do think DOSBox is cool, I'm just not particularly savvy with it.

[Edward850]

10 hours ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Not to mention that Night Dive Studios now has the ability to remaster almost every PC and Console FPS ever made in the 1990s and early-2000s with some accuracy in mind to the originals, meaning we are going to see less MS-DOS PC games being rereleased via DOSBox in the future. 

I missed that part where we were supposedly given the ultimate ability to port ~15000 games.

You mind explaining this one because this is news to me.

[YeOldeFellerNoob]

I use it mainly for shits and giggles sometimes. Realistically, if I wanted to play strictly vanilla DOOM, I would just play Chocolate DOOM.

[Joshua Schäferhund]

I use DOSBox but not just for Doom

[Roofi]

I almost always use it for vanilla wads.

[bobstremglav]

I use it always, because of accuracy and still nice optimization. Also setting up dosbox for network for me is easier than using source ports

[Murdoch]

2 hours ago, Edward850 said:

I missed that part where we were supposedly given the ultimate ability to port ~15000 games.

You mind explaining this one because this is news to me.

 

What you mean it doesn't only take an hour or two for you guys to make your remasters? 

[Buckshot]

Everyday. There's just a ton of dos-era games and apps that just haven't been remastered or source ports for modern platforms and likely never will be (excluding Internet Archive playable versions which all pretty much run on a dosbox session, that is). Grew up in DOS's prime era, so that was a lot of games from my youth that I'm never going to part with.
 

Dosbox-X is my goto, sometimes dosbox staging.

Edited April 25, 2024 by Buckshot