DOSBox vs. 86Box

[Anonymous No.10784810]

What is your go-to for playing old PC games that cannot be played on modern Windows through any other means?

[Anonymous No.10784824]

aren't these for two different things?

[Anonymous No.10784947]

>>10784824
They're like opposite ends of a spectrum, DOSBox is an emulator built to run DOS games and 86Box is an emulator built to emulate a full PC system with a high degree of flexibility for both gaming and general use cases.

[Anonymous No.10785007]

>>10784810
DOSBox-Pure on Retroach:
>RA shaders
>fine adjustments of the vsync and output refresh rate on per-game basis.
Most of DOS VGA games run at 70hz. Even if I switch my monitor to 70hz manually, they have frame pacing issues on 86box. DOSBox pure has multiple adjustments like buffering mode. Everything is much smoother with less input lag
>DOSBox-Pure is one of the only two emulators with correct overscan border emulation including its color changes.
Other emulator is DOSBox-X iirc, even regular DOSBox doesn't emulate this. 86box has overscan border setting but it's just a static black border.

[Anonymous No.10785034]

>>10785007
I started using DOSBox Pure a few months ago. Good shit

Played me Dizzy games on it I did, m8. fookin A

[Anonymous No.10785159]

>>10785007
Yeah it's a decent experience. I use DOSBox Staging the most now because it comes bundled with ExoDos.

[Anonymous No.10785164]

>>10785007
>Most of DOS VGA games run at 70hz. Even if I switch my monitor to 70hz manually, they have frame pacing issues on 86box.
Yeah, this is a serious issue, and I'm surprised it's not brought up more often.

[Anonymous No.10785197]

>>10784810
PCem and its derivatives are better for 9x. It is an utter pain to just jump in and out of shit spontaneously with , and is a means to an end even for 9x. That's not even getting into all the actual-DOS-configuration stuff you have to deal with when emulating a whole platform like that. Memory allocation can bite my ass forever.
>>10785007
>>10785164
VRR is SO important for emulation, arguably more for it than modern games. Just set it to your native refresh like 120 or 144, and VRR just does the werk for 50-70hz games.

[Anonymous No.10785204]

I do most of my emulating on android. I use Magic Dosbox and it's pretty good; I'm able to create custom config profiles for each game.

[Anonymous No.10785208]

dosbox
if it's late 90s 2d game often wine will work

[Anonymous No.10785262]

>>10785197
>That's not even getting into all the actual-DOS-configuration stuff you have to deal with when emulating a whole platform like that. Memory allocation can bite my ass forever.
These days it's as simple as swapping MSCDEX with SHSUCDX, and oakcdrom or whatever other CD-ROM driver you use with xcdrom.sys. It's retard simple to get MS-DOS with SB, mouse, CD-ROM, and extras like DOSKEY and XANSI.SYS all running at the same time and still have 610+KBs of conventional free as well as well over 100KBs of upper memory blocks free. MEMMAKER handles most of the heavy lifting for you, you just need to replace a word or two in the config file once it's done.
Pic very related.

[Anonymous No.10785341]

>>10784810
I've never run into a problem.
There are plenty of enthusiast websites where some madman has made a wrapper so that it runs in 1080p. Or just in a stable state which is sometimes fine.

[Anonymous No.10785351]

>>10785262
Yeah, I don't get the kvetching about memory either. Even back in the day all you had to do was unload drivers you weren't gonna use.

[Anonymous No.10785805]

>>10784810
pcgamingwiki
GOG

[Anonymous No.10785828]

DOSBox for dos games
Old P3 laptop for Win9x games, 86box is too slow.

[Anonymous No.10786824]

>>10785262
ctmouse as well.

[Anonymous No.10786872]

>>10784947
DOSBox works with most stuff these days, it just has a slow development cycle. It will even do obscure stuff like serial and even parallel pass through.

[Anonymous No.10786886]

did 86box steal all the thunder from PCEM? haven't been following x86 emulation since the whole debacle where the PCEM dev ragequit

[Anonymous No.10786906]

>>10786886
Pretty much. PCem is technically still in development, but it's slowed down a lot. 86Box is a lot more active by comparison, and has more features at this point. It is, however, slower at emulating higher-end CPUs.

[Anonymous No.10787620]

Is there any reason not to use MS-DOS 7.1 extracted from Windows 98 over 6.22?

[Anonymous No.10787763]

>>10787620
Only thing I saw was some mention on vogons that you might have issues with Win3.x. Someone else said they had no problems with Win3.x on DOS 7.x. That and machines that don't have booting off the CD-ROM drive as an option in BIOS.

[Anonymous No.10787883]

dosbox if it's absolutely necessary, 86box/pcem are just too slow even on powerful hardware, true PC emulation isn't quite there yet, and won't be for a long long while

[Anonymous No.10788861]

>>10784810
DOSBox Staging is the best. No bloat, shader support, modern 10 axis joypad support. It just werks
https://dosbox-staging.github.io/

[Anonymous No.10789112]

>>10785034
I second that

[Anonymous No.10789154]

>>10785164
It's a huge problem depending how autistic you are. Sometimes even samples get interrupted which results in nasty sound crackling. Proper DOSBox emulation requires a VRR Display if the game does not offer a dedicated 60hz mode. Staging and Pure have some kind of interpolation that's works pretty well tho.

[Anonymous No.10789163]

>>10786906
Slower but more accurate, and the difference isn't that much anymore. It was a year or two ago, but it's pretty decent now.
PCEm got a new maintainer, but afaik they haven't done much.

[Anonymous No.10789167]

>>10784810
I use eXoDOS to get the basic settings and then make my own config and batch files to use the latest version of dosbox-staging. I find that while dosbox-x is supposed to be more accurate, it is less compatible. So I stick with staging. I use 86box for win9x games, although I wish there was a dosbox style solution for win9x. I imagine that's a far more difficult task because of the differences in complexity between win9x and DOS. But having vhd drives I can mount per game is a good enough solution for now. The really annoying part is having to have multiple win9x installations for multiple different VMs with different hardware.

Also I rarely use patches or source ports for games before XP anyway, I prefer the more authentic experience in 99% of cases. But not enough to have several PCs lying around.

[Anonymous No.10789685]

DOSBox for anything gaming.
86Box for everything else.
PCEM and 86Box's input latency makes everything feel fucking awful for games that have any amount of action gameplay. I don't really fault them since they're not really tuned for gaming, they're everything and the kitchen sink emulators and they're really good at that.
But Doxbox-X is far and away my go to for DOS/Win3.1/Win95 gaming.

[Anonymous No.10790082]

>>10789685
Is DOSBox that good for Win9x gaming now? I know some forks have 3dfx support, which is great, but is DOSBox 3dfx emulation really on par with 86Box's?

[Anonymous No.10790087]

>>10788861
Does it emulate overscan border?

[Anonymous No.10790738]

>>10790082
Has been for quite a while if you've been using the forks. Mainline can and does it decently well too its just a pain in the ass in comparison.
DOSBox-X has the best Windows compatibility out of all the forks.

[Anonymous No.10790769]

Why does Dosbox Staging closes itself 2 seconds after starting? Basic Dosbox and Dosbox-x work fine.

[Anonymous No.10790790]

>>10790769
Because Staging has always been a jank fork that was intended to hijack the project away from the original creators.

[Anonymous No.10790806]

>>10790790
Can't they all just get along?

[Anonymous No.10790807]

>>10790806
Nothing wrong with Pure or X, but I refuse to use Staging out of principle with how shitty the dudes behind it were when they rolled it out.

[Anonymous No.10791313]

DOSBox-X is great but there's been a long standing bug where their implementation of IPXNET refuses to work. I hate having to set up an emulated NE2000 and futzing around with Netware client shit just to get some multiplayer DOS action going, and even then there's no bridging software to pair "real" IPX LANs with IPXNET sessions.

[Anonymous No.10791467]

>>10790807
But staging is more compatible than X.

One of the first games I tried to get running with X just didn't work properly at all. That was Abuse. Then I tried playing Gruntz on Windows 98 with X recently and while the install went very smoothly, there were problems with video playback on the game which pcem doesn't have.

Literally the only two games I tried playing with dosbox-x haven't worked correctly but do in either dosbox-staging or pcem. I don't care how shitty the devs are as people, so long as the games work right.

Honestly all emulator devs tend to be either very weird or massive assholes.

[Anonymous No.10791473]

>>10791467
Worked for me.
Stock settings, changed nothing.
Copy of Abuse was pulled from the Total DOS Collection
buse v2.0 (1995)(Crack Dot Com) [Action].zip

[Anonymous No.10791509]

>>10789154
>interpolation
So that's what it was. I tried every single variant of dosbox and they all had this jitter when fast scrolling both horizontal and vertical (always used Pinball Fantasies and Zyclunt as benchmarks). Dosbox Pure was the only one that felt smooth enough, still some microstutter here and there but way better than the rest.

[Anonymous No.10791514]

>>10790769
Error in one of the config files.

[Anonymous No.10791516]

>>10791473
The game didn't launch for me, but then it was a year ago when I last tried it. I remember the problem was to do with soundcard initiliastion. Did you try using fluidsynth with this?

Either way, it works on dosbox-staging and I've never had problems with staging at all. Everything I throw at it works correctly without having to fuck around too much except for setting up the machine, the cycles, and the sound card.

[Anonymous No.10791523]

>>10791516
>Did you try using fluidsynth with this?
Did not, assuming its not default that is. Think Nuked OPL is the default in X anymore.
I do know a while back there was some jank releases of X that would lock up on me as well, but I haven't had that happen in quite a while now. Wonder if you got unlucky and downloaded one of those at the time.

[Anonymous No.10791541]

>>10790087
I just checked Wolf3D for this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM1HYM_qSsw&t=84s
and it does not seem to do that 3-5 pixel expansion during a click.

[Anonymous No.10791548]

>>10791523
>Wonder if you got unlucky and downloaded one of those at the time.

Possibly. I'm too deep now anyway, got too many batch files to want to update them all now haha.

I'd only use dosbox-x for win9x games now, but like I said before the first one I tried had video playback issues so I'm sticking with pcem for now. It would be nice to just have a batch file with an autoexec in the configuration file for win9x games though, hopefully win9x compatibility will improve soon. I haven't set up a win9x library yet so I don't know if that's possible with pcem.

[Anonymous No.10791616]

For me, it's Dosbox-X

[Anonymous No.10792376]

>>10785007
>>10785164
>>10785197
Have any of you guys tried 86box4crt? It's a year old fork of 86box that works with SwitchRes in order to go exclusive full-screen to cut down on lag and the usual scrolling issues you see in DOS emulation. Just tried with Pinball Fantasies, was smooth as butter on my CRT monitor.

[Anonymous No.10792447]

>>10792376
Took a quick video of the game in action so you can see the smooth scrolling more or less. Sorry about the shitty quality of my cellphone's camera. Too big to post unfortunately.
https://files.catbox.moe/ou7exn.webm

[Anonymous No.10792472]

>>10786886
>did 86box steal all the thunder from PCEM?
PCem's last release was in 2020
86Box keeps releasing new versions frequently and has way more features and hardware you can emulate. In fact a new version just released 3 hours ago:
https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases/tag/v4.1.1

The only advantage of PCem at this point is that it's less demanding because it focused more on performance than accuracy, but it's worse when it comes to everything else

[Anonymous No.10792493]

speaking of staging I just realized they've released a new update. tried it but suddenly all my games I tried stutter. must've been something with the changes on how the cycles work.

[Anonymous No.10792549]

can we get at least a pre-configured /vr/ pack of 86box or Pure with win98 and voodoo included?
the old dos pack at the doom thread is in desperate need of a update now that the anon who worked on it is gone.

[Anonymous No.10793450]

>>10792549
86Box might be a tall ask for this. What hardware configuration would it be emulating, for starters, besides a Voodoo card? Not to mention it's very demanding when you emulate anything higher than a low-end Pentium. DOSBox is probably more reasonable for this.

[Anonymous No.10793469]

>>10793450
something that runs games all the way to 1999-2000
DOSBox-X has P3 so it would be good for general gameplay

[Anonymous No.10793536]

>>10793469
P3 emulation is overkill since no games of that era used SSE instructions. You really didn't run in to games that required it till mid XP era even.
Emulating a P1 and just clocking it high is plenty fine.

[Anonymous No.10793646]

Not going the use 86Box until they add in a proper VM manger like what PCem has, and no the 3rd party front end is garbage, it's always throwing up errors over minor things.

[Anonymous No.10793763]

>>10793646
I love 86box but I'm a bit dumbfounded that it still lacks such a basic feature even today.
Its not hard to manage your configs manually, just annoying.
I wish I had more free time, I'd attempt to make a patch for it, but alas, I'm stuck waging.

[Anonymous No.10794475]

>>10793646
Yeah, they really need to add a built-in manager, I don't know why this isn't at the top of their priorities. That said I dunno what you tried but 86Box Manager never gave me any error or anything. It always worked perfectly on my machine

[Anonymous No.10794478]

>>10793646
>>10793763
Of the ones that are available, I like WinBox the best, but unfortunately it seems to have ceased development, which is a shame. Maybe someone can fork it.

[Anonymous No.10794497]

>>10792549
archive.org might have a pre-setup win98 environment.
I know it has one for qemu-3dfx.

People should give it a try. It's a bit less convenient than pcem/86box but it's virtualized instead of emulated, so it's much much faster.

[Anonymous No.10794757]

>>10794478
>WinBox the best
WinBox is the broken one. The 86Box devs stopped recommending it on their website too

[Anonymous No.10794783]

>>10794757
Haven't experienced any problems with it myself, but oh well. Hopefully they get around to making their own solution that doesn't suck.

[Anonymous No.10796145]

bump

[Anonymous No.10796336]

>>10794757
i miss Microsoft Virtual PC

[Anonymous No.10796485]

>>10784810
Real hardware

[Anonymous No.10796682]

>>10792447
Anyone ever play a weird bootleg version of party land with no art or music?

[Anonymous No.10796789]

>>10791313
Ok, so I decided to check up on the DOSBox-X github page and the guy maintaining it FINALLY fixed the IPXNET bug earlier this month.
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/issues/2240

[Anonymous No.10797587]

>>10796789
Good to see they're actually addressing old bugs.

[Anonymous No.10797759]

>>10784810
The problem I have with 86box is that the mouse emulation is garbage. There's no way to accurately emulate the resolution and polling rate of a mouse on an emulator running on a modern computer. Or maybe there is and they just haven't implemented it, but either way their implementation is shit and the mouse tracking is laggy as fuck to the point that it's unusable. As it is right now, the only way to get a good experience running 90s retro games is using actual 90s hardware.

[Anonymous No.10797797]

>>10797759
I thought dosbox forks have implemented raw input?

[Anonymous No.10797917]

>>10797759
I saw someone talking about that on the issues page. One of the devs (I think?) Suggested using a piece of software called ps2rate on Windows 98 to increase the polling rate and get a smoother experience with it. Might be worth a try for you?

[Anonymous No.10797940]

>>10788861
Wow, DOSBox staging has a great scaler holy shit.
This is Mechwarror 2 running at 1024x768 and Staging scales it to fullscreen 1080p but keeps the aspect ratio and there are no obvious scaling artefacts. That's pretty cool. Just look how clean the text is.

[Anonymous No.10797952]

>>10797940
Could be wrong, but that looks like it might be sharp-bilinear.

[Anonymous No.10798981]

>>10797797
>dosbox forks
86Box is a completely separate and different thing from dosbox. It emulates every piece of hardware accurately, including specific motherboards, CPUs, sound cards and video cards.
It's more accurate than dosbox but also much, much more demanding and you have to do the same things you have to do on real hardware like install drivers, etc

[Anonymous No.10800402]

bump

[Anonymous No.10800507]

>>10791313
>>10796789
Doing multiplayer DOS sounds fun, anyone have any recommended games?

[Anonymous No.10800542]

>>10800507
Wing Commander Academy

[Anonymous No.10800558]

>>10800507

[Anonymous No.10801023]

>>10797759
Yeah, I've noticed this as well. Using the mouse on Windows installations on 86Box doesn't feel very good. It feels laggy and choppy. Now, it's been a very long time since I used old Windows on real hardware, so most likely the mouse wasn't as smooth back then as it is now, but I don't recall it feeling this shitty.

[Anonymous No.10801024]

>>10801023
I recently connected a modern gaming mouse to a Win98 machine that was modern enough to have USB.
It couldn't deal with its fast rates at all and after a bit of sporadic movement the USB driver crashed.

[Anonymous No.10801028]

>>10801024
Interesting. I'd have thought it would just get bottlenecked by the low USB speed.

[Anonymous No.10801029]

>>10801023
The ps/2 ball mouse I have on my pentium 1 pc running windows 95 with a crt monitor feels extremely smooth and responsive compared to any mouse I've used on a modern computer with an lcd display, especially compared to wireless mice.

[Anonymous No.10801117]

>>10801029
You've almost definitely been using shit mice running at a 125hz polling rate and your monitors have had too much latency on your modern computers. Even in the late 90s, people were using optical sensors at 1000hz and it hasn't exactly gotten better (unless you count DPI increases, but its a minor thing IMO), but it definitely hasn't gotten worse.

This is why gaming mice are good even if you don't like RGB shit.

[Anonymous No.10801745]

>>10792549
I'm thinking about providing this. Already went ahead and installed Windows 98 using DOSBox-X. So far it's working well. I only made the hard drive image with 8GB of storage, though. What games should I fill it up with?

[Anonymous No.10801753]

>>10801745
You should start again with a 2GB vhd and use differencing images, that way you only take up as much space as needed and you can have a basically fresh install for each game with all the drivers on the parent image with batch files to launch each game with a config file that makes sure the correct images are mounted. Dont forget to put the shortcut for the game in the startup folder so the game automatically launches.

Games wise, there are tonne of games worth installing. The /v/ recommended wiki might be a good place to look. I've recently done exactly what I just said with Diablo 1 and 2 though. I'm going to do Fallout 2 next.

[Anonymous No.10802925]

>>10801753
Sounds like a good idea. I'll look into this.

[Anonymous No.10802965]

>>10802925
The only problem that I'm not sure about is that when you move the parent image, the child image doesn't know where it is anymore. There is probably a vhd editor and maybe you can make the parent image reference a relative path, but honestly I don't know. I'm still experimenting with this method myself. At the moment I use 86box to create the differencing image and I tried moving the parent image to see what happens and it stopped working. So this won't be sharable in the meantime.

I think this is a cool project worth working on though, I'm happy to help in whatever way I can, I'm not too familiar with win9x but I just got that method I mentioned before working for myself and thought it was worth mentioning. I feel like win9x is a period of gaming that is a little bit lost to time. The games don't work on modern Windows without patches most of the time, and its only recently that emulators have really been capable of running win9x games effectively, and they still aren't really there yet. Obviously the big games that everyone remembers are still played and have been patched, but the guy behind eXoDOS says that there are 10,000 games for win9x systems, so there is almost definitely a bunch of stuff lost to time.

Hell, if the child images aren't sharable, at the very least we can get some sort of wiki going with the steps necessary to get games running this way. Even if we can't get a win9x pack going, that would be something.

[Anonymous No.10802973]

I run my dos games in a virtualized win9x environment and pass through my usb hub with mouse, keyboard, sound device + my 7800 GT so there's no video or audio lag.

[Anonymous No.10803098]

>>10802965
Wouldn't it be better, then, to just make small images, like 1GB in size, and just make multiple copies of that image and install games individually onto each image? It's nowhere near as elegant, obviously, but then each image would be fully self-contained. This would be paired with a very minimal Windows 98 SE installation, of course, with nothing beyond the very basics needed to run the games.

[Anonymous No.10803143]

>>10803098
That would definitely work without any problems, but the problem then is that for every game you need an installation of windows, which is only about 200-400mb or so, but that can add up quickly if its a sizable amount of games on the pack, lets say its 100 games, thats 20-40GB just on redundant installations of windows, and that space could be used for games instead, since win9x games can be tens of mb, thats a lot of wasted space, in the space it takes for one minimal installation of windows, you can have potentially 20 games.

I'm going to look into relative paths for differencing vhd images, because even for my own personal use, it would be nice to be able to move my folders around without having to redo every installation for games that I've got.

It must be possible because the guy behind eXoDOS was talking about differencing images for a potential eXowin9x project. Since the whole point of that is sharing and preservation through sharing, I assume that there must be a way to make it work.

[Anonymous No.10803152]

>>10803143
Aren't there custom, super minimal Windows 98 builds out there, kinda like TinyXP? I seem to recall them existing, but I may be misremembering. Seems like that would work really well for this.

[Anonymous No.10803434]

>>10803152
I would guess that there probably is something like that, but I suppose it depends on what is removed. Might be something that certain games need to run. It also depends on what size it gets windows 98 down to aswell.

It depends on how many games are gonna be in the pack too I guess. If its only a small amount, then the redundant windows installs probably aren't a big deal.

[Anonymous No.10805436]

This might be a dumb question, but can you mount a folder as a CD on Windows 98 using DOSBox-X? I know 86Box lets you do that easily, but the option seems grayed out in DOSBox-X, at least when booting into Windows 98.

[Anonymous No.10805454]

Darkhorse candidates:
-ScummVM for old Sierra/LucasArts/Legend adventures
-Gargoyle for Infocom textadventures
These reduce overhead from the rest of the virtual-machine you're not going to use; they basically ARE the VM for the game you want.
DOSBox is for unique software that was hardcoded with its own engine and nothing else, and nobody has bothered coding a remaster (or they did and you want the original experience).
Games like "Starflight", "Alien Legacy", maybe "Wing Commander".

[Anonymous No.10805471]

>>10784810
I like the convenience of DOSBox, where I can set it up so that I run a shortcut and it boots straight into the game, then closes itself when I quit the game. 86box is better for games which run differently depending on CPU speed since DOSBox isn't cycle accurate.

[Anonymous No.10805610]

>>10805436
I don't know how to mount a folder as a CD (though I think that might be possible,
I feel like I read something about that in the documentation), but I can atleast tell you that if you try to mount or unmount anything while booted into Windows 98, you won't be able to.

>>10805471
You can set the cycle speed though, I've never had any speed issues once I get the cycle setting right for any particular game.

[Anonymous No.10805619]

>>10805610
>You can set the cycle speed though, I've never had any speed issues once I get the cycle setting right for any particular game.
It's still not accurate at any cycle count, you can see this with certain games like Wing Commander when compared to playing them with CPUs from the time.

[Anonymous No.10805638]

>>10805436
>can you mount a folder as a CD on Windows 98 using DOSBox-X?
Dunno about inside of Win98, but from the DOSbox command line you can.
MOUNT "Emulated Drive letter" "Real Drive or Directory" -t cdrom

[Anonymous No.10805643]

>>10805619
What are you even talking about?
Even the original DOS hardware came with different CPUs with different cycle timings.

[Anonymous No.10805665]

>>10805643
"Cycles" in DOSBox has no real analog to physical CPUs. You can somewhat guesstimate it, and DOSBox-X has some presets to simulate some specific CPU speeds, but its not accurate.
This is due to DOSBox's CPU emulation being optimized for speed in a hacky way since it was designed in the 00s. If you need truly accurate 8088 4.47mhz timing for example, you need something like 86box, Boche, or MAME.

[Anonymous No.10805678]

>>10805643
DOSBox cycle timing doesn't match actual CPU timings. Wing Commander 1 is a good example of this. Here's how the game runs on a period-correct CPU:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMt-bIm5bk
Note the animations of things like the mouth movements during cutscenes. You won't be able to actually get the game to run like this in DOSBox regardless of the cycle count you set. Try it yourself and see:
https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3ACPU-settings-in-DOSBox%E2%80%90X#_cycles
For games like this, you'll end up with things playing too slow and/or fast compared to how they would have back when these games were developed.

[Anonymous No.10805682]

>>10805665
Yeah, in very old DOS games the exact frequency can actually matter.
But Wing Commander? That game was made to run on 3 different x86 generations with widely different clock speeds.

[Anonymous No.10806156]

>>10805610
I see, that's a bummer. How would you go about installing games on Windows 98 without first putting the installation files on the mounted hard drive, then? Or are you forced to mount an actual disc image of the game before booting into Windows?

[Anonymous No.10806169]

>>10806156
Isn't there an option among the menus to mount/unmount drives when running dosbox-x in windowed mode?

[Anonymous No.10806182]

>>10806156
What this guy said is correct:
>>10805638
You just have to mount it before you boot into windows 98 is what I was trying to say because you cant mount or unmount while booted into a guest OS. If you need to be able to swap discs, you can mount them all to one drive and use F11+CTRL+D (or using the drive drop down menu on the taskbar). Use a command like:

imgmount d ".\disc1" ".\disc2" -t cdrom

Tbh, I haven't tested this in windows 98, so you might have to use an iso or an image file. You can use the imgmake command to do that if you need to, and then mount it as a harddrive to your actual PC to easily put the files in there. If you use -t cdrom, DOSbox will treat it as a CD drive.

[Anonymous No.10806235]

>>10806182
Ok, I figured it out. You CAN mount a directory and use it in Windows 98 after all. Just gotta use
>mount e "./directory" -t cdrom
Gotta do it before booting, of course, but you can always do it through the autoexec portion of the config file.

[Anonymous No.10806285]

>>10806235
Yeah sorry, forgot that you need to use mount instead of imgmount, I was thinking of isos.

Anyway, makes me wonder if there's a limit to how much data you can put in that folder before windows 98 stops recognising it. Could potentially be a way to get high capacity disk space on a Windows 98 installation. If you put like a terabyte of stuff in there, would windows just think its a really big CD? Or would it just not even be able to access it? Gonna have to test that out.

[Anonymous No.10806289]

>>10806285
I'm currently installing The Sims Complete Collection just to see if it works, and though the folder was over 2 GB in size, it detected it fine as a CD-ROM, though Explorer froze for a little bit trying to read it. I'll try mounting my whole terabyte external drive and see if it picks it up next.

[Anonymous No.10806481]

>>10806289
That's interesting. I know from the installation screens that Windows 98 supported DVDs, so I wonder if it thinks its a dvd and 4.7GB is the limit. Maybe even 8.5GB if double layer is supported. If it can go above that, then 128GB might be the limit because that's the maximum harddrive size you could have on windows 98se.

Be careful mounting your whole drive, apparently sizes higher than 128GB would cause random data corruption. Might be worth testing on a special folder and copying a lot of data to it instead. I don't have 128GB free on any of my drives to test that otherwise I would test it myself.

If it works though and there arent any issues, that might be useful information. Could make it easier to install and transfer data to and from virtual drives and physical drives. Which would make a potential win9x /vr/ pack much easier.

[Anonymous No.10807303]

>>10806481
Yeah, I'll not do that, then. Unfortunately, the Sims installation failed. It might not have run, anyway, given the machine doesn't even meet the minimum specs, but whatever.

[Anonymous No.10807995]

86box when I need to run something on windows 95 otherwise dosbox

[Anonymous No.10808562]

>>10790790
>>10790807
Why are they so cocky? I saw one of the devs recently talking about the project as though it's the definitive DOSBox, like Dosbox-X didn't even exist or something.

[Anonymous No.10809428]

>>10790807
>>10790790
>>10808562
Do you have any examples of this behavior? Not that I doubt it. Emulation is filled with nasty assholes for some reason.

[Anonymous No.10809471]

>>10809428
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/3027#issuecomment-1769370376
>Rest assured, at some point GOG will need to move to Staging as other legacy DOSBoxes will bit-rot away, at which point they'll need to fix this (if not sooner).
For context, this is in response to an issue which DOSBox-Staging introduced and isn't present in DOSBox-X, which is absolutely still being actively developed.

[Anonymous No.10809648]

>>10809471
he's right though. it's caused by the difference in encoding, this case UTF-8 which is required if you want compatibility with other host system languages. and it only affects batch files created by GOG which uses CP 437, which was NOT used by DOS. DOSBox-X just happen to not bother with unicode but then you need to use specific encoding for each different language
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/issues/685

[Anonymous No.10809651]

>>10809648
He's not right that GOG has to adopt Staging at all, especially when Dosbox-X also exists, doesn't have that issue, and is generally a more accurate emulator.

[Anonymous No.10809690]

>>10809651
he said legacy dosbox, which DOSBox-X clearly isn't.

[Anonymous No.10809701]

>>10809651
Not to butt in but GOG should at least adept something since they're still using 7.4.

[Anonymous No.10809719]

>>10809690
He said they need to move to Staging, he could have just generally said they need to move to a modern fork. They could move to X and avoid both problems.

[Anonymous No.10809724]

>>10809719
>going full on NOTICE ME SENPAI in another fork's issue page
jfc

[Anonymous No.10809725]

>>10809719
I think you're making way too big a deal out of this.

Of course they would think staging is what GOG should move to, they are the ones that made it. And besides that, staging is focused on gaming specifically whereas x is trying to emulate all aspects of DOS to the point that all software that could run on a DOS machine can run on DOSbox-x.

[Anonymous No.10809743]

>>10809725
It's unwarranted arrogance. Just say that GOG should update their DOSBox build, nobody would even disagree with that. That was a deliberate snub by a team that has acted shitty from the beginning, as another anon pointed out earlier in the thread.

[Anonymous No.10809752]

Meabwhile, actually best DOSBox fork is...

[Anonymous No.10809762]

>>10809752
>DOSBox for zoomers

[Anonymous No.10809782]

>>10809762
DOSBox is for zoomers indeed but Pure is the best fork

[Anonymous No.10809794]

>>10809752
>"core" faggotry

[Anonymous No.10809821]

>>10809782
it can't be the best fork when they spend far more time attempting to make it retard-proof for the retroarch demographic than they do working on game accuracy

[Anonymous No.10810705]

>>10792493
yeah. been playing SimIsle in staging 0.80, ran like butter. tried updating to 0.81 but it started stuttering. apparently you need to lower the cycles compared to the previous 0.80 setting. fixes the stuttering but it intermittently crashes every couple of minutes. guess I'll stick to 0.80.

[Anonymous No.10810721]

I'm told that all the cool kids are using DOSBox-X now.

[Anonymous No.10810918]

>>10810721
Emulation will never be cool.

[Anonymous No.10810957]

>>10809821
It just werks

[Anonymous No.10810997]

>>10810918
Lol yeah, I should have six different PCs to cover all of the eras of PC gaming, plus a bunch of micro computers and other home computers such as Amiga and Atari ST, and the like 20 consoles on top of that instead of my one gaming PC and a collection of controllers.

Then I'd be cool.

[Anonymous No.10811072]

So, what's the appeal of DOSBox-x? I look at the features list
https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/DOSBox%E2%80%90X%E2%80%99s-Feature-Highlights
and most of these are present in Pure. I play Windows 98 and 3Dfx games in Pure just fine. The only one missing is PC98 emulation but Neko Project II is much more accurate anyway.
Pure has accurate overscan border emulation in every video output mode including Vulkan while in Dosbox-x it only works in surface mode which really sucks. Plus much better video and audio sync options provided by RA api

[Anonymous No.10811118]

>>10811072
An emulator is more than just a set of features, there's also the matter of how accurately the system is emulated. Retroarch cores the vast majority of the time are usually behind in that department because they're almost always outdated forks of some other emulator. Its the same case here.

[Anonymous No.10811125]

>>10811118
You have to provide examples for your accuracy claim though. Neither X nor Pure are cycle-accurate. Pure allows me to use overscan border, an essential accuracy feature, with any shader/upscaler and output video mode. Just post an example of something that is more accurate on X.

[Anonymous No.10811465]

>>10809752
I really like that I can directly load up a zip with all the game files and dosbox.conf with it and any changes are stored in a separate location.

[Anonymous No.10812215]

>>10809762
What's wrong with it?

>>10809794
What's wrong with it?

>>10809821
My games work so I guess this is another one of those "you" problems.

[Anonymous No.10812796]

>>10809821
Why not make it both retard-proof and accurate?

[Anonymous No.10813269]

>>10812796
Good point, you should ask the devs

[Anonymous No.10813629]

>>10811125
Play SimLife, see if the digitial sound effects are able to work in Pure.

[Anonymous No.10815180]

>>10809752
It is very good for getting proper framepacing, at least if you set it up correctly.

[Anonymous No.10815707]

>>10792376
Dumb question, but is it possible to run this CRT based fork on Windows XP? I have a retro setup downstairs and have a Win XP setup as well.

[Anonymous No.10817158]

>>10815707
86box has high cpu requirements. I can emulate roughly a 133 mhz pentium on my 8700k. Unless you're running XP on a fairly new computer I wouldn't recommend trying.

[Anonymous No.10817556]

I’m kind of a brainlet and don’t know how to configure a computer in 86box. What should I use for specs to get decent software performance for Daggerfall?

[Anonymous No.10817617]

>>10817556
Why would you want to us 86box in your case though? It's for the emulation of specific PC hardware, when you know exactly what hardware configuration you want to use. If you have no idea and just want to play the game, use DOSBox.

[Anonymous No.10817619]

>>10817617
I just want Daggerfall to play period-accurately and was under the impression dosbox would handle software rendered graphics differently.

[Anonymous No.10817668]

>>10817619
>dosbox would handle software rendered graphics differently
This is not the case. Furthermore, DOSBox handles framepacing much better than 86Box. There were so many different hardware configurations in 1996 that were able to run Daggerfall that being period-accurate is a moot point. DOSBox is accurate enough. The only thing that someone may find not accurate in regards with DOSBox is that it does not emulate that awful Soundblaster filter, especially noteciable in older games with lower quality sound - they sound much better in DOSBox than in 86box or real hardware. Software graphics in DOSBox are accurate.

[Anonymous No.10817741]

>>10817619
>was under the impression dosbox would handle software rendered graphics differently.
Why?

[Anonymous No.10817751]

>>10817741
idk, I’m dumb and thought that dosbox would make the graphics cleaner or sharper or something.

>>10817668
Thanks for the response, so I guess I can just use gog’s dosbox release that’s free? Is there any reason to fuck around with 86box?