Is there a better alterative to Dosbox?

metalmackey · 6 Jan 2007 at 16:55

Hi guys,

I decided to give some of my old games a try in dosbox. The only one i've got running at a playable speed is Psycho Pinball. I also tried Tie fighter and Screamer 2 and both were unplayable, scream 2 ran at about 4fps. Why is emulation of basically the same cpu but a lot slower so hard to do? Also, why is it emulated at all, surely all the instructions are still in todays x86 CPUS? Can you experts tell me why its so hard to write a dos 'emulator' and fool older apps that they are runing on older hardware? Sorry if im missing something but seeing how good MAME is at emulating totally different hardware I was disapointed with Dosbox.

Thanks

snowdog · 6 Jan 2007 at 17:41

I just use a windows 98 bootup cd ( so microsoft DOS ) wich plays all games i want full speed, dosbox plays nearly all dos games i have at ultra low speeds...

But then again im still running on fat32 so dos isnt a prob for me, might be for you.

Perhaps make a 1 gig FAT32 secondary partition (while keeping rest ntfs) on one of your hdd's and use it for DOS stuff...

If you find a good windows app, pls post it, i would like to have one too.

metalmackey · 6 Jan 2007 at 22:55

I cant see why Microsoft cant do it, they should be able to emulate Dos on todays fast PCs without much hassle. They are emulating DX9 in DX10 with hardly no speed loss, so why is it so hard to emulate Dos?

Tony Williams · 6 Jan 2007 at 23:08

Dedicated machine? You'd pick one up for less than a fiver on the Fleebay.

markyb · 7 Jan 2007 at 09:45

I use DOSBox,

Agreed it is a little slow at times, although the DOSBox web site contains a big database for settings used with old DOS Games. Also lists compatibility.

DOSBox Games compatibility list