The most difficult games to run right now are games from '96-'05, we really need something that runs Windows 98 properly at custom speeds from 486 to P3 and offers Glide, D3D and OGL anywhere from Voodoo 1 to GeForce 3 levels of performance and compatibility. That's the dream at least 😢
The closes thing to that would be 86box. It's incredibly customizable even allowing Voodoo 1/2 SLI; 8086 (with optional 8087 co-pro) up till P2 line. Though it will never emulate P3 and above. It's my goto for DOS/Win9x Emulation.
86Box is the way to go for late 90's early '00s windows gaming. You need a good processor however to run it well. For instance, I have an I7 9700 and although it can run Pentium 1 games up to 166Mhz fairly well, It's not strong enough to run Pentium 2 speeds.
I've changed my library over to DOSBOX-X and the ability to run games from ZIP files made my life way easier. It's a bit more work to set up but you keep a clean base install of the game and every change, savegame, etc. is saved in a separate folder which I love. While not all games can be run from a ZIP, about 90% work fine. The ability for shaders is vital for me too - I just wish we had more advanced shares such as the ones RetroArch uses. For proper CRT emulation, RetroArch with DOSBOX Pure is the only option and while it supports running games from ZIP files as well, the options are more limited and games that do not like being run from a ZIP file simply don't work.
> For proper CRT emulation, RetroArch with DOSBOX Pure is the only option Actually, the built-in adaptive CRT shaders in DOSBox Staging are your absolute best option. Check out of front page for screenshots ;)
@@johnnovak1979 I believe those are the same ones I have for DOSBOX-X but they're not as good as the shader packs you can get for RetroArch. I have a 4K OLED I bought specifically for CRT emulation and CyberLab Death To Pixels Shader for RetroArch is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. It even emulates the reflection you get on the inside bezel of your CRT. It requires a relatively beefy CPU but it's really worth it. It doesn't compare to standard shaders you get.
i feel like it's the specific game or software i wanna run that drives my choice. dosbox-x did make loading software really much more straightforward tho. especially if you are new to emulating software and you just wanna play some games, i feel you will be and running much faster just based on that
@@jbinary82 Something must be wrong with your config then. I recently setup a system for a friend ony for ScummVM and DOSBox Staging based on a 2007 Intel ITX mainboard (that's with Intel onboard graphics!) with a 2.6 GHz C2D and it worked very well once configured. Based OS is KDE neon, so Ubuntu under the hood. I also run it successfully on a Intel J1800. Of course on both systems you won't run Grand Prix 2 anything close to maxed out, but Quake timedemo 2 or 3 (can't remember which) ran at 30 fps at 3200x200 while using Staging's Autoshader feature, openglnb output & Linux's gamemode. Maximum performance of the J1800 system varies between a very fast 486 and a Pentium 100 depending on the game. On X11 it is currently faster than Wayland at least on those two systems.
I use DOSBox-X mainly because of their suggested use case - running DOS applications (rather than games) with maximum compatibility. That being said, I've never seen an issue with any of my DOS development tools such that they failed to work in DOSBox Staging but did work in DOSBox-X, so I'm not sure how much water that claim holds.
I came across this fork a few years ago, immediately loved it for the sheer convenience it's menu's offer as well as it's capabilities. I was somewhat surprised it wasn't already the de-facto standard. It's Windows 95 support is something I messed with at the time, from what I recall it worked fine, but then again I only explored the OS itself and I did play a game on it, it would have been a DOS game. Addendum; If I recall correctly, it's possible to feed MIDI data to an external program such as VirtualMidiSynth, quite fun to mess around with. This may be a standard feature all DOSBox forks/flavours have though.
Seeing these improvements in emulation is a one of the positive patterns I've seen with archival technology , probably no more nice things will fade away and be forgotten by history, what a great accomplishment for us humans, what a great time to be here. I have no doubt people will improve DOSBox-X or similar software (forks, maybe) to perfection. It's only a matter of time, and things have been arriving earlier and earlier, I feel. I also feel bad being a bystander while people code these marvels, I'm no good at that, my forté is soft sciences, whoever reads this post can see it clearly in the enthusiastic writing in english as a second language, hahaha! Great as always, Phil!
For Windows games 86box might offer better compatibility but it comes at a serious performance hit. To be able to emulate something above a 400 MHz pentium ii in 86box you need a very fast machine. Dosbox-x is what most people need and 86box is for the purists among us. Also a shame that the Dosbox developers are not doing something like Dosbox-x themselves.
Yep, even 86Box emulating a P1 MMX 233 / Voodoo3 for prime Win98se era, is no good on something like a Haswell CPU. It will run, but hovers around 80%... You're kinda limited to DOS with an i486 when running 86Box on older hardware. The problem being the app itself is single-threaded, not just passing through a single thread to the emulated CPU.
@@KomradeMikhail That's why PCem is better. You don't need something faster than a PII 400 MHz for Windows 9x era games. Running at 100% with 5800x and 5950x.
@@mikoyangurevic8634 Only if you stick to 800x600 or 1024x768. There was a reason why people could not wait to update to P3/K7 CPUs with the highest clockrate you could afford.
@@armorgeddon Until 2009 I was gaming in 1280x1024 using a CRT. And I had an Athlon XP 3200+ with 3850 AGP. Never liked the widescreen resolutions. Also when I'm vintage gaming I don't want something bigger than 1024x768 for a resolution. For nostalgic reasons. In 1998 I had an STB Voodoo 2 Blackmagic with 12 MB. After 1999 Voodoo 3 2000 and later a 3500. In 2001 Geforce 3 Ti 500, 2004 Geforce 6800 Ultra until the upgrade to 3850 AGP. Nowadays with my 5950x I gaming on 1080p and I don't see why should I use 2k or 4k?
"Dosbox Staging" implemented Chorus and Reverb support for audio, which is a feature found on the Sound Blaster AWE64. When you add Chorus and Reverb to Adlib sound, it makes that seemingly come alive. DosBox X does not currently implement that feature.
but you need to be aware that this feature can also break things. I needed some time to track some distorted sounds down to reverb and chorus. For example Dune II gets some distortions on my real Hardware CM32L at the early intro Scene. Mortal Kombat I and II also got some distortions if I use Chorus and Reverb. But then again, when it works, it is a beautifull Sound Experience and I use it a lot.
I found that changing the CPU cycles mid game isn't always the best. If the game does timings checks at startup and then stores that result in a variable, changing the CPU speed mid game messes with that so it's best to set the CPU cycles before starting a game.
@@philscomputerlab the sound stuttering you were talking about I have seen some games do when you mess with cycles mid-game. But also as a developer in those days I remember doing a CPU timing check at app startup because you had a variety of CPU speeds.
You might know this already but some games like Jazz Jackrabbit 1 won't start on anything above 200mhz and will get a divide by zero exception. From my experience this happens with programs compiled with Turbo Pascal (I think version 5), and if they import the "crt" unit that was all you needed to do. Inside the crt unit was a timing check and it would crash on machines above 200mhz. It was also possible to patch executables compiled with Turbo Pascal against this crash if you didn't have the source code. I did this back in the day with Jazz Jackrabbit 1 but forgot what the patch was called.
Thanks for the video, Phil! Just what I needed... I am running DosBox Staging with Borland Pascal and ran into multiple issues (including the latest release often ignoring configuration settings). This looks more like the DosBox I need for this purpose - especially mouse wheel, long file name and paste support, as well as different speed settings and MMX are welcome...
Thing is, DOSBox Daum hat many of these options and the GUI 10+ years ago. Of cause he didn't continue development, so I need to check if it's about time to completely switch as I'm still using Daum. Just have to check if I can continue using the same config files or of certain setting there do not work with DOSBox-X.
I switched to DOSbox-X because I needed clipboard-support to copy text from and to the host system. Then I ran the 80s Chat AI Racter against ChatGPT - and Racter shredded it. ;-)
Thank You SO much Phil! I have recently downloaded DosBox-X and have yet to try it. I remember using VDMSound with WinXP and was able to Install and play Duke Nukem 1 and 2 with no effort and since we are now working with 64 bit OSes it has been more of a problem even with DosBox alone. I'm very glad I subbed your channel and I'm working on a Win 95 board for this purpose of playing around with Dos Programs and Games! The real board I want is VERY rare and almost impossible to find but I;m not gonna give up until I find one!
I'm in and out of so many systems at work with so many different things to remember. It seems whenever I try to get into some old games, I'm always looking up some config option, how to mount a local directory, etc... I was there 3000 years ago, so this makes it a lot nicer for me. Am going to have to give this a spin to go back to some old classics. Thanks for the demo.
I like the fact that there are different flavors and different teams working on DOSBox. I used DOSBox-X for quite some time and I found it good but it also tries to do a lot and I feel it kinda misses an identity, jack of all trades. I much prefer DOSBox Staging today that has spectacular sound card support and near perfect CRT emulation, focuses entirely on games and is the closest thing to the continuation of the original DOSBox that exists today - builds on top of it and improves on it significantly.
2024 has been a good Year for Retro PC so far. There's a guy called omores running 9x on extremely modern motherboards. Like 13th gen Core old. Nice video BTW as always.
Just switched from vanilla DosBox to DosBox-X. Also compared DosBox-X with the DosBox Staging (both latest versions) and found that DosBox-X is a lot better than the Staging. More user friendly and more options. As of the point of accuracy I didn't see any differences. For me DosBox-X is the winner.
I ran into some issues with DOSBox-X and Dune 2 (mt-32 patched). Luckily Staging worked like a charm out of the box with it. Though always nice to have different options to choose from out there.
Maybe I was lucky with my 486 build, I had to buy 3 motherboards for the 3rd one to finally work but other than that the setup was smooth. Mostly. I had bad luck with the audio driver, I wanted to use the original driver for the card I have in the machine but ended up using UNISOUND and it works perfectly. The only issue I have with that build is I can't quick Windows 3.11, it just hangs on the logout and I don't get back my DOS prompt but I wasn't planning on using Win3 much anyway. So yeah, building a real 486 can be tricky but if you have some time and the resources it's well worth it. If you don't but you still want to try out old games, this might be your perfect solution.
A week ago, I started my emulation journey to do a little MS-DOS programming but mainly to experience the same path Linux Torvalds would have when he used PC/IX to build MINIX, which was used to build his first version of the Linux kernel. I think "the best" title goes to 86box - hands down.
Dosbox-x has one feature that others don't, it has better key mapper. When you press a key it highlights it, and if you use joystick it shows the analogue axis when you move it. That is very useful with games that have lots of input keys like fight sims, to see what is the button on your joystick or a controller doing.
Used DOS Box a longtime ago to replay an old game or five. Have not tried it in a while, used an old version with integrated 3Dfx Glide support. Might give this a whirl.
I have some of my old rigs from the past, Althlon XP, Athlon 64, Phenom II X6, Core II Duo, etc. Might be interesting to build Win 98/XP dualboot retrogaming rig. Some old GPU's to test I have too. HD 1950 XTX and GF 8800 GTS should work I think, some older TNT 2 etc. No sound card iirc. Should I build or just try emulator? Thanks for the nice video again!
In my opinion, the best way for retro gaming is always to build an old PC as much as possible, although OS emulation/ virtualization is much more convenient than that.
The difficulty I have with dos box is that I don’t use it very often and I forget how to use it. I have re-read all of the instructions and learn it again which takes some time and if I get it wrong I have go back and do some troubleshooting. The menus looks more intuitive, so if it has become more user friendly then that’s a big step forward.
DOS Box seems like a very developer oriented program. Developers are usually pretty bad at user interface design. And opensource/free projects usually don't have user interface teams or consensus on what good interface design should be.
That is a fair comment. It's not easy. There are many ways you can set it up, with nested config files and all of that. I keep it very simple and have copy pastes of the same DOSBox folder, configured for different machines ready to go 😊
Wonderful video as always. I wanted say that over the years, I have found that running as many intel components as I can in a system lead to the most compatibility issues with programs and trouble shooting. I did not see the specs of the system you are using. Were you using a non Intel cpu?
This reminds me of early NES emulators lots of options right in the menus wysiwyg design very minimal I think that's a great thing for all skill levels
I use it to record game play and emulate Speccy and C64, even NEs and Mdrive. But no usb gamepad support. I used the processor cycle + to make one of my Speccy Tetris games quicker, well the music, as it needed 60 htz.
at 5:11 when you are not concentrated tomb raider might sound to you like coom raider at x2 video speed 🤣🤣🤣. I slowed down the video and sped it up just to check if i heard it wrong 😅
Short answer: NO, NOP, Nein, Ne... Lately I find myself using RetroArch - DOSBox-Pure core. All good stuff of DOSBox mixed with great stuff from RA. Playing game with Rewind function and easy save state from game controller (and the same configuration I use for other cores) makes it in my opinion one of the best combinations. I used DOSBox-X for a while now and long time ago had even instructions for original DOSBox on Abandonia posted. I also like to use PCem and Box86, more accurate emulation of a PC of the time.
I'm just surprised they didn't call it DosBox 360. 🤷♂ Jokes aside, this is the step to the right direction regarding retro PC emulation. But I think we need to see a more thorough process of this program regarding import system configs like the PC-98 and its translation settings to see if those japanese games would convert them to English. I'm more interested in playing Poiicenauts or Snatcher. As for running Windows OS' on this platform with 3D acceleration, it still doesn't come close. Perhaps Windows 95 maybe more stable to run some of these "system-sensitive" games. We shall see in the near future where this takes us.
If I were running a PC-98 emulation, it would be to try out the early Touhou Project games (although I expect I'd fail miserably even in "easy mode". (did Super Robot Wars run on PC-98?)
I am on an Android tablet with the Magic DosBox free app installed to create tiny x86 executable. I think the most DOS gamer use the default DosBox version and don’t like to switch to DosBox-X. If i use MMX-instruction in DOS for example most DosBox user can’t use it, because the default DosBox version emulates a 80386/80387, but not a Pentium MMX.
While it doesn't have the userfriendly UI and a million scaling options and such, Dosbox Staging is the closest I've seen to reproducing the actual graphics you'd see in DOS games with a CRT monitor.
Great video once again. What about 86box? I watched a video from tech tangents last week. Even though it seems a bit complex, the emulation capabilities are very good.
Original hardware certainly, eXoDOS, 86Box, PCem, DOSBox-X, DOSBox Pure, MiSTer FPGA, all great alternatives to vanilla DOSBox! Thanks Phil for covering DOSBox-X :)
I have a customer who needs a little extra help who I have set up with a windows 98 se period desktop (based on a windows ME desktop), and a windows 7 32 bit laptop (an older toshiba AMD e-350 cpu win8 came with it) to throw old games at the wall to run natively or use dosbox. I would love to introduce him to dosbox-x to help him play dos games on the newer laptop, he would love it.
I've switched to DB-X from DB a long time ago. Tons of options and better perfs. For Win98, I prefer 86box. Not PCem because it's total crap when driven by RocketLauncher.
@@armedready1 I was going to say, he not only has an awesome channel, but he contributes a lot to the retro gaming scene, with a lot of work put into the GOG games on real hardware spreadsheet and testing things.
Nice seeing you here besides the Tech Yes Man comments, Marco, you have great taste and most important, looks like you're an awesome friend to... well... Your friends, of course! Keep being great, my man.
At start, so curious to see your thoughts once I watch this episode. I CAN say, having used Dosbox-X, I DO think it's the best port of Dosbox and probably the easiest way to emulate MS-DOS games, though I must confess I'm partial to 86box and that series due to it's accuracy of emulation and extra power (Dosbox-X is DEFINATEY the easier way for the average andy/normie norm/sportsball-dad to get into Dos quickly and with minimal fuss -- heck I USE it to emulate windows 1.X and 2.X for quick testing of some of my coding projects)
~4:31 -- another neat trick that drew me to dosbox-x the first time I used it was the MCGA emulation, which noone else currently does (at least that I've been able to find.) I was developing a video card detection program so the ability to debug that check was useful to me.
How powerful is the 3dfx emulation? I could see that the site refers to it as a Voodoo1, but the passthrough gives it quite a bit more umph, since it's translating the API to the host computer. May one ask for a benchmark of various Voodoo1, 2, Banshee, 3-3000 era games, in this DOSBox-X?
My experience with DOSBOX-X is that it’s very buggy. It was the first one with native arm64 support for macOS, and for the longest time Quake would just crash upon launch. Then in one release the arm64 image was actually the x86 version. Contacted the dev, he just told us to wait for the next release… I’m using dosbox staging right now. Yes it doesn’t have a GUI menu, but lots of things can be achieved with command aliases if you make a one time effort to customize.
I would say the answer to the titular question is probably yes, mostly because DosBox/DosBox-x and it's forks are pretty much the only dos emulators that exist.
Phil can you do something looking at ReactOS for retro hardware use . Preferably on a couple or three generations around original Pentium through to about P3. It looks promising .
I've used Dosbox X and SVN Versions before there was Doxbox Staging. Just because they have been the first to Introduce special settings (Filters and Scalers and Refresh Rate Options). But which Soundfont did you use for Raptor? The distorted Guitar was nasty and sounded way off compared to a real Roland SC (ehrlich, das hat sich schiach angehört).
@@harbinger200 Actually I am emulating P1 166 MMX on Ryzen 7 4700u just fine with 86Box. Running both FreeDOS and MS-DOS, and Win98 with 3dfx Voodoo 2. I play Dark Forces 2 just fine. Compatibility is top notch
Waiting for 98Box, a user friendly and easy to use W98 emulator with proper graphics and audio support 😉
The most difficult games to run right now are games from '96-'05, we really need something that runs Windows 98 properly at custom speeds from 486 to P3 and offers Glide, D3D and OGL anywhere from Voodoo 1 to GeForce 3 levels of performance and compatibility. That's the dream at least 😢
The closes thing to that would be 86box. It's incredibly customizable even allowing Voodoo 1/2 SLI; 8086 (with optional 8087 co-pro) up till P2 line.
Though it will never emulate P3 and above. It's my goto for DOS/Win9x Emulation.
86Box is the way to go for late 90's early '00s windows gaming. You need a good processor however to run it well. For instance, I have an I7 9700 and although it can run Pentium 1 games up to 166Mhz fairly well, It's not strong enough to run Pentium 2 speeds.
Yeah, that's the issue... We need a higher-level emulation solution that doesn't require a high-end machine
@brecken19972 Where 86box is better than DOSBox-X, DOSBox-X will be at least as good.
@@brecken19972 I'm a bit of a noob, but why 86box and not PCem?
I've changed my library over to DOSBOX-X and the ability to run games from ZIP files made my life way easier. It's a bit more work to set up but you keep a clean base install of the game and every change, savegame, etc. is saved in a separate folder which I love. While not all games can be run from a ZIP, about 90% work fine. The ability for shaders is vital for me too - I just wish we had more advanced shares such as the ones RetroArch uses. For proper CRT emulation, RetroArch with DOSBOX Pure is the only option and while it supports running games from ZIP files as well, the options are more limited and games that do not like being run from a ZIP file simply don't work.
Wow didn't know about running from Zip. Nifty.
> For proper CRT emulation, RetroArch with DOSBOX Pure is the only option
Actually, the built-in adaptive CRT shaders in DOSBox Staging are your absolute best option. Check out of front page for screenshots ;)
@@johnnovak1979 I believe those are the same ones I have for DOSBOX-X but they're not as good as the shader packs you can get for RetroArch. I have a 4K OLED I bought specifically for CRT emulation and CyberLab Death To Pixels Shader for RetroArch is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. It even emulates the reflection you get on the inside bezel of your CRT. It requires a relatively beefy CPU but it's really worth it. It doesn't compare to standard shaders you get.
@@johnnovak1979DOSBOX staging looks amazing but you have to work it like normal DOSBOX so I’m ok with the compromise with DOSBOX-X sometimes.
@@DerekLippold Implementing an OSD in Staging is on our roadmap. Once that's available, that might change the DOS emulation landscape a bit ;)
It would be interesting to see a video directly comparing the features of DOSBox-X vs DOSBox Staging. Thanks as always for the great content!
i feel like it's the specific game or software i wanna run that drives my choice. dosbox-x did make loading software really much more straightforward tho.
especially if you are new to emulating software and you just wanna play some games, i feel you will be and running much faster just based on that
DOSBox Staging in my experience is a lot more accurate, for example running Tony & Friends in Kellogg´s Land without any flickering of the water.
@@belzebub16but it takes lot more of CPU. I could use dos box x, but not staging on a core2duo
@@ChrisJackson-js8rdyeah I like right clicking on EXE when I’m testing things quick.
@@jbinary82 Something must be wrong with your config then. I recently setup a system for a friend ony for ScummVM and DOSBox Staging based on a 2007 Intel ITX mainboard (that's with Intel onboard graphics!) with a 2.6 GHz C2D and it worked very well once configured. Based OS is KDE neon, so Ubuntu under the hood. I also run it successfully on a Intel J1800. Of course on both systems you won't run Grand Prix 2 anything close to maxed out, but Quake timedemo 2 or 3 (can't remember which) ran at 30 fps at 3200x200 while using Staging's Autoshader feature, openglnb output & Linux's gamemode. Maximum performance of the J1800 system varies between a very fast 486 and a Pentium 100 depending on the game.
On X11 it is currently faster than Wayland at least on those two systems.
Hey Phil, congrats for the 800th video, it's CRAZY and amazing at the same time :D
Good luck going forward!
Oh my, thank you! Time really flies, it's scary 😧
I use DOSBox-X mainly because of their suggested use case - running DOS applications (rather than games) with maximum compatibility. That being said, I've never seen an issue with any of my DOS development tools such that they failed to work in DOSBox Staging but did work in DOSBox-X, so I'm not sure how much water that claim holds.
As much as I like DosBox, I prefer original hardware and PCEM/86box emulation
I came across this fork a few years ago, immediately loved it for the sheer convenience it's menu's offer as well as it's capabilities. I was somewhat surprised it wasn't already the de-facto standard.
It's Windows 95 support is something I messed with at the time, from what I recall it worked fine, but then again I only explored the OS itself and I did play a game on it, it would have been a DOS game.
Addendum;
If I recall correctly, it's possible to feed MIDI data to an external program such as VirtualMidiSynth, quite fun to mess around with. This may be a standard feature all DOSBox forks/flavours have though.
Yes you can drive external MIDI synths. To be fair it's a feature DOSBox has been able to do for ages...
@@philscomputerlab I'm happy it exists, as well as that alternatives exist for Window's lacklustre built-in Wavetable system thing.
Seeing these improvements in emulation is a one of the positive patterns I've seen with archival technology , probably no more nice things will fade away and be forgotten by history, what a great accomplishment for us humans, what a great time to be here. I have no doubt people will improve DOSBox-X or similar software (forks, maybe) to perfection. It's only a matter of time, and things have been arriving earlier and earlier, I feel. I also feel bad being a bystander while people code these marvels, I'm no good at that, my forté is soft sciences, whoever reads this post can see it clearly in the enthusiastic writing in english as a second language, hahaha! Great as always, Phil!
Dope look at Dosbox X, Phil!
I would be interested if you did a giant comparison between emulating the same DOS machine on this, Pcem, and 86Box
That's a big project! I do like the idea but it's so easy to miss something...
For Windows games 86box might offer better compatibility but it comes at a serious performance hit. To be able to emulate something above a 400 MHz pentium ii in 86box you need a very fast machine. Dosbox-x is what most people need and 86box is for the purists among us. Also a shame that the Dosbox developers are not doing something like Dosbox-x themselves.
Yep, even 86Box emulating a P1 MMX 233 / Voodoo3 for prime Win98se era, is no good on something like a Haswell CPU.
It will run, but hovers around 80%... You're kinda limited to DOS with an i486 when running 86Box on older hardware.
The problem being the app itself is single-threaded, not just passing through a single thread to the emulated CPU.
@@KomradeMikhail That's why PCem is better. You don't need something faster than a PII 400 MHz for Windows 9x era games. Running at 100% with 5800x and 5950x.
@@mikoyangurevic8634 Only if you stick to 800x600 or 1024x768. There was a reason why people could not wait to update to P3/K7 CPUs with the highest clockrate you could afford.
@@armorgeddon Until 2009 I was gaming in 1280x1024 using a CRT. And I had an Athlon XP 3200+ with 3850 AGP. Never liked the widescreen resolutions. Also when I'm vintage gaming I don't want something bigger than 1024x768 for a resolution. For nostalgic reasons. In 1998 I had an STB Voodoo 2 Blackmagic with 12 MB. After 1999 Voodoo 3 2000 and later a 3500. In 2001 Geforce 3 Ti 500, 2004 Geforce 6800 Ultra until the upgrade to 3850 AGP. Nowadays with my 5950x I gaming on 1080p and I don't see why should I use 2k or 4k?
"Dosbox Staging" implemented Chorus and Reverb support for audio, which is a feature found on the Sound Blaster AWE64. When you add Chorus and Reverb to Adlib sound, it makes that seemingly come alive. DosBox X does not currently implement that feature.
Thank you! It's hard to keep track of every feature 🙂
but you need to be aware that this feature can also break things. I needed some time to track some distorted sounds down to reverb and chorus. For example Dune II gets some distortions on my real Hardware CM32L at the early intro Scene. Mortal Kombat I and II also got some distortions if I use Chorus and Reverb. But then again, when it works, it is a beautifull Sound Experience and I use it a lot.
This is a long overdue upgrade to Dosbox. Now my stupid friends can play the classics without me having to explain Dosbox.
still too confusing
sadly I am confused, install redirects to a github and then I get lost.
@@briankelly1240 Hmm. If you downloaded the install, it shouldn't be sending you there.
I found that changing the CPU cycles mid game isn't always the best. If the game does timings checks at startup and then stores that result in a variable, changing the CPU speed mid game messes with that so it's best to set the CPU cycles before starting a game.
That is interesting. What game have you come across that is affected?
@@philscomputerlab the sound stuttering you were talking about I have seen some games do when you mess with cycles mid-game. But also as a developer in those days I remember doing a CPU timing check at app startup because you had a variety of CPU speeds.
@@robvdl Very interesting, thanks!
You might know this already but some games like Jazz Jackrabbit 1 won't start on anything above 200mhz and will get a divide by zero exception.
From my experience this happens with programs compiled with Turbo Pascal (I think version 5), and if they import the "crt" unit that was all you needed to do.
Inside the crt unit was a timing check and it would crash on machines above 200mhz.
It was also possible to patch executables compiled with Turbo Pascal against this crash if you didn't have the source code. I did this back in the day with Jazz Jackrabbit 1 but forgot what the patch was called.
Love the pace of the video, you get right into it, no long intro, respectful of my time. Thank you!
Glad you liked it!
Agree
Thanks for the video, Phil! Just what I needed... I am running DosBox Staging with Borland Pascal and ran into multiple issues (including the latest release often ignoring configuration settings). This looks more like the DosBox I need for this purpose - especially mouse wheel, long file name and paste support, as well as different speed settings and MMX are welcome...
The menu alone just makes this so much more accessible to the average person.
I still don't understand the low and high dma on the sound card doh :D it's also half 1 in the morning.
Thing is, DOSBox Daum hat many of these options and the GUI 10+ years ago. Of cause he didn't continue development, so I need to check if it's about time to completely switch as I'm still using Daum. Just have to check if I can continue using the same config files or of certain setting there do not work with DOSBox-X.
too weird, what is he doing ???
I switched to DOSbox-X because I needed clipboard-support to copy text from and to the host system. Then I ran the 80s Chat AI Racter against ChatGPT - and Racter shredded it. ;-)
Thank You SO much Phil! I have recently downloaded DosBox-X and have yet to try it. I remember using VDMSound with WinXP and was able to Install and play Duke Nukem 1 and 2 with no effort and since we are now working with 64 bit OSes it has been more of a problem even with DosBox alone. I'm very glad I subbed your channel and I'm working on a Win 95 board for this purpose of playing around with Dos Programs and Games! The real board I want is VERY rare and almost impossible to find but I;m not gonna give up until I find one!
I'm in and out of so many systems at work with so many different things to remember. It seems whenever I try to get into some old games, I'm always looking up some config option, how to mount a local directory, etc... I was there 3000 years ago, so this makes it a lot nicer for me. Am going to have to give this a spin to go back to some old classics. Thanks for the demo.
I like the fact that there are different flavors and different teams working on DOSBox.
I used DOSBox-X for quite some time and I found it good but it also tries to do a lot and I feel it kinda misses an identity, jack of all trades.
I much prefer DOSBox Staging today that has spectacular sound card support and near perfect CRT emulation, focuses entirely on games and is the closest thing to the continuation of the original DOSBox that exists today - builds on top of it and improves on it significantly.
I've been using it for a long time because of the convenience, but also of it's very good Windows 9x support.
I love the old school emulator looking meny
Thank you Phil! It's been a while since I tried a dosbox fork, this looks very interesting!
I see a new Mr Phil episode and I click without a second thought. LOVE this channel!
2024 has been a good Year for Retro PC so far. There's a guy called omores running 9x on extremely modern motherboards. Like 13th gen Core old.
Nice video BTW as always.
Indeed it has
Every year is awesome for retro 😅
Just switched from vanilla DosBox to DosBox-X.
Also compared DosBox-X with the DosBox Staging (both latest versions) and found that DosBox-X is a lot better than the Staging.
More user friendly and more options.
As of the point of accuracy I didn't see any differences.
For me DosBox-X is the winner.
I ran into some issues with DOSBox-X and Dune 2 (mt-32 patched). Luckily Staging worked like a charm out of the box with it. Though always nice to have different options to choose from out there.
Maybe I was lucky with my 486 build, I had to buy 3 motherboards for the 3rd one to finally work but other than that the setup was smooth. Mostly. I had bad luck with the audio driver, I wanted to use the original driver for the card I have in the machine but ended up using UNISOUND and it works perfectly. The only issue I have with that build is I can't quick Windows 3.11, it just hangs on the logout and I don't get back my DOS prompt but I wasn't planning on using Win3 much anyway. So yeah, building a real 486 can be tricky but if you have some time and the resources it's well worth it. If you don't but you still want to try out old games, this might be your perfect solution.
Awesome thanks Phil.. never heard of this til now
DOSBox-X makes playing PC-9801 games so easy! No need to muck around with the Neko Project II emulator anymore!
Big huge upvote from me for showing Star Wars Dark Forces 2. An utter classic early FPS that almost never gets shown on UA-cam these days.
It's a fun game, and actually one I played back in the day 😊
YES. I wonder if it works better for WFW 3.11, of course accurate emulation with PCEm is ideal.
dosbox-x trumps old dosbox. I was having issues with my controllers on old dosbox, dosbox-x was a piece of cake.
A week ago, I started my emulation journey to do a little MS-DOS programming but mainly to experience the same path Linux Torvalds would have when he used PC/IX to build MINIX, which was used to build his first version of the Linux kernel. I think "the best" title goes to 86box - hands down.
Dosbox-x has one feature that others don't, it has better key mapper. When you press a key it highlights it, and if you use joystick it shows the analogue axis when you move it. That is very useful with games that have lots of input keys like fight sims, to see what is the button on your joystick or a controller doing.
@@Bonkikavo Hmm doesn't regular DOSBox also have this? I remember using the key mapper in Wing Commander...
@@philscomputerlab It has a keymapper, but it doesn't highlight the keys you press.
@@Bonkikavo Ah I see, thank you for explaining ☺️
Fantastic, Phil🎉 I'm assuming that it is a fork of DosBox?
Config menus are a much welcomed improvement, for sure!
It is
Used DOS Box a longtime ago to replay an old game or five. Have not tried it in a while, used an old version with integrated 3Dfx Glide support. Might give this a whirl.
I use Dosbox-x to run PC-98, it's amazing.
would need to check that, so many gems in that hardware, the Ui sure looks more comfy for sure to experiment with those games
Is dosbox x better than nekoproject2?
@@とふこ Yes and it's easier to setup.
I have some of my old rigs from the past, Althlon XP, Athlon 64, Phenom II X6, Core II Duo, etc. Might be interesting to build Win 98/XP dualboot retrogaming rig. Some old GPU's to test I have too. HD 1950 XTX and GF 8800 GTS should work I think, some older TNT 2 etc. No sound card iirc. Should I build or just try emulator? Thanks for the nice video again!
I you have the stuff on your hands, i'd build a system and experiment from there on. But that's what i would do with the hardware available. 😉
In my opinion, the best way for retro gaming is always to build an old PC as much as possible, although OS emulation/ virtualization is much more convenient than that.
The difficulty I have with dos box is that I don’t use it very often and I forget how to use it. I have re-read all of the instructions and learn it again which takes some time and if I get it wrong I have go back and do some troubleshooting. The menus looks more intuitive, so if it has become more user friendly then that’s a big step forward.
DOS Box seems like a very developer oriented program. Developers are usually pretty bad at user interface design. And opensource/free projects usually don't have user interface teams or consensus on what good interface design should be.
That is a fair comment. It's not easy. There are many ways you can set it up, with nested config files and all of that. I keep it very simple and have copy pastes of the same DOSBox folder, configured for different machines ready to go 😊
Thanks again Phil. I need to make time to check this out soon.
It's about time! So many parameters are just not practical to configure in a text file.
Great, I needed another option for Intel Mac instead of just Boxer.
DOSBox-X is awesome, just like you are, Phill 😉👍! It's rather versatile and beginner friendly at the same time.
Thanks for the review!
Thank you 😊
Wonderful video as always. I wanted say that over the years, I have found that running as many intel components as I can in a system lead to the most compatibility issues with programs and trouble shooting. I did not see the specs of the system you are using. Were you using a non Intel cpu?
AMD APU with a modern Mini PC.
Just for your information, screamer did a CPU test on setup utility so if you switch the cpu, you should also run setup
I haven't used it myself yet, but there is SoftGPU for virtual machines that some have been able to use to play Windows 98 games.
Thanks for this emulator, it runs so nice!!!
Love using this Version
This reminds me of early NES emulators lots of options right in the menus wysiwyg design very minimal I think that's a great thing for all skill levels
I use it to record game play and emulate Speccy and C64, even NEs and Mdrive. But no usb gamepad support.
I used the processor cycle + to make one of my Speccy Tetris games quicker, well the music, as it needed 60 htz.
at 5:11 when you are not concentrated tomb raider might sound to you like coom raider at x2 video speed 🤣🤣🤣. I slowed down the video and sped it up just to check if i heard it wrong 😅
Short answer: NO, NOP, Nein, Ne...
Lately I find myself using RetroArch - DOSBox-Pure core. All good stuff of DOSBox mixed with great stuff from RA. Playing game with Rewind function and easy save state from game controller (and the same configuration I use for other cores) makes it in my opinion one of the best combinations. I used DOSBox-X for a while now and long time ago had even instructions for original DOSBox on Abandonia posted.
I also like to use PCem and Box86, more accurate emulation of a PC of the time.
I'm just surprised they didn't call it DosBox 360. 🤷♂
Jokes aside, this is the step to the right direction regarding retro PC emulation.
But I think we need to see a more thorough process of this program regarding import system configs like the PC-98 and its translation settings to see if those japanese games would convert them to English. I'm more interested in playing Poiicenauts or Snatcher.
As for running Windows OS' on this platform with 3D acceleration, it still doesn't come close.
Perhaps Windows 95 maybe more stable to run some of these "system-sensitive" games.
We shall see in the near future where this takes us.
If I were running a PC-98 emulation, it would be to try out the early Touhou Project games (although I expect I'd fail miserably even in "easy mode".
(did Super Robot Wars run on PC-98?)
Perfect bite sized video
Thank you 😊
I am on an Android tablet with the Magic DosBox free app installed to create tiny x86 executable. I think the most DOS gamer use the default DosBox version and don’t like to switch to DosBox-X. If i use MMX-instruction in DOS for example most DosBox user can’t use it, because the default DosBox version emulates a 80386/80387, but not a Pentium MMX.
While it doesn't have the userfriendly UI and a million scaling options and such, Dosbox Staging is the closest I've seen to reproducing the actual graphics you'd see in DOS games with a CRT monitor.
Just closed my work Outlook, opened YT and see the Phil's new video about the DosBox - that's what I call a great weekend starter 😁
Enjoy!
Just a reminder - the Wave 1 music for Raptor shreds.
Great Video again👍🏻👌🏻
Great video once again. What about 86box? I watched a video from tech tangents last week. Even though it seems a bit complex, the emulation capabilities are very good.
Original hardware certainly, eXoDOS, 86Box, PCem, DOSBox-X, DOSBox Pure, MiSTer FPGA, all great alternatives to vanilla DOSBox!
Thanks Phil for covering DOSBox-X :)
I have a customer who needs a little extra help who I have set up with a windows 98 se period desktop (based on a windows ME desktop), and a windows 7 32 bit laptop (an older toshiba AMD e-350 cpu win8 came with it) to throw old games at the wall to run natively or use dosbox. I would love to introduce him to dosbox-x to help him play dos games on the newer laptop, he would love it.
Thanks for your videos been waiting for this for a while 🎉😊
Sooo lets see what I'm missing (still using vanilla Dosbox 0.74-2). Yeah I'd swtich to X but too lazy to resetup my entire DosBox microSD card
I've switched to DB-X from DB a long time ago. Tons of options and better perfs.
For Win98, I prefer 86box. Not PCem because it's total crap when driven by RocketLauncher.
For me Dosbox X is mostly better than native DOS gaming.
Thank you. 👍🏼
Is Phil one of the best retro tech channels?
Yes of course. Don't be silly.
Yeah I remember when he was on the gog forums ages ago.
@@armedready1 I was going to say, he not only has an awesome channel, but he contributes a lot to the retro gaming scene, with a lot of work put into the GOG games on real hardware spreadsheet and testing things.
Nice seeing you here besides the Tech Yes Man comments, Marco, you have great taste and most important, looks like you're an awesome friend to... well... Your friends, of course! Keep being great, my man.
At start, so curious to see your thoughts once I watch this episode. I CAN say, having used Dosbox-X, I DO think it's the best port of Dosbox and probably the easiest way to emulate MS-DOS games, though I must confess I'm partial to 86box and that series due to it's accuracy of emulation and extra power (Dosbox-X is DEFINATEY the easier way for the average andy/normie norm/sportsball-dad to get into Dos quickly and with minimal fuss -- heck I USE it to emulate windows 1.X and 2.X for quick testing of some of my coding projects)
~0:22 -- WOW they've improved the UX since I've used it last! I see why the positive headline on the video (besides click bait).
~4:31 -- another neat trick that drew me to dosbox-x the first time I used it was the MCGA emulation, which noone else currently does (at least that I've been able to find.) I was developing a video card detection program so the ability to debug that check was useful to me.
There were much earlier DOSBox SVN compilations that had a top menu.
😒👍 Keep It Old School
settings and information windows imitating windows 3.1 is cute
Great video Phil! Any chance you can link to where you downloaded this? I'm only finding the XP installer and zip files with no installer.
Just from their download page, it was a zip file.
How powerful is the 3dfx emulation?
I could see that the site refers to it as a Voodoo1, but the passthrough gives it quite a bit more umph, since it's translating the API to the host computer.
May one ask for a benchmark of various Voodoo1, 2, Banshee, 3-3000 era games, in this DOSBox-X?
I really ought to learn, not to ask questions until I've seen the entire video. :D
Save states, yes!!!
Nice review
My experience with DOSBOX-X is that it’s very buggy. It was the first one with native arm64 support for macOS, and for the longest time Quake would just crash upon launch. Then in one release the arm64 image was actually the x86 version. Contacted the dev, he just told us to wait for the next release… I’m using dosbox staging right now. Yes it doesn’t have a GUI menu, but lots of things can be achieved with command aliases if you make a one time effort to customize.
Yes it is!
Waiting for the PCem vs 86Box comparison
It's pretty awesome.
DOSBox-X is great for well... DOS and 16-bit Windows. Win 9X seems to be somewhat beyond the main focus and I would consider 86Box for that.
lol 3dfx i loved
This to me looks like a cross of DosBox and 86Box or PCem
I've been using Dosbox-x for a couple of years now. It is better than Dosbox. I can even run Windows 98 on Dosbox-x
What I really WANT is a new update from dosbox. Version 0.74-3 hasn't got any updates for a few years now. :(
You and me both 😄
Thanks❤
save states are a game changer
yes, phil.
So spectrum holobytes stunt driver should work good? I haven't tried dosbox in years but i remember stunt driver being very cpu sensitive
I would say the answer to the titular question is probably yes, mostly because DosBox/DosBox-x and it's forks are pretty much the only dos emulators that exist.
It sure is my favorite.
Phil can you do something looking at ReactOS for retro hardware use . Preferably on a couple or three generations around original Pentium through to about P3. It looks promising .
the mt 32 sounds so smooth and clean
Really cool stuff.
I've used Dosbox X and SVN Versions before there was Doxbox Staging. Just because they have been the first to Introduce special settings (Filters and Scalers and Refresh Rate Options). But which Soundfont did you use for Raptor? The distorted Guitar was nasty and sounded way off compared to a real Roland SC (ehrlich, das hat sich schiach angehört).
Very nice.
86box, but DOSBox-X is the most user friendly for sure.
86box is good, but it has problem with performance. It requires CPU from future for anything above Pentium at 100 Mhz.
@@harbinger200 Actually I am emulating P1 166 MMX on Ryzen 7 4700u just fine with 86Box. Running both FreeDOS and MS-DOS, and Win98 with 3dfx Voodoo 2. I play Dark Forces 2 just fine. Compatibility is top notch
Hey old man! Can you cover the latest and fastest PCI graphic card? The GT 610 PCI by Zotac?
if adaptive crt shader can be added into dosbox-x, it will be perfect.