Dos Emulator

[Rayek]

Is anyone creating one? i'm getting antsy. i've offered to donate a few bucks to the dev who pulls that one off. it'll save a lot of dev's time, as instead of porting games over, run them on the emulator....

am i crazy for asking such things?

 

[Jegriva]

Try to search athor discussions about it, ther are many of them somewhere.

 

[ravuya]

The x86 is not a trivial architecture to emulate... and that's ignoring the work that needs to be done on VGA and sound emulation as well. It's extremely difficult to write a usable emulator for the x86 so we can even start DOS, let alone play games.

 

[Captainbubby]

I believe at one stage the official gp2x website mentioned a Dos4gw emulator being worked on, though I assume it wasn't being worked on "in house"

 

[rossimo]

And there's DosBox.

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

 

[demonblaze]

I tried using dosbox but found it sloooooooooow on my pc. I thought VDMsound was far better but maybe it would be even more difficult to port... plus I think it was made specifcally for windoze 2000 and xp and has never been ported to linux

 

[Jarska333]

I don't think VDMsound is actually an emulator? Moe like a... compatibility layer?

 

[Ferentix]

Yeah, VDMsound is just for letting old DOS games that play fine on newer versions of Windows but without sound play with sound too. It only emualtes soundcards- it doesn't actually run the DOS game itself as a DOS emulator. Basically, if a game fails to run under windows, using VDMsound will not improve matters.

 

[shinelife]

I've just got hold of a GP2X with a view to porting over "Legacy", my in-development emulator for bootable IBM PC games, which currently runs on Linux through SDL. A successful port would enable playing of early to mid 1980's bootable PC CGA games such as Kings Quest, Archon, Flight Simulator, Infocom text adventures etc. An approximate selection of games this emulator aims to run is at Retrograde Station (http://retrograde.trustno1.org/). Note that you won't see anything like Doom, Quake, Dune or indeed anything requiring 80286+ or EGA/VGA running on this emulator.

However the emulator does not currently run DOS, so emulation of games launched from the DOS prompt (i.e. EXE files) is not currently possible.

As previous people on the thread have said, don't get too excited - emulation of the 8086 (the processor used by early PC's) is really time-consuming. In fact the quick port I did to the Compaq Ipaq (a 206Mhz ARM based device) a couple of years ago was excruciatingly slow.

Having said all this, I'm not wishing to put this project on the chopping block before it's even started - it may be possible to utilize a combination of GP2X hardware, dirty hacks and high-level emulation to get a specific selection of these games running at a decent speed on the GP2X.

The project website is http://www.shinelife.co.uk/ and I'll post any significant updates on this board.

Cheers

Jon

 

[Eolair]

I've just got hold of a GP2X with a view to porting over "Legacy", my in-development emulator for bootable IBM PC games, which currently runs on Linux through SDL. A successful port would enable playing of early to mid 1980's bootable PC CGA games such as Kings Quest, Archon, Flight Simulator, Infocom text adventures etc. An approximate selection of games this emulator aims to run is at Retrograde Station (http://retrograde.trustno1.org/). Note that you won't see anything like Doom, Quake, Dune or indeed anything requiring 80286+ or EGA/VGA running on this emulator.

However the emulator does not currently run DOS, so emulation of games launched from the DOS prompt (i.e. EXE files) is not currently possible.

As previous people on the thread have said, don't get too excited - emulation of the 8086 (the processor used by early PC's) is really time-consuming. In fact the quick port I did to the Compaq Ipaq (a 206Mhz ARM based device) a couple of years ago was excruciatingly slow.

Having said all this, I'm not wishing to put this project on the chopping block before it's even started - it may be possible to utilize a combination of GP2X hardware, dirty hacks and high-level emulation to get a specific selection of these games running at a decent speed on the GP2X.

The project website is http://www.shinelife.co.uk/ and I'll post any significant updates on this board.

Cheers

Jon

​

Very interesting. I wish you all luck with your project!