Post Your Dosbox Successes Here

[WizardStan]

might and magic 4/5 (world of xeen) - excellent, absolutely playable

That's quite surprising. This was one of the games I tested on my PC that needed to be boosted to 12000 cycles to reach the expected speed.

 

[Pickle]

all tested on the latest dosbox (6/6/2010) with 4000 cycles and pandora clocked to 801.

you should have run with cycles set to max

 

[lokiase]

cycles maxed. alright. will be done in future tests. thx

@wizardstan:
i was quite astonished myself that xeen ran that smooth. I played only the starttown and all was fast and no lags or interuptions at all.
only the intro was lagging, but the game not a bit.
one of my alltime faves. don´t know how many times I went through the first dungeon -->dwarve mines with that creepy, beardy fellow welcoming you on entering

 

[WizardStan]

one of my alltime faves.

Mine as well. S'why I reverse engineered and started reimplementing the engine in SDL.

 

[lokiase]

one of my alltime faves.

Mine as well. S'why I reverse engineered and started reimplementing the engine in SDL.

:lol: sounds like a hell of work. you aren't finished yet, are you?

the pandora simply rocks. always hated that the gp2x had no keyboard. especially concerning c64,amiga or dos games. this feels like heaven now. might and magic on the road woohooo

 

[WizardStan]

:lol: sounds like a hell of work. you aren't finished yet, are you?

Actually, a lot has been finished. It's mostly fiddly bits. You can start a new game, wander around, fight monsters, get experience, equip stuff. Magic doesn't work and none of the town events work (so even though you get experience, you can't train to level up ) but sadly I've not touched it in over a year to finish it off. Laaaazy, no motivation. I'm hoping once I get my Pandora I'll be motivated to get it running

 

[lokiase]

you definitely found a beta tester *wave*

 

[Blue Ion]

elder scrolls daggerfall - installation processed finished but afterwards it didn´t want to start, cause of some cd problems. will look into that later.

Configure z.cfg to where the cdrom folder actually is, like:

type dfall_minimum
path c:\dagger\arena2\
pathcd c:\dfcd\dagger\arena2\
fadecolor 0
mapfile d
rendergame 1
user 1
startMap 179
region 17
helmet 0
maxSpeed 200
controls betaplyr.dat
maps mapsave.sav

and run using:
fall z.cfg

The minimum installation worked like that.
I haven't tried on the pandora, but considering arena suffers on more powerful computers, daggerfall can only get worse.
Start the game with the mouse already captured or else you won't be able to do so ingame.

For the record, Magic Carpet 2 works too slow as well (minimal detail and window reduced) though it is just slowmotion. People with patience might be able to go through.
I haven't tried Magic Carpet 1 but chances are it runs just as bad.

 

[lokiase]

thx blue.
had no time to mess with the .cfg files yet.

and yeah, i´m pretty sure daggerfall won´t work since arena didn´t, but you always have to give it a try

 

[Eniko]

Just tried a couple games.

Princess Maker 2: Runs sluggish at 500mhz, touchscreen is a useless mess. Playable at that speed but will have sound slowdown. Ran fine at 700mhz. 800mhz+ might prevent occasional music skip.

Warlords 2 Deluxe: Playable at 500mhz, touchscreen works fine. Still sluggish at 800mhz though, scrolls map tile by tile pretty slowly. Don't try this one if you're not patient. Then again it's a slow game anyway so not for the impatient to begin with.

EDIT: One Must Fall 2097: Runs well if a little sluggish at 800mhz, turning off a bunch of video options helped. Controls are a bit tricky to set up, you have to set a nub to joystick mode, then in Dosbox config set the joystick to button swap (not doing this will crash when using button 2), then ctrl+f1 after you run Dosbox to map joystick 1 and 2 to your gaming buttons. Left nub is joystick 2 in OMF config.

 

[Khan]

Running "Background Killer" may help a little

And, obviously, plugging an USB mouse greatly improves playability (at perfomance´s expense, but nothing serious) until those issues with nubs and touchscreen are ironed out (Nubs behave erraticaly, even though being supposedly well calibrated >_<)

PD: Any tips to squeeze a bit more perfomance? Frame skipping seems to be counterproductive as well as skimping on sound quality (optimized code only for sb16? :huh: ...lowering the sound rate doesn´t help)

 

[Xtreme2k]

I came across a homebrew DOS emulator for the Nintendo DS (It's called 'DSx86')that was supposed to run Master of Orion and other games at very playable speeds. Its still being worked on it seems. Latest version was released on 6/13/10. Seems to be fairly well along and solid.

This is indeed impressing considering that the DS only has a 66 Mhz ARM9 CPU. I'd love to see it running on both pandora and wiz, however it's problably harder to port than dosbox since it's not been written with portability in mind.

 

[skeezix]

"background killer"; what about hotfix #3 (beta is out.)

jeff

 

[GizmoTheGreen]

Anyone know of any h-games playable under dosbox?

I'm assuming true love isn't, since its a win95 game

 

[Ze_ro]

I came across a homebrew DOS emulator for the Nintendo DS (It's called 'DSx86')that was supposed to run Master of Orion and other games at very playable speeds. Its still being worked on it seems. Latest version was released on 6/13/10. Seems to be fairly well along and solid.

This is indeed impressing considering that the DS only has a 66 Mhz ARM9 CPU. I'd love to see it running on both pandora and wiz, however it's problably harder to port than dosbox since it's not been written with portability in mind.

I thought about this too, but if you check out the DSx86 homepage, you'll see it doesn't emulate anywhere near as much (or as complicated) hardware as DOSBox does. It can't even emulate a full 286. I suspect that while it might run quite nicely on Pandora, anything that would work on it would already work perfectly fine in DOSBox. Only major advantage would be that you could probably turn the clock speed down significantly.

Oh, and also, the source code doesn't seem to be available (though maybe the author could be convinced to share it).

--Zero

 

[Khan]

Anyone know of any h-games playable under dosbox?

I'm assuming true love isn't, since its a win95 game

Marble Cooking!

 

[Pickle]

Oh, and also, the source code doesn't seem to be available (though maybe the author could be convinced to share it).

Certainly, but dont expect to see anything breathtaking, its basically the svn.

 

[GizmoTheGreen]

Anyone know of any h-games playable under dosbox?

I'm assuming true love isn't, since its a win95 game

Marble Cooking!

thansk for the tip! be sure to let me know if you know more
weird, didnt work... knights of xentar is a go though!
no wait, it appears to get stuck... wel, atleast it ran, it appears to get stuck, but music goes on fine,

 

[Khan]

thansk for the tip! be sure to let me know if you know more
weird, didnt work... knights of xentar is a go though!
no wait, it appears to get stuck... wel, atleast it ran, it appears to get stuck, but music goes on fine,

For Marble Cooking (and DOS games in general) run the batch file (START.BAT). Works flawlessly for me that way

Despite the skippy sound, Knights of Xentar works fine. When you say "stuck" you mean you can´t exit the game? I can get in-game perfectly but weirdly I can´t Exit to DOS (Pandora Key to the rescue! Saves you the hassle of forcing shutdown )

More h-games (Yes, h-GAMES...not very fond of visual novels and CG-driven crap in general D)

Cobra Mission
Mad Paradox
Dragon Knight IV (Although being in Japanese, its mechanics are ridiculous simple and can be easily completed)
Metal & Lace (IIRC this one was censored, but hey! Pics of gorgeous anime babes as you beat them in robo-fights!)
Queen of Tenshindo 95 (A Windows 95 one, but hopefully the future WINE project has a chance to get it running due to its low requirements...worked fine on my 486 DX2-66)

And regarding arcade games you have the highly addictive Gals Panic series (Maybe the later games are not playable under the current un-optimized state of MAME)

 

[MonkeyChops]

I tried a few today, all at 825 and max cycles. I know that some of these are bound to be better in other emulators/native ports or not even worth testing in some of your eye's but, I don't really care. I'm grew up on dos B)

Phantasmagoria worked very well. It had a small hang-up on the title screen and is a little skippy in some of the game-play but most of the game play has been smooth as have the cut scenes (even at full screen). I absolutely loved this game back in the day, I'm really stoked that it works so well in dosbox.

Kings Quest 6 also worked pretty well. Start-up was slow but game play is good and the voices are working well. There was, however, no music with the default soundcard settings. After fooling with the game settings, I managed to get music but, in the process, completely destroy the frame rate. So mark it as playable with voices but without music. I'll keep at it though, this is another classic for me and I'd love to get it working with music.

Sam and Max demo that I downloaded was not playable until I got the sound figured out. Weird that it was incredibly slow without sound but pretty much full speed with sound.

Duke 3d demo was not playable. loaded and brought up the menu but with the demo playing in the background, I was probably getting 1-2 fps and then freeze.

Dark Forces demo is playable, I need to play with it some more to get the controls right and get the sound enabled but it is at least playable without sound.

Tomb Raider demo was also not playable. It loaded to gameplay and then tanked after I took 3 steps at about 5 fps.

Captain Comic is flawless. Great fun!