I'll save you time and effort. DOSBox currently only supports DOS and Windows <95. Use pcem or vmware,hyperv,virtualbox, etc.

That's sad to hear. It appears we have a ways to go before near flawless emulation of pc games on another pc becomes a reality.

It's DOSBox, not WinBox.

Destroy wrote:

I never knew one could install winXP or Vista inside of DOSBox to run games.
I've tried most other virtual machines to run 3dfx or D3D games and they have proven either glitchy or too slow or both.

Not WinXP or Vista, but Win98SE/Win95 are fine. Just not supported, you are on your own and don't bother DOSBox devs community. If a game works in WinXP/Vista, then it is very likely that it will continue to work on Windows 10.

DOSBox is still the best platform for ancient Win9x games, especially from the early days of propriety 3D APIs and Direct3D era. It is best for 3Dfx Glide APIs because it can do both pass-through and Voodoo chip emulation. The pass-through always has the advantage of speed, while the later supports Direct3D games. Unfortunately, you won't find these 2 critical features in the upstream DOSBox. You will have to find the patches and compile your own DOSBox or use community builds which incorporate them.

DOSBox can be insanely fast, too fast that may break for games that don't expect such speed, especially the 32-bit optimized dynamic_x86 CPU core. So far, I see nothing comes close to that without resorting to HW accelerated virtualization.

kjliew wrote:

DOSBox is still the best platform for ancient Win9x games, especially from the early days of propriety 3D APIs and Direct3D era. It is best for 3Dfx Glide APIs because it can do both pass-through and Voodoo chip emulation.

Strongly disagree with that one. This is only an unstable curiosity to me back in 2011. Youtubers regurgitating a misnomer as a definitive solution is setting up trouble for the end-user, the developers, and the mods here. You're not helping.

Also, you've heard of PCem, right? At least that has the ability to change your CDs while running Win9x so you can actually play many of those early Win9x games that tend to be of the multipleCDfmvAdventure type and you can do it without crashing so hard or any of the "expert retro old school pc advice" of using DaemonTools in Dosbox on multiple 2GB hard drive images to cycle your CDs. It's the only other emulator that I know of that's good for and actually supports DOS+Win9x. Sarah's hard work isn't appreciated enough for this.

And remember - it's called DOSbox. If you want to see the DOSbox code work out some Windows gaming quickly, you should keep an eye on BoxedWine.

leileilol wrote:

Also, you've heard of PCem, right?

Yeah, I have been monitoring this. I tried out v14 recently, I am impressed, but yet DOSBox is faster and kekko 3Dfx chip emulation still works better.

leileilol wrote:

any of the "expert retro old school pc advice" of using DaemonTools in Dosbox on multiple 2GB hard drive images to cycle your CDs.

I do agree that DOSBox 2GB disk image is very annoying, but I got it working on 8GB with a very simple patch. I personally think 1~2 8GB disk image is enough for win9x games. I still like the way DOSBox work, simple and clean, compared to PCem. I don't really see the point of PCem trying to emulate every pieces of HW, but I think everyone has the rights to believe in what he/she is doing.

kjliew wrote:

I don't really see the point of PCem trying to emulate every pieces of HW

Because it's meant to be a full PC emulator. DOSBox, on the other hand, is a DOS gaming platform.

Seems to me dgvoodoo2 has directx 1-8.1 handled.

and for win9x you'll need that depth of emulation for any stability anyway. You can't simply just high-level Windows9x

Azarien wrote:

kjliew wrote:

I don't really see the point of PCem trying to emulate every pieces of HW

Because it's meant to be a full PC emulator. DOSBox, on the other hand, is a DOS gaming platform.

DOSBox, while being a DOS emulator, can do many things that an actual DOS machine can do. I have an external 3.5" floppy drive, and from my original disks, I was able to install Windows 3.1 to the E:\ drive. To get sound to work, I had to get a sound program, but, it works. I can play SimTower flawlessly through DOSBox. DOSBox itself is missing a lot of the original DOS programs, so I was also able to get edit, deltree and qbasic, as well as the qbasic help file. Edit, is like a word editor, but because I'm so used to using DOS, my fingers just fly on the keyboard and I can pull up multiple items just by accessing edit.

For me personally, DOS is so much easier to use and it's what I got used to using. But to say DOSBox is only a game emulator is untrue, because it is a literal DOS emulator, and it can run anything that was made to run in DOS. I can't remember if I tried installing Windows 98SE in DOSBox. I have a game that worked up until XP SP2, but was made to also work with 98SE. When XP SP3 came out, the game stopped working, and it doesn't work on 7, I highly doubt it would work with 10, but I've no plans to switch to 10.

Oh just off-topic, I'm having a problem with the website account recovery, is there someone I can talk with about it, or a place on the forum to post about website issues?

DosMan0007 wrote:

But to say DOSBox is only a game emulator is untrue, because it is a literal DOS emulator, and it can run anything that was made to run in DOS.

The reason that DOSBox does not officially support DOS apps is that it takes a lot f shortcuts and is missing elements not needed by games for speed.This means that while many of these apps will run it does not mean that they will run without issue. Share is the most common thing cited that breaks many office apps. You can use fake share, but it is only a workaround. It does not fix the problem. It may lead to corruption of things like databases. The lack of features like printing makes many apps pointless.

The fact that you may risk your work or data is the main reason that the devs discourage non-gaming programs in DOSBox. They cannot be held liable for damage done by the misuse of DOSBox. Of course there is nothing stopping you from trying, but any damage is on you and don't ask here for help with non games in DOSBox.

collector wrote:

DosMan0007 wrote:

But to say DOSBox is only a game emulator is untrue, because it is a literal DOS emulator, and it can run anything that was made to run in DOS.

The reason that DOSBox does not officially support DOS apps is that it takes a lot f shortcuts and is missing elements not needed by games for speed.This means that while many of these apps will run it does not mean that they will run without issue. Share is the most common thing cited that breaks many office apps. You can use fake share, but it is only a workaround. It does not fix the problem. It may lead to corruption of things like databases. The lack of features like printing makes many apps pointless.

The fact that you may risk your work or data is the main reason that the devs discourage non-gaming programs in DOSBox. They cannot be held liable for damage done by the misuse of DOSBox. Of course there is nothing stopping you from trying, but any damage is on you and don't ask here for help with non games in DOSBox.

In other words, the devs of DOSBox will only support DOS games. That's totally understandable as that's what DOSBox is designed for. But I see DOSBox as being a lot more than just a DOS emulator to run games. For instance, waaay back, when I had my 486, we had a Sound Blaster Pro card, and the box came with a disk called Voyetra. I loved using it, but I'm missing a disk and so I can't use it. But, if I had the disks, I would have already installed it and went to town. As far as I know right now though, there's no DOS game or DOS program that I haven't been able to use inside of DOSBox. What's also nice is that I can mount that external floppy drive in DOSBox and go through and see what disks still work and everything.

The disks I still have are a huge part of my childhood. And being able to go back, reinstall those disks in DOSBox, and relive great memories is really what I enjoy doing. I spent most of my time with DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 growing up, moving onto DOS 6.22 and unfortunately Windows 95 😒

Oh and there is one app I always used to use as a kid, Print Master. AND there is a program or something that will allow you to print, inside of DOSBox. I made a few calenders for some people at work using the old Print Master, and was able to actually print them out.