Talk:DOSBox

Do we really need an article on DOSBox? Linking to the Wikipedia article should be good enough. -- TheDarkArchon 20:45, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I think you're right.  Although the program's documentation is scattered and incomplete, it is only relevant here because of speedrunning AFAICT, so any specialized instruction on our part can wait until we actually have speedrunning tutorials.    Ryan W 23:07, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I must have been out of touch with the community for a while. People are actually using DOS Box to speedrun? It seems a lot more worthwhile to me to just grab an old Win95 machine off of ebay or Craigslist and use that. :P Zack 22:44, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I am not a speedrunner myself, but I know that the DOSBox method can be set up and tweaked in 15 minutes and costs no money.  For an old Win9x machine bought on ebay, the shipping alone might be $50 (unless you happen to live in a large city and can pick it up yourself).  Nowadays you also have to worry about cracked boards and expiring power supplies.  The old hardware drivers are also a bit balky IIRC.

Certainly there was a period where DOSBox wasn't quite stable enough for speedrunning, nor the emulated VGA fast enough unless you had a brand new machine, but the consensus on the Doomworld forums seems to be that v0.70 has fixed enough of the bugs.  I don't deny that a really serious DOS gamer might want an old machine and be willing to maintain it, but the DOSBox players are at least a significant minority.    Ryan W 16:44, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

This does add whether and how well it works in regard to Doom (basically that finally it runs the games well on modern systems). It won't likely ever make more than a short article, but it seems useful (and now more since I added a link to Wikipedia's DOSBox article at the bottom).

Perhaps we could add a screen shot of Doom loading or running on DOSBox. A window mode one, as a full screen shot may be indistinguishable from one taken directly on Windows 9x or DOS, or one taken with Chocolate Doom or the like. Who is like God? 21:47, 30 March 2008 (UTC)