dosbox works!

[Miven]

dosbox was the project of the month a while back. I thought "Hey. Cool. I'll check that out."

I have to admit I didn't have high expectations. On my system, everything has to come from source because it's so customized. No rpm's or deb's for me. So I grabbed dosbox-0.74.tar.gz, and promptly forgot about it, fervently hacking at dwm as I was.

Well, just the other day I spotted it sitting in all the junk in my tmp directory and decided to give it a go. I dumped it in my src dir, untar'd it, "./configure"... no problems (yet). Good. "make"... OMG it built! Maybe some warning about an unused variable or something. Wow. I'm shaking my head at this point

"./dosbox" and it runs, complains about my soundcard being in use. No surprise, I was listening to Beethoven at the time and the cheap little soundcard in my laptop can only do one thing at a time.

My old Acer 3502 came with a 40G HD and 2 partitions. XP on the first, empty on the second. I put Mandrake10 on the empty chunk and have never looked back. These days, the XP system is so rotten I use it as ancilliary storage space and I haven't seen "Start Menu" on this PC in over a year. The last time I did, I was really bored and wanted to have a go at an ancient game called MAX by Interplay. It's like chess taken up a couple orders of magnitude, and the AI is not too bad either.

In dosbox, I typed "mount c /mnt/win_c/intrplay/max" and then typed "max", and it worked! Intro movie, the whole shebang. ALT-ENTER toggles fullscreen mode. It works better in linux than it does in XP. My jaw dropped and I called my nephew over from his Star Wars Battlefront game and we laughed.

I'd like a big round of applause and many good fortunes to those very clever people on the dosbox team. Thank you, you made my day. Now I have exactly zero reasons to boot XP.

[MikeTbob]

I hope Dancing bananas are okay. I use DosBox myself to play "Kroz" and a few others.

[elija]

DosBox is a truly great project. I used it a few years ago on a Vista system to install and run an old engine tuning program that Vista refused to run. I should imagine it's got even better since then

[jayd512]

I tried DosBox a few years back for the same reason... just to see what it was all about. The first game that I loaded into it was Champions of Krynn.
I really nice project all around!

[Miven]

OK MikeTbob. How did you get those dancing bananas in your post? I need to know.

Champions of Krinn looks good. I'd like to try it.

I know this is not the place for this, but if someone wanted MAX (Mechanized Assault & eXploration) by Interplay(1997) I could upload it somewhere. I've got it in rar, 3 chunks, about 225MB. I did it myself too, I have the vintage CD. Strategy, turn based, you can play it while you're making dinner, if that's your style. Games can take weeks. It's one of the best games I've ever played, and I don't normally play games.

But I don't want to turn this thread into some warez thing. Perhaps we can chat elsewhere.

Multiplayer uses IPX which was abandoned long ago for obvious reasons. I haven't tried it yet in dosbox with IPX emulation.

Technically, I'm being bad. But practically, Interplay isn't going to care about a 15 year old dos game being shared. They got inhaled by Blizzard years ago.

There's a crew that are trying to replicate it. (Mechanized Assault & eXploration Reloaded » Portal) They seem to be doing a pretty good job. They pull off global multiplayer once in a while. A bit of a cult following, if you will.

Peace and Cheer.

[MikeTbob]

OK MikeTbob. How did you get those dancing bananas in your post? I need to know.

Champions of Krinn looks good. I'd like to try it.

I know this is not the place for this, but if someone wanted MAX (Mechanized Assault & eXploration) by Interplay(1997) I could upload it somewhere. I've got it in rar, 3 chunks, about 225MB. I did it myself too, I have the vintage CD. Strategy, turn based, you can play it while you're making dinner, if that's your style. Games can take weeks. It's one of the best games I've ever played, and I don't normally play games.

But I don't want to turn this thread into some warez thing. Perhaps we can chat elsewhere.

Multiplayer uses IPX which was abandoned long ago for obvious reasons. I haven't tried it yet in dosbox with IPX emulation.

Technically, I'm being bad. But practically, Interplay isn't going to care about a 15 year old dos game being shared. They got inhaled by Blizzard years ago.

There's a crew that are trying to replicate it. (Mechanized Assault & eXploration Reloaded » Portal) They seem to be doing a pretty good job. They pull off global multiplayer once in a while. A bit of a cult following, if you will.

Peace and Cheer.

You can get the dancing bananas by clicking on any reply button, on the right side of the monitor are some smilies or emoticons if you will, click on "More" just below the smilies and a window pops up. Scroll down.
And yes, Sharing Warez and other things of that nature are not usually welcome here.

[jayd512]

OK MikeTbob. How did you get those dancing bananas in your post? I need to know.

If you just don't feel like hitting the "More" button, the code for it is :banana:

Champions of Krinn looks good. I'd like to try it.

Pretty much anything from the AD&D Gold Box is worth checking out, if you're into those types of games.