DOSBox 0.74-2 Released With Better Wine Compatibility, Linux OpenGL Fixes

[ssokolow]

Now we're talking! That's an appreciable level of respectable. Still leveling up personally. I love emulators for the convenience and the vast breadth of games it can cover, but the real thing is always the best.

I try to strike a balance: Enjoying what I envied as a kid, yet not becoming too habituated to it because I want to feel that the "authoritative" forms of the games are the ones that run on commodity hardware, insulated from changes by a layer of open-source emulation and Linux. (Essentially, I pair DRM-free ownership and making backups with "making backups" of my expectations.)

[xpris]

for now packages available only in Arch AUR and rpm for OpenMandriva LX4.

[mulenmar]

Any respectable individual has a variation of the following:

$ ls ~/Games/dos
aquanoid dangerous_dave doom gta keen simcity2000 warcraft2 wolf3d

Eh, I'll stick to the open-source versions of Doom, Wolfenstein, and Commander Keen, thanks. I'd just as soon not deal with bugs or map limits. Guess that makes me a non-respectable individual!

[perpetually high]

Eh, I'll stick to the open-source versions of Doom, Wolfenstein, and Commander Keen, thanks. I'd just as soon not deal with bugs or map limits. Guess that makes me a non-respectable individual!

I was just kidding around. Those are the shareware versions I have of the ones you mentioned. I also have gzdoom and the other great open-sourced versions. When I comment such as I did, I'm appealing to the already minority that frequent the Phoronix boards. No need to get uptight.

[oiaohm]

"DOSBox, the DOS emulator used by Wine and also can be run directly on Linux" sounds like DOSBox is just a part of WINE that also runs in some kind of stand-alone mode. The "truth" is that DOSBox is a completely separate DOS game emulator. And by "game emulator" I really mean "game emulator": See https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=27920

That forum posts are only part of the story.

https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Software

There are non games in supported software list.

Dosbox has insanely slow release cycles. 0.74 is from 2010. Wine patches for dosbox are from 2011
https://wiki.winehq.org/DOSBox noted here for niceness by wine version. Wine 1.3.30 is "October 10, 2011" so the wine patches are over 6 years old very soon would have been 7 years old. Also noted starting in 2015 Linux distributions started custom patching wine required patches into Dosbox. Of course this was distributions pulling the wine patches out the Doxbox SVN and apply them to 0.74.

Also you find other patches added to dosbox by Linux distribution for non game applications. Maybe at long last Dosbox developers will lose some of their stubbornness. They have proven with 0.74-2 that they can do a release with no dos software effecting patches. Maybe they could release a little bit often for platform compatibility patches and integration patches. "compilation problems" noted on Linux in the 0.74-2 release is 0.74 has been build able on modern Linux distributions for over 5 years without custom patching.

Dosbox 0.74-2 is kind of big news but not the way it written up. It does mean distributions don't have to custom patch for wine support but some linux distributions are still going to be maintaining custom patches.

Reality for wine is the wine project has to deal with dos based installers that shipped windows 9x and windows 3.x application that are win16/win32s applications. Guess what be it a dos game or dos application or win16/win32s application with dos installer if they had installer they are all basically the same. Dos Installer support is something that is generic.

Just to be horrible there are more applications with dos installers but with win16/win32 inside than the total number of commercial dos games ever released. Percentage of those commercial dos games also only came with win32/win16 installers.

For those that don't know https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/07/15/winevdm/ majority of the code required to run win16 programs on 64 bit windows is already written by the wine project. This developer used a different dos emulator for windows to provide the required protected modes and reworked the loader. Yet we still see dosbox forks going the route of run full windows 9x....

Wine project having trouble getting the patches they required into a release version of dosbox did/has put wine developers off. In 2014 when Linux kernel disable on 64 bit Linux the 16 bit protected mode wine needs for win16 consideration to dropping dosbox completely was given and going qemu instead. Its likely if problem of getting dosbox releases with patches wine need was not the case when that happened something like winevdm would have grown in dosbox as wine project back-up plan if 16 bit protect mode was disabled. I like to see open source project working well with each other reality here is wine and dosbox are working with each other but not particularly well.

[Vaporeon]

I haven't used "stable" DOSbox in about 6 years, instead using SVN builds. I have not noticed any massive regressions in that time either.

[M@yeulC]

I originally thought this was about making the windows version more compatible with wine... Which would have been a welcome improvement, as there are multiple "steamplay", dosbox-bundled games out there, that barely work out-of-the-box.

[Aleksei]

Any respectable individual has a variation of the following:

$ ls ~/Games/dos
aquanoid dangerous_dave doom gta keen simcity2000 warcraft2 wolf3d

Can you run warcraft 2 on recent DosBox and recent kernel? I tried recently, it won't run because of 16-bit disabled in the kernel config. Maybe you know some trick (to avoid compiling your own kernel)?

[mulenmar]

I was just kidding around. Those are the shareware versions I have of the ones you mentioned. I also have gzdoom and the other great open-sourced versions. When I comment such as I did, I'm appealing to the already minority that frequent the Phoronix boards. No need to get uptight.

chuckles I meant that humorously, no insult was taken.

[rene]

actually the update was really long overdue, I already thought the original authors abandon it, ..!