I hope we are getting DOSBox Pure at some point.

themazingness

@benmclean Interesting point. I'd counter that it encourages archiving formats and archiving is preservation. I'd also argue that it isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. As an SVN it is a branch of DosBox, not the definitive one. It's merely one option.

I've settled on DosBox-X because it actually feels like I'm using DOS. I think it's cool that this one focuses a bit more on making it a console like experience.

As romantic as your idea sounds, floppies and cds are all volatile and won't last forever. CDs scratch. Floppies are an endangered species and easily deteriorate. I admire the idea of preserving these as best as possible though.

dinth

@benmclean said in I hope we are getting DOSBox Pure at some point.:

Cause all it does is run game rips and treats the game rips like as if they're console ROMs. If that format is popularized for DOS games then the installation media won't get preserved.

I understand your concerns about the preservation of installation media for dos games and I support the cause - keep all my original media backed up on a NAS and crashplan and take pride of my collection. But on the other hand, often i just want to play a game on my TV with a gamepad in my hand and then Dosbox-pure is perfect for me, not only allowing me to play old games but also having an added benefit of treating them as a console game - just switch on the tv, choose a game and jump straight into it. I believe those are two completely different use cases and its great that now both have dedicated tools.

BTW. Dosbox-pure is now available in experimental repo of RetroPie and so far it works perfectly fine on Raspberry 4

patomax

I'm testing it on a Rpi 3B + and it works flawlessly with Fuzzy and Little Big Adventure, my only complaint is that it saves the configuration to a .zip file in the same Rom folder, and ES confuses it with a game.

I saw that you can change the extension of the games to .dosz, I will have to do that for a while and remove it from looking for .zip files from es_config.

I also noticed that it detects the .map files automatically

retro81

@patomax there’s an easier workaround for this: change the default retroarch settings from saving saves to <content directory> to a folder of your choice, in my case I created “saves” in the default retroarch config fldr along with all the other retroarch stuff

williambarty

@xwons

Thanks so much for posting the step-by-step installation guide for DOSBox Pure -- incredibly clear and helpful!

patomax

@retro81 1332 / 5000
thank you, but in the end I decided to leave them in .dosz format because anyway you have to create the compressed file and in Pegasus frontend a strange bug happens that takes files from other folders.
These are the games that I put in dosbox Pure.

alt text

some games where the control configuration is detected automatically are missing important keys, for example in Pinball Illusion there is the ESC key to exit the table but the Y key is missing to confirm, in prince of persia 2 the ENTER key is missing to change options, the on-screen keyboard helps but does not always look good and the idea is to avoid its use if there are still buttons available on the control to use, at least they can still be assigned one by one, but key combinations cannot be assigned or at least I don't know how to do it.

I tried the MT-32 ROM I had in lr-scummvm in PURE and surprisingly it works, in some games it does not affect performance but in others it affects them in certain sections, more tests are required.

Some games that used images and that I transferred from my old Dosbox installation did not work, the best option is to just compress the image and install the game, the .Zip file works like the virtual hard disk. The games I install from GoG such as LBA have .Bin and .Cue images but they have the extensions changed to .GoG and .Dat respectively, they must be renamed and the emulator detects them.

that for now, I'll keep adding games.

retro81

@patomax nice collection and good analysis! Either using dosz or zip is fine, what I was referring to is about changing the location of the saves, which is far better than messing with the ES xml

Shaggy1

I wanted to thank everyone in this thread. Dosbox pure on retropie has changed my dos emulation experience tremendously. I have tested about 10 games in eXodos zip format and found complete compatibility. To sum up the customizations I have made based upon this thread:

Placed game archives in ~/RetroPie/roms/pc folder, renaming to .dosz instead of .zip
Updated libretro config to place saves in ~/.config/retroarch/dosbox-saves

Further:

Customized es_systems to refer to the .dosz extension.
Compiled a modified Skyscraper fork to recognize .dosz for “pc” screen scraper.

So far scraping is about 90% accurate when using the eXodos files.

This is so much better than the shell scripts needed for dosbox. I will never go back.

hooperre

Has anyone successfully set an auto-boot? I set it and it's gone the next time I open one.

retro81

@hooperre yes, it works fine for me, check permissions on the config files maybe

hooperre

@retro81 Are you aware of what config files are used? I don't mind doing them manually. I have tried both .dosz and .zip files, neither with success. Both are being used on a USB thumb, so I'm not sure if that's what's causing the problem.

patomax

@hooperre When you define an autoboot, a .zip file is created with the name of the game.save, it acts as the virtual disk and inside it places a text file called AUTOBOOT.DBP. it simply contains the name of the executable for example C: \ START.EXE

if this file is not being created it may be lack of permissions within the roms folder or wherever it is creating the gamename.save.zip file

hooperre

@patomax Thanks. Interesting. I reset my rom permissions last night, but it still isn't working unfortunately.

Edit: Confirmed it is an error running from a USB as it works fine when I copied to the SD card.

The answer is simple as creating a .zip file wherever the rom is stored named [GAME].save.zip containing an empty file titled AUTOBOOT.DBP, as @patomax alluded to, and the core will do the rest from there. Some of them I did need to add the actual file path eg. C:\WAR1.EXE or D:\NBA97\NBA.BAT manually, however, and that works fine as well. Works for .zip and .dosz filetypes.

jamrom2

I've been testing this all day... so far...

Converted a few games like Joe Montana Football, Desert Strike, A-10 Tank Killer, Syndicate and Knights of the Sky. Worked great and no issues. Sound, Joystick control, speed and video size/quality all great.
Tried Magic Carpet. Worked well, but seems a little slower than regular DosBox. No other issues. Works with mouse only, because it was a mouse only game (I think one of the first if I remember correctly)
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe asks for program disk #2 immediately follwoing the Lucasarts title screen. Never did this in DosBox. Not sure what to do with this as there is no other disk to do a virtual swap with.
Dark Forces works, but the joystick calibration sends the game into spin in circle mode. Tried everything to get out of it doing that, but there is no game config to reassign buttons. But.. the game works and that's 80% of the battle.
Red Baron - does well until asked for a disk, just dumps out with a fatal error. Wasn't an issue with the same file build in DosBox.

So without going further, multi-disk games seem to create a problem. Controls are good when the game matches what it's configured for, I tried changing the assignments in the core, but doesn't seem to have any effect on the game. And I get the xx.save.zip file in my \roms\pc folder for every game I run.

I'd say this is a really good head start and I really appreciate the work that's gone into it. It's a lot easier to just make a zip file and play, but it looks like it still needs more tweaking. Whatever is causing this to happen, seems to be a stark difference in the core's of each.

Keep plugging though. It's definitely refreshing to see DosBox getting the Retroarch treatment.

krzychu148

@shaggy1 Could you describe how to add the .dosz extension to Skyscraper ?

patomax

@krzychu148 It's easy, all you have to do is go to .../configs/all/skyscraper and add in the config.ini file.

[pc]
extensions="*.dosz"

krzychu148

@patomax Thank you very much for the response!

jamrom2

So after a ton of testing my DOS games... I reverted back to "core" DosBox. I think it has a lot to do with me running a Pi3b+

Sound issues on many games when using any features like overlays and forget about using shaders. Sound pops, cracks and skips.

Some games don't run as fast as they do in core, Aces over Europe is a good example, and other games have disk recognition issues like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.

Eventually, I'm going upgrade to a Pi4, probably sooner than later... but until then, I dropped back. I think this is a great port to Libretro, and my finding by no means should prevent anyone from doing it. I'm very happy to see it happen. I'll just hold off for now.

niculinux

By the end of 2020 we got it! As of now latest version is 0.11 relased on 23 feb 2021 but an interesting control preset is missing, that is to say numeric keypad emulation via gamepad, don't know if it might be possible but sone games offer only that uncommon controller system such as Ecstatica

Hope it will be implemented someday..

patomax

@jamrom2 I had some performance issues when connecting my Rpi3b + to a TV and using audio over HDMI, but when using audio through the headphone output, performance is not affected as much.