On Sat, 12 Jun 2004 05:32:22 +0000, James Michael Fultz wrote:

> * Bradley Reed <bradreed@NOSPAMcomcast.net>:
>>> [ games I tried in DOSBox were slow for me ]
>>
>> Did you try hitting CTRL-F12 several times while the game was running?
>> I think the default settings run the games slowly because there are a
>> lot of old games that are just unplayable at modern computer speeds.
>> Each time you hit CTRL-F12 it speeds up emulation, just don't speed it
>> up faster than your computer will handle or it will become slow again.
>
> Yes, I did. It did help but didn't seem to be quite enough for me. I'm
> using an Athlon Thunderbird 1400MHz, for reference. I suppose that it
> should be fast enough for some of the older games that I have to run in
> DOSBox. Perhaps not. I suppose that more experimentation is in order.
> ;-)
>
>> Just finished a game of Master of Orion in Dosbox not 10 minutes ago.
>
> That's cool. It seems to me that DOSBox could prove useful beyond games
> too. If one had an old DOS application that was needed to read some old
> data, etc.

We've tried it for just that. I work in a hospital, and it'a amazing how
many dos based apps there are still around...Many from the government,
like for reporting statistics.
DOSBox/DOSEMU work reasonably well for some, but we have had issues with
keymappings and font display with some apps. Some work "out of the box",
some not. At one point I even got one running that needed to connect to
an old Netware server...Had Novell client running in Dosemu, and launching
the app. It worked, but had just enough quirks that we couldn't put it in
production.
But we have 2 that are running full-time on Linux boxes, which means users
can telnet to them from any of the workstations, instead of us having to
set them up on the individual machines.

Anyway, my point...DOS emulation does work pretty well in alot of
situations. Very cool.


--
- Matt -