DOS emulator

DOSBox-X

You've probably already played with the original DOSBox, which is a brilliant piece of software. It enables you to run old PC DOS software on modern PC hardware, solving two problems in a single stroke. The DOS environment that preceded Windows is no longer a thing. Even if you were able to get it to work on modern hardware, it would run far too fast for most software and games to be usable. DOSBox brings compatibility and allows you to throttle the speed, all without remembering a single IRQ register. But for some developers, DOSBox's emulation options are still too limiting, especially if you want emulation at the same exacting standard as some of MAME's emulated hardware reaches. And that's what this fork of DOSBox does.

The DOSBox-X project intends to present many more configuration options to the user, to target a much more specific emulating demographic – those who want to play old games and demos as accurately as possible. DOSBox-X has also set itself a hugely ambitious target of emulating all pre-2000 DOS and Windows 9x-based hardware, including peripherals, motherboards, and CPUs. You can see the results of some of the early work in the way DOSBox-X runs old demoscene demos more accurately than Bochs, QEMU, and DOSBox, passing many tests that the original DOSBox fails. This is obviously where the inspiration for the fork comes from, and building a platform to accurately recreate the performance of this old hardware is just as valuable as the work done to recreate the classic SID chip or the open source re-engineered Commodore 64 ROMs. Without these exacting re-creations, we'll likely lose an important part of early technology history after the hardware has failed. But projects like DOSBox-X allow this vital piece of history to be snapshotted and played with by anyone with a Linux box.

Project Website

http://dosbox-x.com/

DOSBox-X can also emulate old versions of Windows alongside ancient versions of DOS.

Classic shooter