Next I change output=surface to output=ddraw to allow for scaling and aspect ratio correction. If your monitor is different, be sure to use its resolution (e.g. Open the nf file via the Start menu.įirst, I change the line that says fullresolution=original to fullresolution=1920x1080, which is my monitor’s native resolution. These settings can be changed by opening the DOSBox Options from the Start menu. The nf file controls how DOSBox displays old games and software. Thsi would make the payload much smaller than a full CD so make the games more practical even without trying to stream them.Compared to today’s high-definition games, DOS games used low resolutions, so playing old games in DOSBox on a modern LCD monitor or HDTV is not an optimal experience without some configuration. Of course you still need to implement some simulation of a disk swap.įor many the game was relatively small with CD music tracks making up most of the CD - these could be compressed (MP3/similar) and transmitted that way to be unpacked in the emulator at the other side. It might even make multi-CD games that started appeating in the mid 90, like Wing Commander III, practical to run this way. Streaming the data on request might feel faster than the local physical drive did back then, and avoids transferring the whole disk just to play the first part of the game. those with FMVs on the CD, the speed of many Internet connections these days is greater than I got out of a local CD-ROM in the mid 90s especially when the latency of spin up time is considered. Surely for most CD-ROM games of that era some sort of cached streaming would help greatly.įor those that actually had large chunks of data not CDDA audio, i.e. So much better to have emulators automatically deal with that stuff today. It's kind of fun looking back and having a slightly better idea of the "magic" behind a lot of the trial-and-error, though as much as I can reminisce about it I also probably wouldn't want to ever do it again. (I had to maintain some of those types of configs for a couple labs I was unpaid labor for, but that's another set of tales.) I remember being really proud of my boot-loader scripts saving multiple configs and making it easier to switch between them, rather than what a lot other people I knew were doing of just constantly changing their one set of AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS and having no idea what last worked for some previous games and always trying for some lowest common denominator that ran the most things they could as best as possible. So much of it at the age I was doing all of that was trial-and-error based almost solely on obscure error messages and trial-and-error. Again, probably fun combinations of protected mode fixes and EMS/XMS management TSRs built into OS/2 versus the other commercial ones games were often bundled with, or should have been bundled with but forgot or packaged an ancient broken version because it was cheaper…) (Similarly, there were at least a couple games that I recall ran better in a DOS window in OS/2 than anywhere else. Then there were fun crazy things like: boot into Win 3.11, for its protected mode fixes to activate (not that I knew at that age that's what was the magic, that's a more recent learning), immediately quit Windows, then the launch the game. Some games would require one config, others a second, Windows 3.11 sometimes a third, (then when I had OS/2 installed, that was yet another set boot options). I recall at one point I had an entire bootloader full of multiple choices of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS pairs based on which EMS or XMS needs I had. Yeah, game playing as a young person in that era was wild. Thankfully I've never ran into the EMS and XMS fun, but I can imagine that some aspects of DOS would feel very arcane to younger people.
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