DOSBox gaming on PPC

[haramia]

Some of my favorite games run on DOS and because I like making my life complicated, I'd like to use my G5 Quad to play them.

Perhaps we could share what games run well, so others could try them out.

As far as my interests go, I like playing 2D strategy and fantasy games. The one I play most is Heroes of Might and Magic II. It was ported to Mac OS 9 but if you're running Leopard, the Classic environment is not available anymore.

 

[GA204]

Heroes 2 and 3 are awesome and both available in Classic, and one of the reasons I have OS 9 on my Cube and dual boot between Leopard and Tiger on my G5.

For other games, if you use the JIT DOSBox version from SourceForge, set the in-game detail to the lowest setting, change all of the audio settings to 22050 Hz and use OpenGL (+/- frameskip of 1), Daggerfall is quite playable on a DP 2.0 GHz G5.

 

[Project Alice]

For other games, if you use the JIT DOSBox version from SourceForge, set the in-game detail to the lowest setting, change all of the audio settings to 22050 Hz and use OpenGL (+/- frameskip of 1), Daggerfall is quite playable on a DP 2.0 GHz G5.

I had to look that game up, but apparently the minimum requirement is a 486DX2, with most people saying its preferable on a Pentium.
Which makes me wonder, is DOSBox that slow on PPC? I've been interested in trying it. But something tells me I could spin up a DOS VM in VirtualPC and it would probably play fine on much slower systems. Assuming DOS plays nice with whatever hardware VPC emulates.

I have actual PC's I usually use for games like this so, I haven't really experimented with games under emulation on these things in quite a few years.

 

[GA204]

Definitely recommend it; Daggerfall is my favourite game and one of the largest open world RPG games of its time. It runs quite well on a 486DX2 with the large hard drive install, but I haven't played it in real DOS since the late 1990's.

For 3D games like Daggerfall or Duke Nukem 3D, DOSBox has a reputation of steep hardware requirements on PPC. Still, Daggerfall is very playable on a DP 2.0 GHz G5 and even quite playable on a single processor 1.25 GHz G4 using the JIT version of DOSBox with the above settings and slightly higher frameskip of 1 or 2.

When I did try Daggerfall on a VPC 7.03 DOS 5.00 VM on a G4 1.25 GHz, it ran about the same speed as DOSBox-JIT. However, I haven't spent much time playing around with VPC yet to see if I can get it to run a little faster. Do you have any tips for optimizing a VPC 7 DOS VM?

 

[Dronecatcher]

You might find these posts interesting:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/dosbox-gaming-on-a-g3.1979246/

DOSBox For PPC

New from Dr Kaiser... https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/12/and-now-for-something-completely.html My only use for DOSBox is with seminal mod player, Fasttracker - which in the past was only barely doable on my 1.67 Powerbook with the CPU screaming towards 100%. Now with the new version from...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[GA204]

Just tried Daggerfall in RealPC on the 450 MHz Cube in OS 9, which beat them all(!). It works really great with the only noticeable problems being lag during the loading screens, no MIDI in the game (although SoundBlaster works) and there being no obvious way to right-click (although I have an old utility program I wrote in X86 DOS assembly that should work for that purpose, and could be adapted to other games).

There must be a way to better optimize my VPC7 DOS VM or the DOSBox code, but for now I just wanted to share that if you want to run DOS games on PPC Macs and can run Classic OS on your Mac, RealPC is definitely worth a try.