You can drag the vertical slider below with your mouse and immediately see a difference. Using DOSBox Optionals I took a ‘before and after’ screen shot of ‘ no shader‘ and the ‘ crt-lottes_mod‘ shader. Given that I’m scaling my screen up, my no-shader view will have a slight blurring to it – but that’s not the shader. So without any ‘shaders’… What does DOSBox Optionals look like? Let’s compare shader to non shader. I recommend trying it out – I’ve tried a handful of titles with it thus far and they’ve worked, though I did discover a speech pitch issue. Yikes! The sheer number of options and documentation to each option compared to the normal DOSBox install was amazing. I downloaded and extracted DOSBox Optionals and opened up the nf. Marty has done a fantastic job of grouping all of these enhancements into a single DOSBox build that also supported the shader patch by duganchen. I stumbled across another DOSBox variant called DOSBox Optionals, created by Marty Shepard with near latest enhancements of DOSBox ECE, standard DOSBox, and other patches people have released that aren’t incorporated into the ‘standard DOSBox’ build. I didn’t want to use Retroarch for this, and I wanted something a little more recently maintained… An Optionals requirement is found Good job and a nod to Mattias Gustavsson for compiling his custom shader work into DOSBox. As much as I liked the inner screen rendering of it, this version essentially paints a CRT border around the screen that becomes part of your DOSBox window… I did not find this palatable: Go away monitor border… I didn’t ask for you. DOSBox CRT is close but no cigarĭOSBox CRT fit the bill at first – it’s essentially DOSBox 0.74 with a custom shader to give that real CRT look and feel. However, I wanted a relatively recent version of DOSBox with shaders. Now we have variants like DOSBox X, SVN Daum, ECE, and even CRT, which first caught my eye because, while I don’t always play with shaders (I dislike them on VICE), I wanted to see what the DOSBox world had to offer me. Remember that you don’t have to use one version of DOSBox for every single game you play, although if you could, that would be ideal from a configuration management standpoint, as each variant may have different config file options available. It emulates 3Dfx hardware and supports up to 384 MB of ram, two things that the standard DOSBox build doesn’t cover. One of the most popular variants today is called DOSBox ECE, standing for Enhanced Community Edition. There are a decent number of variants that fall under the label of ‘SVN Builds’, you can check em all out here. To that end, there’s almost always a variant of DOSBox that gains popularity for a while because DOSBox ‘proper’ doesn’t support every single feature a DOS gamer might want to utilize when playing a game (e.g. This article refers to functionality I utilized in a specific DOSBox variant known as DOSBox Optionals, compiled by Marty Shepard. It’s the de facto standard for running DOS games on modern hardware. This environment is complete enough to run many classic MS-DOS games completely unmodified. This is, of course, thanks in no small part to a little program called DOSBox.įrom their site to explain it best: DOSBox is an emulator that recreates a MS-DOS compatible environment (complete with Sound, Input, Graphics and even basic networking). Why DosBox at all?īetween the old copies of games I have on CD and floppy images (I saved a lot of crap digitally if not physically), the actual CDs themselves, and sites like GOG.com, I’ll be able to relive a lot of my old gaming days. Not only do I have to worry about DOS games, but Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and even some Windows 98 gaming, and attempting to make all of those games work on one small PC that will host the actual gameplay. I still have an Atari 2600 and IBM PC diorama to do, and the latter is a bit more technically challenging when it comes to actually playing the games. Let’s run a comparison of these shaders in a MSDOS Retro Gaming screenshot session of DOOM. So how do I get shaders? We have to utilize a fork or variant of DOSBox. Those little bits of code and configuration that can make a modern retro gaming screen look cell shaded, dotted like an old school CRT monitor, or even curved and blurred like an old TV tube. The basic version of DOSBox does not contain support for ‘shaders’. See how I configured that in the build log! Retro Gaming PC Build Log Part 3 : PC Games with GOG I’ve recently switched to DOSBOX-X for a more modern DOSBOX build with shaders support.
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