DOS Emulation Arrives For the Raspberry Pi 189
An anonymous reader writes "Homebrew Coder Pate has released a DOS Emulator for the Raspberry Pi. Originally released for the Nintendo DS and Android, the emulator currently can emulate a CPU: 80486 processor, including the protected mode features (for running DOS4GW games) but without virtual memory support. The emulation runs at a speed around that of a 20MHz 80486 (which equals a 40MHz 80386) machine. It has support for Super VGA graphics, Soundblaster 2.0, Memory, USB keyboard and mouse. Perfect for playing old classics such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and Theme Park."
Re:DOSBox? (Score:5, Informative)
DosBox works pretty well on ARM. It comes with lots of baggage though. You have X server and everything else sucking up the PI's limited memory (granted most Dos games and applications are probably expecting 16MB top to work with but...) It looks like this runs on the metal; so its probably faster.
If you don't need or want to do any multitasking and you want the very best retro-gaming experience this might be a nice choice. That said yes it a bit of a wheel re-advent; but so was DosBox, DosEMU existed for what a decade before it? Nothing wrong with having more options.
Re:"A lot"? (Score:5, Informative)
-VOGONS /vr/ (retro games)
-GoG
-4chan
-Abandonia
All active DOS gaming communities.
There are certainly more than 1000 people playing DOS games today.
Re:never understood the appeal (Score:4, Informative)
What you really want is to just run DOOM v1.9 with the command line option '-timedemo demo3'. That will give you a pair of numbers that is easily converted into average FPS. There's even a nice list [tuwien.ac.at] of machines and their results in this benchmark.
You'll notice that performance is also dependent on the amount of cache available, and the type of video card. This is why it's hard to do simple CPU benchmarks and extrapolate that to game performance. A 100mhz 486 with an ISA video card performs worse than a 66mhz 486 with a VLB video card. How this relates to performance in emulation is anyones guess.
Re:never understood the appeal (Score:4, Informative)
Other than as a proof of concept is there any fundamental use for this facility?
Does anybody want to play Doom like it was 1993?
I can think of one: DHPOS Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHPOS [wikipedia.org]
It would make one hell of a dirt cheap advanced POS for the small business owner. Especially those in developing countries. DHPOS website has people using this software all of the world where they can't afford expensive monthly support costs. Link: http://keyhut.com/pos.htm [keyhut.com]
With DOS and just DHPOS installed your employees can't mess with we browsing, etc.
Re:never understood the appeal (Score:4, Informative)
BTW there is no need for emulation to program in pascal. The version of freepascal in the raspbian repo works fine.