DOSBox Staging — a modern continuation of DOSBox

[Morenatsu.]

More like dependencies are cancer.

 

[Rincewind]

More like dependencies are cancer.

Ok, please rewrite the whole world from scratch. Looking forward to v1.0 of your project in 2080!

 

[Morenatsu.]

More like dependencies are cancer.

Ok, please rewrite the whole world from scratch. Looking forward to v1.0 of your project in 2080!

GrimwahBox

 

[Glop_dweller]

And the hard cold truth: Win 10 is king, Win 7 + 8 *combined* is a tiny blip at the tail end.

This is not at all surprising. But as the old (and oft overused adage goes), McDonalds is Statistically the most popular food; with billions served, and yet... This doesn't prove it's the best, or best for a person. If I had my choice I would still be using Win2k SP4. After that, Windoze became more about being a flashy user experience than about being an operating system/window manager—which is the only task that I'd expect or ever want it to manage. Windows 7 is bad enough on its own with its shell and feature omissions, and its further obfuscated configuration options, higher system requirements, and compelled under the hood additional —features— which no doubt continues with each new revised version of the OS. More and more bloat heaped upon even more bloat. Windows has been getting worse and worse with each new version starting with ME, and XP.

*No reflection on your project, or your point. I'm no stranger to abandoning applications when their updates, or new versions demand an OS change. Blender 3 and Clip Studio are my current peeves.

 

[Rincewind]

And the hard cold truth: Win 10 is king, Win 7 + 8 *combined* is a tiny blip at the tail end.

This is not at all surprising. But as the old (and oft overused adage goes), McDonalds is Statistically the most popular food; with billions served, and yet... This doesn't prove it's the best, or best for a person. If I had my choice I would still be using Win2k SP4. After that, Windoze became more about being a flashy user experience than about being an operating system/window manager—which is the only task that I'd expect or ever want it to manage. Windows 7 is bad enough on its own with its shell and feature omissions, and its further obfuscated configuration options, higher system requirements, and compelled under the hood additional —features— which no doubt continues with each new revised version of the OS. More and more bloat heaped upon even more bloat. Windows has been getting worse and worse with each new version starting with ME, and XP.

*No reflection on your project, or your point.

Make no mistake, I'm not in love with Windows 10, and the things you listed annoy me as well. The Linux compatibility layer is nice in Win10, but with that came many other less desirable "features'...

Yeah, 2 billion flies can't be wrong, I like to use that one too There's another saying: you can't swim against the tide (or not for too long, and you wish you didn't). Like it or not, this is what we can do today to support Windows users (and I happen to be one of those Win10 users myself too, what can I say...)

The good thing is, many of the core team members are Linux users so excellent Linux support is non-negotiable. We also explicitly support the Raspberry Pi 4. So when all goes to $hit in Microsoft land, we can all just move to Linux.

 

[Jigby]

is there a config switch to never show the "DOSBox Status Window"?

dosbox.exe -noconsole

 

[Naraya]

I had no idea DOSBox Staging allowed such a fancy Reverb/Chorus adjustments. Need to read more readmes!

 

[Rincewind]

I had no idea DOSBox Staging allowed such a fancy Reverb/Chorus adjustments. Need to read more readmes!

Thanks for posting the video, you beat me to it!

Yeah the reverb/chorus stuff and most of the newer audio improvements from last year were done by yours truly. I'm very much into audio and music (as a listener, amateur sound engineer, musician, and a coder).

We are working on a *very* comprehensive User Manual, but it takes TONS of effort as you can imagine. Also, I cannot help getting sidetracked fixing the many small inconsistencies and bugs I find in the codebase we inherited from the original DOSBox devs as I systematically go through literally everything in order to document it... There are so many forgotten features almost no-one knows about!

In the interim, our release notes are the best source of information on the new features, plus our wiki. I've also put links on the feature highlights on our front page a few days ago, check it out!


Useful links to learn more about the many enhancements introduced by DOSBox Staging

Project homepage (now the feature highlights are links that take you to the relevant release note item, the wiki, or an issue ticket)
https://dosbox-staging.github.io/

Release notes (in the left side navigation; only the major releases ending with '.0' are worth checking out)
https://dosbox-staging.github.io/downloads/windows/

Most new audio enhancements of mine were released in 0.79.0
https://dosbox-staging.github.io/downloads/release-notes/0.79.0/

DOSBox Staging wiki (tons of useful info here, but a bit disorganised... the upcoming User Manual will fix that!)
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/wiki

Enhanced audio configurations for a few games I like and/or use for testing (these showcase the audio enhancements very nicely; a must for OPL fans!)
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/wiki/Audio-configuration-recommendations

 

[Naraya]

I know it's not directly related to DOSBox staging but:
- it's interesting (I haven't heard about this card before)
- it's audio related
- it's LGR

 

[agris]

Rincewind a question for you. As a longtime Daum user in Windows environment, I've gotten used to a d3d renderer that supports d3d shaders. I've tried migration to other, newer builds in the past in that take the reasonable approach of adopting opengl as the main renderer to improve non-windows/x86 support. ECE being the last I really gave a run.

One of the issues I've run into is quite simple, the openGL crt shaders seem shit. They use a sledgehammer where a brass punch would suffice. CRT.D3D.fx from Daum's build is hands-down the best CRT shader I've used, as it masks aliasing in 320px assets without adding excessive scanlines or dramatic tube-style corner distortions.

Are you familiar with that *.fx and do you happen to know any good openGL crt shaders that look the same?

 

[Naraya]

Rincewind a question for you. As a longtime Daum user in Windows environment, I've gotten used to a d3d renderer that supports d3d shaders. I've tried migration to other, newer builds in the past in that take the reasonable approach of adopting opengl as the main renderer to improve non-windows/x86 support. ECE being the last I really gave a run.

One of the issues I've run into is quite simple, the openGL crt shaders seem shit. They use a sledgehammer where a brass punch would suffice. CRT.D3D.fx from Daum's build is hands-down the best CRT shader I've used, as it masks aliasing in 320px assets without adding excessive scanlines or dramatic tube-style corner distortions.

Are you familiar with that *.fx and do you happen to know any good openGL crt shaders that look the same?

agris Answer to your question will be inherently subjective. Have you tried shaders from this repo? I find eg. crt-aperture one to be quite balanced.

 

[agris]

Kinda. It isn't subjective whether or not someone has used a specific shader and if they're aware of an openGL analogue to it, but I appreciate the link Naraya

 

[Great Deceiver]

Rincewind a question for you. As a longtime Daum user in Windows environment, I've gotten used to a d3d renderer that supports d3d shaders. I've tried migration to other, newer builds in the past in that take the reasonable approach of adopting opengl as the main renderer to improve non-windows/x86 support. ECE being the last I really gave a run.

One of the issues I've run into is quite simple, the openGL crt shaders seem shit. They use a sledgehammer where a brass punch would suffice. CRT.D3D.fx from Daum's build is hands-down the best CRT shader I've used, as it masks aliasing in 320px assets without adding excessive scanlines or dramatic tube-style corner distortions.

Are you familiar with that *.fx and do you happen to know any good openGL crt shaders that look the same?

Try crt/fakelottes.tweaked.glsl

 

[Rincewind]

Are you familiar with that *.fx and do you happen to know any good openGL crt shaders that look the same?

It's easy to replicate that using the shaders included in DOSBox Staging. That's a really old shader and there's nothing special about it.

I'll write the second part of my authentic shader series over the next few months, so this will be discussed there in great detail. But in short:

- For 320x200 VGA, using 'machine = vgaonly' is a must with shaders to enable double-scanning. 320x200 VGA is technically indistinguishable from 640x400 from the point of view of the monitor; it's pixel and line-doubled as VGA cards only *emulate* 200-line resolutions! Applying single-scanlines per pixel to 320x200 VGA is wrong! It never looked like that!
- Having said that, on 1080p don't bother... There's not enough vertical resolution for properly displaying 400 emulated scanlines. Just use the default blinear-sharp shader and call it a day.
- However, 'crt/fakelottes.tweaked' is excellent on 4k with 'machine = vgaonly'
- For pre-VGA 200-line resolutions, 'crt/aperture' is my favourite. Pre-VGA cards & monitors (EGA, CGA, Tandy, etc.) did not line double, they had "true 200-line" resolution. Displaying 200 emulated scanlines is very doable at 1080p, even with resolution restriction to 920x720 that I'm doing (to get the same physical image dimension as that of a 14" CRT monitor... pixel art looks wrong "blown up" to fullscreen on a 24-27" monitor, IMO)
- Don't use the shaders from that Tyrell's repo. I've applied compabitibility and gamma fixes to many of them, the updated versions are included in DOSBox Staging. I've raised PRs, but Tyrell seems to have abandoned that project; he hasn't merged them since last May or so... So we're taking over the maintenance of those shaders, effectively.

Hope that helps.

 

[Rincewind]

Some screenies & photos of actual VGA and EGA CRTs (some files are huge, 5-6 megs)

Tweaked version of crt/aperture I use for EGA games (could be made sharper; it's a matter of taste, all EGA monitors were different)

Photo of an actual EGA monitor

Tweaked version of crt/aperture I use for VGA games on 4k (zoom in & note there's two scanlines per pixel)

Photo of actual VGA monitor (zoom in & note there's two scanlines per pixel)

Photo of an actual VGA monitor

 

[Rincewind]

Btw agris, I've volunteered to convert some old Daum shaders for the eXoDOS folks they use to de-interlace FMV games. The reason is they will slowly start migrating to Staging, but it's a massive job, and we need to ensure feature parity with all exotic features they use in some of these old abandoned DOSBox forks (they don't want feature regressions, which is a nice goal to have).

So I might port over CRT.D3D.fx as well if it's easy enough (I suspect it is). But as I said, you're better served with the more recent shaders, I'm pretty sure about that, and eventually, we'll add full RetroArch multi-pass Slang shader support which will blow everything existing out of the water...

 

[Average Manatee]

The PhilsComputerLabs guy started doing a series on DOSBox Staging. It's very informative, highly recommended to watch for all DOS gaming enthusiasts.

It's great to see he went through the same "shader journey" as myself and many others, I assume (from "100% sharp pixels or GTFO" to "I can't play any old game without proper period-authentic CRT shaders anymore").

It's funny to think that the general gaming consensus is that 4k is overkill but this guy is like "Can't wait for 8k so I can more accurately fake having non-square pixels when emulating 640x480 games".

 

[Rincewind]

The PhilsComputerLabs guy started doing a series on DOSBox Staging. It's very informative, highly recommended to watch for all DOS gaming enthusiasts.

It's great to see he went through the same "shader journey" as myself and many others, I assume (from "100% sharp pixels or GTFO" to "I can't play any old game without proper period-authentic CRT shaders anymore").

It's funny to think that the general gaming consensus is that 4k is overkill but this guy is like "Can't wait for 8k so I can more accurately fake having non-square pixels when emulating 640x480 games".

Yeah I'm the same. I'm perfectly fine with 1080p for everything, except for CRT shaders. That's the only reason I'll buy 4K and eventually 8K monitors.

To properly emulate CRT monitors, you need 8k variable refresh rate 400Hz+ OLED/MicroOLED. Well, and wide colour gamut helps too, sRGB is not enough... So it's not gonna happen tomorrow, that's for sure.

Oh, and HDR too with *tons* of brightness.

 

[Theodora]

I had no idea DOSBox Staging allowed such a fancy Reverb/Chorus adjustments. Need to read more readmes!

I wonder how many publishing old games on Steam wrapped in DOSbox will update their games to utilise this instead. (Probably not much room for optimism ; ; has it got any mention from people at GOG, even?)

Thanks for sharing such interesting videos anyway.

 

[Rincewind]

I wonder how many publishing old games on Steam wrapped in DOSbox will update their games to utilise this instead. (Probably not much room for optimism ; ; has it got any mention from people at GOG, even?)

Eventually, they'll be forced to upgrade as the old unmaintained DOSBox will run into all sorts of compatibility problems with newer OSes.

But don't hold your breath; for instance, they'll probably never set up games properly for MT-32 sound as they can't bundle the Roland ROMs, etc. Best is to set them up from scratch yourself.

 

[Rincewind]

Very nice and succinct rundown by PhilsComputerLabs on my adaptive CRT shaders that will be part of the next DOSBox Staging release.

Release candidate will come out around December or so, then final release early next year. But you can try the current dev snapshot builds right now (generally, they're pretty stable; it's rare we break something and it stays so for long):

https://dosbox-staging.github.io/downloads/development-builds/

 

[Great Deceiver]

Great work. Congratulations!

 

[mondblut]

Less reverb and pixel wankery, more save states.

 

[Rincewind]

Less reverb and pixel wankery, more save states.

It's fucking hard to do it right, probably impossible to do it absolutely correctly. Even a half-assed job would be tons of effort, and frankly, it's very low priority. You can save in most DOS games worth playing anyway, can't you?

See here. I got enthusiastic a few days ago... then it had vaned...

https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/313

 

[mondblut]

So basically this thread should be read as "we're reinventing Dosbox to eclipse and overtake all other inferior Dosboxes out there, but we ain't gonna have their features because they're teh hard… but look at these pixel-perfect reverbs, that's the shit, man!"