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X-Wing under Virtual PC

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Now this is a classic, the original DOS version of X-Wing.  The game where you got to play as part of the rebellion and try to overthrow the evil empire - you even get to participate in the final run on the Death Star.

This game had many things that made it great.  It had an amazing 3D engine (for the day), a compelling story line, and a lot of attention to detail.  The missions in this game are quite authentic for a 'rebellion' in that you are always racing against the clock to try and complete your mission before stronger forces arrive from the Empire.  Similarly, many of your missions involve skulking around and trying to destroy / capture ships without drawing attention to yourself.

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X-Wing runs well under Virtual PC - with smooth graphics and perfect sound support.  The only problem is that you cannot use the joystick - which leaves you relying on mouse / keyboard (annoying, but possible to do).

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
    I have found DOSBox to be far too slow for some games (ie Dark Forces), because it's a multi-platform emulator.  It's not supposed to be fast, and it can't be fast.  Virtual PC on the other hand is specifically for x86 processors and thus doesn't have to emulate 'em... I have thus found this the best and fastest solution for my DOS fix. Of course, if you don't have speed problems with DOSBox, go right ahead.  It's easier to just run games on it without having to install DOS and stuff. And what do you mean by "improvements for DOS"?  DOS is DOS, and it's a dead product, hasn't been updated since Windows ME (and post-6.22 MS-DOSes don't really work very well with plain <= 6.22 DOS stuff anyways).  You got virtual additions, which do as much as I would expect (folder sharing, lower CPU usage on idle). If you want to do something like automatically run a VM and launch a DOS game just by clicking an icon, Ben's already been over how to do that (check the archives).  Otherwise I can't see what you would want MS to do... DOS is DOS, and the whole point of LEGACY stuff is IT CAN'T GET IMPROVED.

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
    "I have found DOSBox to be far too slow for some games (ie Dark Forces)" Actually that was true a couple years ago. With the newer version of Dosbox (0.70), almost every game ever made for dos runs decently even on a three/four years old machine. Just make sure you're running with dynamic recompiler on (type "core dynamic" at prompt), if it's still slow then raise cycles number (type "cycles max"). All this should be automatic for most games (no need to type anything), anyway if your game is still slow this is the way to speed it up.

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
    DOSBox gets bad rap for being slow by people that have not tried in in the last couple of years. The project is in very active development, and is constantly being improved & optimized. VPC has its uses, but its forte is not DOS gaming. There are very few DOS games that you can't get to run decently on DOSBox. "Granted memory management on DOS is a pain, but so is tweaking DOSBox config files" What is so hard about selecting a few options like: xms= true ems= true umb= true If it doesn't work, you don't end up with an unbootable machine. Remember "The right tool for the right job." Also, it's a little unfair to call someone a troll because he reasoned arguments that just happen to not be your views.

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2007
    As Collector said - "The right tool for the right job.". But I see it little different - there are some uses, when VPC is better than DOSBox and vice versa. If someone doubts - try run Earth 2140 with sound on DB - good luck with that :) (or try run some SVGA game with DB on something like C900). So, I think there is no perfect "tool" - sometimes DB is better, sometimes - VPC (with FreeDOS ofc :)).

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2007
    Most of the bad rap DOSBOX got, is from people who didn't know what they were doing or gave up after 5 minutes. I told Qbix (one of the original creators of DOSBOX) that the defauly speed for Dosbox was set waaay too low (set to 3000 cycles which is slower than a 386 which means most DOS games ran much too slow) and since 0.70 nearly all DOS games will run perfectly with the default values. So, it did confuse a lot of people who didn't know what cycles are. The huge problem with VirtualPC is exactly that it doesn't emulate. It means that older games will be way too fast in a lot of cases with no way to slow them down. Dosbox uses cycles to do this, and with a front end, you can have a perfect experience. In the end, Dosbox runs on nearly every system, runs nearly every Dos game perfectly (I think only about 2% of all games still won't run well) and with a front end, it's virtually painless to use.

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2007
    DOSGAMELOVER: I can't imagine how Virtual PC is slow for you and DOSBox is fast.  Maybe you're thinking of running a newer OS, such as XP or Vista, on Virtual PC.  Then of course it will run slow unless you have a monster of a machine.  And if you compare Virtual PC to running anything natively on the same machine, it will be slower because you also have a whole host OS and other processes running, so it will look slow. But DOSBox has even more overhead.  And I say this not because I have coded it or looked at the source, but because I played Dark Forces a lot in DOSBox, and I got the best performance I could. I then decided to see if Virtual PC would run it better... in theory it would, because of the virtualization/emulation differences I mentioned earlier.  I tried it and it did run much better. kekko: Just an FYI, I have been talking about DOSBox 0.70 using the dynamic core, and maxing CPU cycles. Collector: About my config comment, I was merely pointing out that DOSBox has text-based config files just like MS-DOS does. Also I called us BOTH trolls (and I didn't notice two different people had posted).  And I said that because we're sorta deviating from the topic of the blog post. Red_Avatar: I did used to use DOSBox with Dark Forces a lot and I did tweak the config files a bit as well.  I even made a mod launcher for Dark Forces which supports launching through DOSBox. Also it's easy to slow down DOS games in Virtual PC.  Ben has been over this before, I believe.  Back when DOS was in wide use there were tools made to slow down faster games... you can still find 'em.  I think I used one called slomo or something like that.  It was neat 'cause it was a TSR (you'd hit a hotkey and it'd pop up over the command prompt) allowing you to adjust the speed on the fly. BlackhandPL says what I probably should have said from the beginning.  Both Virtual PC and DOSBox are good for different games and different people. EXAMPLES:

  • Virtual PC won't run some games, example: Descent 1.  DOSBox to the rescue! (Actually haven't tried it in DOSBox, I probably should heh.)
  • DOSBox is easy to just double-click and use, although minimal CLI knowledge is needed there are frontends that eliminate this requirement, making it even easier to use.  Virtual PC is decidedly for those of us more comfortable with DOS.  It can be slower, but for most games this isn't an issue.  If it is, you can decide if it's worth looking at other solutions, just as I did. There's no reason to do "DOSBox is superior, VPC is inferior" or visa-versa.  Both programs share my hard drive without annihilating each other.  I've used them both.  There's no reason to champion one over the other. Well, except that this is VIRTUAL PC Guy's Blog. :) So uhh... back to X-Wing... I'm gonna have to find a copy of this, Death Star trench run would be fun.  TIE Fighter had nothing like that (well, except maybe the training course). Huh... does Virtual PC always double pixel size in low resolutions like that?  Or is that just the game doing it?  I never paid attention!  Hmm... Virtual PC needs a zoom function to do that... that'd be neat.  Oh well... maybe for Virtual PC 20XX? :)

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2007
    I tried many DOS games in VPC - some did not work at all, some had broken or miserable audio. VPC is useless for DOS gaming, maybe with very few exceptions. It is sad that Microsoft did nothing for DOS games on modern platforms, without DOSBox there would be no solution at all.

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2007
    Red_Avatar, you're right. There is Earth 2140 for Windows. Guys from Reality Pump ported their game to Windows just like Blizzard did with Warcraft II (WII Battle.net Edition). But Warcraft II has been improved during that process ("food counter" just like in StarCraft, network play over TCP/IP, Battle.net support) whereas Earth suffered some "damage" - it seems they somehow deactivated AI module (so now even "hard" isn't much of challenge), multiplayer doesn't work either. DOS version doesn't have those issues - at least AI works properly (I didn't try to play over network - I don't know how to configure IPX/SPX correctly).

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2007
    "DOSBox is an emulator.  Virtual PC is a virtualizer." Virtual PC does a fair amount of emulation itself - both Sound and Video devices are emulated. Of the two products mentioned, DOSBox does a much better job emulating sound. Speed wise, I have to agree with the others - give 0.70 a shot and see if your experience improves (the product was enhanced quite a bit). "There's no reason to do "DOSBox is superior, VPC is inferior" or visa-versa.  Both programs share my hard drive without annihilating each other.  I've used them both.  There's no reason to champion one over the other. Well, except that this is VIRTUAL PC Guy's Blog. :)" I suspect that Ben is a gamer - at least he appears to be one, otherwise he wouldn't have a Gaming Section devoted to them. But because of the shortcomings of VPC when it comes to legacy gaming, he's naturally going get a thread or two that points out that the other product does things better.   In as much as VPC wasn’t designed to support old DOS games we don’t have a lot of room to whine. We can always hold out for improvements (because we think Ben like games too).

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2007
    Wow.  I go out for a weekend and the biggest comment discussion on gaming on my blog happens. Okay - let's all calm down a little.   I couple of points I would like to make:

  1. Yes - I am aware of DOSBox - and think it is a great project.  However...
  2. Virtual PC is my product, and I use Virtual PC because I like it.  I also use Virtual PC for gaming as it allows me to find interesting and esoteric bugs.  I have DOSBox installed on many of my computers - but I rarely use it - simply because I prefer to use Virtual PC.
  3. Virtual PC (and other virtualization products from Microsoft) is not designed or intended for gaming.  We do not actively make changes to increase the performance / playability of games.  However - if we find a game that causes a crash or exposes a funcamental bug - we do fix that.
  4. Given the previous point - I think it is impressive that Virtual PC can run as many games as it does.
  5. I am not going to get into a discussion of whether DOSBox is better or worse than Virtual PC at running a specific game, or games in general.  Both tools are free - and you are free to choose for yourself.
  6. Battle Chess runs really well under the upcoming Windows Server virtualization technology...  Okay - that is off topic - but cool none the less. Cheers, Ben
  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2007
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2007
    Nope. Dosbox emulates a PC and MS-DOS but only what is needed to get games to work. There is no config.sys in DosBox, there is an autoexec.bat but it is part of the DosBox.conf file in the [autoexec] section. No EMM386/HIMEM is needed with DosBox. In fact there has been alot of work in DosBox to make those games that use JEMM to work very easily in DosBox which work notorious for being difficult to use in real dos. In earlier DosBox builds you had to disable EMS or XMS but in the latest DosBox build you just run your game and that's it. A massive improvement over real DOS on a real PC. This is just one of many things DosBox does. Very rarely you will encounter a game which requires real MS-DOS or EMM386. In those cases you can create a hard drive image and load MS-DOS on it (like Virtual PC) and boot that in DosBox to play your game.