Dos games emulator for DS?

astragsi · September 08, 2006, 02:20:57 AM

Is there any emulator like 'DosBox' for the nintendo DS?

Would love to play my old PC DOS games...

Scor · September 08, 2006, 09:49:37 AM

Nope no DosBox (though DSlinux

), probably to heavy to run anyway.
Though if you have a scumm game you can run scummvm DS.

sardaukar · September 08, 2006, 10:35:40 AM

The DOS emulator won't come out 'til next year, along with the Dreamcast, Playstation and Sega Model 3 emulators. The author is busy with the optimization phase.

socket · September 08, 2006, 11:01:21 AM

Dont know if you can say DosBox is too heavy really... for example: diggerds and dssopwith are two excellent ports of two of my favorite dos games.... I want to play some janitor joe, beast, dr sleeptite, or various other crappy games on my ds.

I guess if you expect it to run more advanced games, it might be too heavy, but a simple DOS without later, more advanced, features is probably possible.

Scor · September 08, 2006, 01:33:51 PM

DosBox requires you to emulate an I386 and all other standard dos hardware. The games you mention are ports, so they are not emulated.

Scor · September 08, 2006, 01:34:23 PM

Quote from: "sardaukar"The DOS emulator won't come out 'til next year, along with the Dreamcast, Playstation and Sega Model 3 emulators. The author is busy with the optimization phase.

ROFL :lol:

socket · September 08, 2006, 03:37:40 PM

Quote from: "Scor"DosBox requires you to emulate an I386 and all other standard dos hardware. The games you mention are ports, so they are not emulated.

Well my point is this, it wouldnt have to be doxbox exactly just a dos emulator with limited functionality.

bitblt · September 08, 2006, 05:30:34 PM

Quote from: "socket"Well my point is this, it wouldnt have to be doxbox exactly just a dos emulator with limited functionality.

It's one thing to be able to navigate a file system with DOS commands like, CD, MD, RD, COPY, DEL, etc. It's whole different thing to be able to execute DOS programs developed for the PC using x86 code. Running x86 code on the DS would require full emulation and therefore a much faster ARM CPU. I believe even simple character based DOS programs are probably too much for the DS to emulate.

Even DOSBOX and Virtual PC have performance issues running some DOS based games on a moderately fast PC. The only reason why some games work on the DS (ie. Doom, Hexen) is because the original C/C++ source files have been hand optimized and compiled into native ARM code.

In the case of ScummVM the original engine was reverse engineered and then re-programmed and compiled into native ARM code. ScummVM isn't emulation, it's simulation using an engine developed to act like original Scumm.

sardaukar · September 09, 2006, 01:07:49 AM

Seriously now, it CAN be done - there's a DOSBox version for GP2x, and it runs ARM processors. But even on GP2X's 200Mhz cores, it's still slow. Give it up.

bitblt · September 09, 2006, 02:53:24 AM

Quote from: "sardaukar"Seriously now, it CAN be done - there's a DOSBox version for GP2x, and it runs ARM processors. But even on GP2X's 200Mhz cores, it's still slow. Give it up.

Quote from: "bitblt"Running x86 code on the DS would require full emulation and therefore a much faster ARM CPU. I believe even simple character based DOS programs are probably too much for the DS to emulate.

I didn't say ARM couldn't emulate x86.

sardaukar · September 09, 2006, 03:47:41 AM

I know you didn't, I'm just stressing that while it certainly IS possible, it's not practical. By the way, according to Turing's principle of machine processing, every computer is capable of performing any task (including emulation) - although the speed at which they do isn't specified.

socket · September 10, 2006, 10:18:33 PM

Quote from: "bitblt"I believe even simple character based DOS programs are probably too much for the DS to emulate.

Well, these are generally the kind of games I was talking about... I meant really old games, nothing with any sort of real graphics. Maybe I'll start remaking some of my favorites....

Payk · September 11, 2006, 02:37:59 AM

It wont be to havy. In fact if planed to do a "DosBox". The COM and DLL files are documentaded as well. At first i would try to have a GUI:

^^Thes GUI allows mouseemulation too.
When i finished it i will try to load Floppyimages and best would be CD-Images. It would be first step in a right dirrection. But i can promiss to much. The perfomrance i enough. RAM is enough...it should be possible

bitblt · September 11, 2006, 03:27:47 AM

Well, good luck to you Payk. Just like your prediction about PSX emulation, I think you might be over estimating the capabilities of the DS. I would love for you to prove me wrong. Does this mean you are going to stop working on your 3D engine then?

Payk · September 11, 2006, 05:03:33 AM

No. Its a second project. If one stucks a bit i can work on the other. 3D games are on a complete other way interesting then OSs are. Both interest me much.

Edit: Yesterday i reduced ram usage of my game by about 25%.
I started some test with the wram for buffering ogg. But i will first implement ogg in my os. if that works fine it goes over to my engine.
So it will help alot to have that second project