For those still playing DOS-based games, today is a good day as DOSBox 0.73 -- a tool which can emulate but also assist in running legit copies of these old titles on non-native DOS systems -- has been released.
It's actually a pretty big step up from 0.72, with highlights including improved Vista support, heaps of compatibility fixes, increased speed and stability, and lots more.
For Good Old Gamers, the installers there should be updated shortly; if you're too eager to wait, simply install this version and copy the exe to each game's folder as appropriate.
Full changelog is below.
- Add two new opl2+opl3 emulators. (better speed, different implementation
approach)
- Improved DRO recording/better file structure.
- Add EGA emulation.
- Add special vga machine mode. Supports more of the exotic tricks like
changing the palette during screen updates, 9x16 fonts etc.
- Added special machine modes for the following svga cards:
- S3
- Paradise
- Tseng
- Fix problems with the vga split line feature.
- Improve vesa emulation.
- Add optional selection of old vesa mode for games that don't work
with certain vesa features.
- Improve video BIOS emulation to behave more like a real bios.
- Fixes for emulated 4bpp graphics modes.
- Fixes to paging system.
- Various fixes and improvements for the recompiling core.
- Add arm backend for the recompiling core.
- Add some mscdex quirks when dealing with files that are exactly 8.3 long.
- Small fixes to batch file handling.
- Small fixes to the XMS memory handling.
- Various fixes for aligned memory on hosts that want it.
- Various improvements to the mouse.
- Fixes and small speed ups to the debugger.
- Fix and improve lot's of compilation problems. (curses detection,
GCC 3.4 and GCC 4.X fixes)
- Added some basic auto keyboard layout handling. (windows only currently)
- Add basic support for evdev keyboard driver.
- Various fixes to the timer. (improve mode 2 timer changes,
implement mode 1, improve gate2 handling)
- Add audio extraction and mci audio support. Should enable CDROM audio
for Vista and adds volume control.
- Improve the directory cache speed a lot, especially with mounting slow
media like network paths.
- Various fixes to the create temporary file call.
- Don't keep batchfiles open during execution. Allows rewriting of the
active batchfile. (menu programs use this trick sometimes)
- Fix problems with filenames with 2 extensions.
- Add some more lowlevel dos tables.
- Fixes to hercules emulation.
- Fix flag handling for special case of ROR.
- Make the batchfile handling in regard to IF more flexible.
- Fixes to scrolling/panning feature.
- Add prefetch queue emulation.
- Make the emulated cpu type selectable. This is mainly the
identification commands and the way paging works.
- Some special EMS functionality added. (OS handles, zero-page handling)
- Improve support for EMS when booting a different OS.
- Improve cdrom speed detection by games.
- Improve stability of cycle guessing code, when there is background
activity.
- Fix various mscdex and cdrom detection schemes.
- Added Coremidi support on Mac OS X.
- Improve support for DOS devices when used to detect the existance
of directories in various ways.
- Add IRQ 2 emulation on VRET. (ega only)
- Added video parameter table and video state functionality.
- Increase default freespace to 250 MB.
- Some fixes to the fat filesystem handling for disk images.
- Some soundblaster fixes and command additions.
- Fix mixer 16bit direct transfers on bigendian hosts.
