Reply To: Who uses real hardware?
As fantastic as DOSBox is, I’m certainly all for real hardware. I’m loving the Atari branded PC. This is my main PC setup:-
Modern PC on the right, my old XP era machine on the far left, and in the middle under the desk, a metric ton of cables normally hidden by the chair + a Dell Dimension 486SX 33 + a PII 400. The PII has basically 2 sets of sound and video cards in it and a DOS/Win 98 dual boot which I can pick and choose between depending what I’m running. The Dell was something of a barn find – it was absolutely revolting when I got hold of it, including petrified chewing gum stuck in the expansion slots. Miraculously everything still worked when cleaned up.
It doesn’t get all that much use but I’ve got an old Mac set up on the left. They can be quite good fun with DOS/early Windows era gaming – e.g. playing Dark Forces in 640×480. I got the big Apple Studio monitor with the primary intention of DOS gaming but Apple being Apple, it doesn’t have all the usual controls and is set up slightly differently. It works OK most of the time but the brightness isn’t what it should be using it as a PC monitor and some DOS games you simply can’t see what you are doing. I’m loathe to get rid of it so I’ve ended up with 2 CRT’s in here and vertical stacking with my main PC monitors to fit everything in. I’ve a KVM switch to connect the two DOS machines to the other monitor.
Never been aware of any degradation with Sound Blasters myself. My ears have probably degraded more than they have so maybe I just don’t notice. I still have my original Sound Blaster 1.5 card from about 1991 working in another PC on the top floor. For these PC’s down here, I feed all the various audio outs through a little board I got off Ebay that combines 6 signals into one, then into my line in on the modern PC so that the audio comes out in one place whichever machine I’m on. There’s a Roland CM-64 + SC155 for MIDI games at the front left that feed into that as well.
If I fiddle around with caching settings in the BIOS, these two machines cover near enough everything put out during the 90s. I’ve got a few older machines upstairs for EGA and earlier. I’ll grab a picture of them next time I’m up there.
