DOS on untraditional devices?
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Anyone tried DOS on non-PCs; things like WeeCee, Android, Raspberry Pi? If so what was your experience?
Android has quite a few options for DOSBox ports. I’ve tried a few free ones and Magic DOSBox and DOSBox Turbo. IME they don’t run as well as a modern PC or native, yet are still fun and better than nothing when mobile. If you have the patience to configure it my vote would be for Magic DOSBox.
You know, it seems like this is something I would have done, but I can’t think of any time I’ve ever run DOS on something non-traditional. Apart from maybe when I booted my main PC into MS-DOS 6.22 natively just to see if I could.
I have thought about trying something on my android phone, but then I just think about touchscreen controls and nope right back out of there.
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I dabbled with DOSBox on a PSP years back which worked fairly well but was limited by the controls of course. The best mobile system I’ve tried for DOSBox was the Pandora (https://www.openpandora.org/) – the full keyboard made it work well for most games with the caveat that the CPU definitely wasn’t fast enough for anything demanding. If you can buy some sort of clip on Bluetooth keyboard/controller for an Android phone, I’d imagine that would be a better alternative these days.
DOSBox on RPi works fine. I have only RPi 3B+, which isn’t some massive powerhouse performance wise, but older games do work fine. For Quake tho use rather some source port, DOS version is out of the question 🙂 I would assume, that RPi 4 would be much better, since you have A72 cores instead of A55, but I don’t have personal experience with it.
On mobile, I would definitely recommend Magic DOSBox, it’s regularly updated, and today’s mobile phones are powerhouses, which can run pretty much everything (my mid-range Pixel 4a is running Doom benchmark at 113 fps, which is more then plenty).
Still have an openpandora lying around, though I’ve mostly used it for ports of dos games, either open source (openxcom, openttd, scummvm etc) or M-HT’s recompilations (xcom, tftd, warcraft). There is a successor by now (the Pyra), but it has a hefty price tag for (in my use case) not that much more.
Lately, since for some mysterious reason I have been travelling less, I’ve been using the raspberrypi more. The pi4 has one major advantage over its predecessors; it finally has enough oomph to run munt (mt-32 emulation) at full speed. That way I can play all those games with the music as I remember it, as opposed to how it actually sounded back when I played them ^_^.
not strictly real DOS but I’ve been using the DOSBox-Pure core on LAKKA (Retroarch). my LAKKA install runs on a Chromebox CN60 i7 with 4 GB RAM in a tiny little form factor.
you can run and configure most games from ZIP or image file and controller support for most games is simple.
I use a Raspberry Pi 4 to run Dosbox and scummvm on my TV with a wireless keyboard with an integrated trackpad (the Logitech K830 Illuminated Living-Room Keyboard)
I’m not doing anything fancy, just Raspberry Pi OS with shortcuts to both.
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