How to have real full screen with civilization in dosbox

Question

My screen have a resolution of 1368x768. When I play civilization (version 1), I got the image in a resolution of 640x400 at middle of the screen, the rest being black. When I play orion, the image is occupying all the screen. Which dosbox option should I change to have the same with civilization?

Thanks

Answer

You probably will need to change the scaler parameter - this controls how the "classic" DOS resolution is upscaled to fill the higher resolution of today's monitors. The various types represent the algorithm used to upscale the image, and the "2x" or "3x" control how much upscaling should be applied.

You may also have to change fullresolution, which does additional scaling to match your monitor's resolution.

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Playing Ultimate DOOM and DOOM II Coop on Modern Hardware

Question

So, a friend and I want to work through DOOM I and II on coop over a coming weekend. What's the best way to do this on modern hardware? We don't want graphical improvements and fancy features (except maybe mouse look), we want a classic DOOM experience.

This will be over a local network with a Windows XP and a Windows 7 PC.

Has anyone had experience doing this?

Answer

With DOSBox you should have no problem

Here's a wiki

There you'll have some source port to play your favorite game :D

Note:

Doom requires a fairly fast computer to run inside DOSBox, but many ports of its source code exist for modern Operating Systems, so you may find more luck downloading one of them instead. Because Doom makes use of your sound card and potentially Modem, you should take care to match your dosbox.conf setting to the settings found in the SETUP.EXE found inside your Doom folder. For the most part the default options will work, but if you are making use of the Gravis Ultra Sound or MIDI audio devices you should pay special attention that the DMA, IRQ and Addresses all match.

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Why do people use DOSBox over Virtualbox in a gaming context?

Question

I've noticed that a number of people here use DOSBox for playing older titles on modern PC hardware.

I am very familiar with VirtualBox, I use it to virtualize several operating systems. I have also read up on it's current 3d support.

My question is what is the advantage of something like DOSBox over VirtualBox?

Is it essentially for ease of use? With VB I have to install the actual DOS package and manipulate memory management, etc as I did back in the real dos days (presumably). Does DOSBox remove these sorts of configuration issues?

I'm considering running games that would have had requirements in the 100's of Mhz on an i7-2600k, so I'm not terribly concerned about virtualization overhead unless there's some specific gotcha that I don't know about

Answer

VirtualBox is a general-purpose computer emulator, and nothing else. It doesn't come with any operating system (you need to install one). The guest operating system is fairly "isolated" from the host. You can only access a host directory from the guest system through SMB sharing (over a virtual network).

DOSBox is a 16/32-bit x86 emulator that already comes with a DOS-like operating system pre-installed. The objective is to run DOS applications as easy as possible. It doesn't require a virtual harddrive image, as it can access host directories directly (after mounting a directory as a virtual drive — this is only possible because DOSBox also emulates the operating system). It also has some features to emulate old networking hardware (such as dial-up modems and IPX network) over TCP/IP.

VirtualBox uses virtualization, which means it requires a host CPU of the same architecture of the guest system.

DOSBox is a full emulator, all CPU instructions have been re-implemented in C, and it can run on any hardware. (there are videos of DOSBox running inside Symbian Nokia phones)

In a nutshell: DOSBox has been designed to run old DOS applications and games in a fairly easy way, in any host system.

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Glossary:

• Host: the system/computer that runs the emulator.
• Guest: the emulated system/computer that runs inside the emulator

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Increase mouse pointer speed in System Shock Portable

Question

I'm running System Shock Portable v1.2 and when I increase the resolution to 1024x768 or higher the mouse pointer speed slows down incredibly making the game nearly unplayable (I have to move my mouse 3-4 times to get the pointer across the screen).

Is there some config file setting to increase the speed of the mouse pointer? I am using Malba Tahan's mouselook mod as well as Gulikoza's DOSBox build if that makes a difference.

Edit: In XCYB.CFG I decreased the hmousemul and vmousemul to 1 which makes it playable but is there any other tweak that can be done to increase the speed of the cursor even a little more?

Answer

In DOSBox, the mouse sensitivity can be altered by changing the setting "sensitivity" in section [sdl] in the file "Dosbox.conf".

The default value is 100 and can be changed up to 1000.

I don't know if this is helpful for you in this situation but it might be worth a try.

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf

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