eXo

The very first CompUSA was less than a mile from my house at the time. It was just the little local computer store. It was sort of nuts when it went national. the "flagship" store was just a few blocks away from the original store in Addison, TX. That is where I ended up working in high school. Being such a big store in Dallas, which was a hotbed for software development at the time, I got to meet a ton of game developers. Apogee/3D Realms, 7th Level, DigiFX, and of course id were all based here. In the late 90's when Romero, Hall, and Carmack left to create Gathering of Developers (GoD) and Ion Storm they tapped me to help promote their software around town. Which sounds great until you realize it meant demoing games like KISS: Psycho Circus all the time...lol.

As soon as you said "Amiga" I knew you were from the UK. Growing up in Texas I had never heard of an Amiga until the mid-2000's and I was downloading roms online and I got to wondering what the hell an "amiga" was. Even by the late 80's and early 90's, everything here was pretty much PC focused. There was a handful of mac-obsessed weirdos, who you would swear had joined a cult, with the fervor in which they would debate. During my days at CompUSA we used to have to run them off. They would actively stand in the PC software aisles and try to debate people into buying a mac. Anyways, I never actually knew anyone who had any other type of machine. I knew some C64's were floating around, but I didn't know anyone personally who had one. For me it was the NES and then the 16-bit consoles that I held on a pedestal while the PC games I had in the 80's were pale comparisons. 80's platformer games like Chaganitzu or Monuments of Mars just weren't as cool as Super Mario Bros or Mega Man. I mainly played PC games for the more in depth interface that it allowed, making games like King's Quest and other adventures possible. In the early 90's things started equalizing, with the computer scene even having decent Mario Kart clones, and then through the mid 90's it felt as though the PC had pretty much come into it's own. Amazing flight sims started releasing, crazy in-depth RPG's and adventure games, new genres like RTS popped up. I think I can sum it up best by saying it always felt like console games were a bit more polished (plus you could run them without regards to what sound card you had, or how much base RAM was available, or if you had a joystick port, etc...) but PC games felt like anything could happen, even if it was an overall rougher experience at times. So the really long winded answer to your question is, I didn't know anything better existed! hehe. For me the competition of better looking games laid within the multiple monitor types and soundblaster cards available to me. I lost more than a few nights sleep as a kid browsing PC parts catalogs and imagining ways to make money to buy a sound card. My first PC was an AT&T 8086, green screen monochrome CGA, no mouse, no sound card, 10mb hard drive. This was when 286 and 386 machines were available, and VGA was becoming fairly common. I played a lot of games in 4 color monochrome w/ no sound simply because that's all that was available to me. Hence the memories of my uncle's house, where I could play games in color with sound! *angels singing*. edit: I forgot, the other reason I loved my PC was because of that little modem attached to it. NES games were expensive and even getting to rent one was lucky. But with that modem there was a *huge* world of shareware and pirated stuff floating around. I played a ton of crappy games simply because they were free and I was bored. Avoid the Noid comes to mind...lol.

hehe. I enjoy reminiscing, which is probably why I built eXoDOS in the first place. Thinking about the evolution of DOS, I think the memory that stands out to me most is the introduction of the CD-ROM. In 1992 I went over to my Uncle's place one evening. Normally I'd sit at the end of his desk on a 386 he had cobbled together while he messed around on his amazing (for the time) 486. I'd play stuff like Catacombs Abyss or a Sierra adventure while he trolled the BBS boards looking for the next amazing thing. That evening was different though. He told me he had to run and take care of some stuff, but that he had just installed a CD-ROM into his main computer. He told me there was some weird game about gremlins in the drive, and told me to mess around with it and see if I could get anywhere. The game ended up being Gobliiins. When it started I was blown away by how vibrant the graphics were, but even more so by the audio. It was the first time I had ever heard CD audio in a game before. I still have a huge soft spot for that soundtrack and the Gobliiins series in general. Eventually we got through the game and just a few weeks later I visited and he had just gotten King's Quest 6. Game Over man. My Nintendo got very little usage after that!

Keep in mind Dan, that to go down this path you are going to have to get your hands dirty for now. There are no immediate plans for me to try and implement anything like this in eXoDOS natively. Primarily because it would require a ton of testing that I simply would never be able to accomplish on my own. That said, the SVN Daum versions of dosbox do have some interesting options. See this thread for examples: http://www.classicdosgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1271 Essentially, it can mimic the fishbowl distortion of older monitors as well as what we are calling "scanlines". Lucky for you, the SVN Daum version is already in eXoDOS. In the exodos subfolder (after you have run the install batch), you will see a dosbox folder (note: not the one in the main launchbox folder). Inside you will see dosbox, but you will also see a subfolder called SVN. That is the version they are referring to. If you look at the file launchbox calls when a game is launched, that is that particular games launch file. Something like, ".\exodos\Games\MotoMani\Motor-Mania (1989).bat" Go to that location and open the batch file with a text editor and you will see a line that says: ".\dosbox\dosbox.exe" -conf ".\games\!dos\MotoMani\dosbox.conf" -noconsole -exit edit it to ".\dosbox\svn\dosbox.exe" -conf ".\games\!dos\MotoMani\dosbox.conf" -noconsole -exit -nomenu and now that game is being launched with the svn version. Some games *require* the svn version, so they will already be edited. Notice the command line parameter "-nomenu" has been added. This is because the SVN version adds a bar to allow you to change emulation options while the game is running. While handy, this ruins the effect of running your game on original hardware. Now that you have the game running on the SVN copy, you have to edit the games dosbox.conf file. It is sitting right next to the batch file you opened earlier. Open the conf file with a text editor and you can now change all the options that define how that particular game is emulated. At this point, I leave it to you to play around. You'll notice you may have to add lines that don't exist in order to get some of this running, as my conf files were built on the parameters of a vanilla 0.74 build. None of it is rocket science though, and you can learn a lot through some trial and error. Remember that all these files are backed up in the GamesADV.zip (or GamesRPG or GamesSTR, etc) file in the parent .\exodos\games\ folder. So if you feel like you've totally screwed it up beyond all control, you can always pop open that file, find the game folder you were editting, and pull it out to overwrite the files you've changed. Do that, and you'll have a fresh copy again. Changing the scaler will sometimes require changing the output from surface to something like ddraw or overlay. So make sure you read that thread carefully and ask questions in the proper channels if you get stuck. Spend some time getting a single game running the way you like and then maybe I'll show you how to mass edit all of your files to get them all to use those settings (keeping in mind that it may break some games to make those mass edits).

flat screen CRT's were fairly common in the late 90's actually. The super expensive monitors I was referring to were the LCD one's, more often found in commercial scenarios. They had no scanlines. But yea, the flat screen CRT's that were more common in the 90's would have eliminated any screen curvature. I got mine around 96 I think, when I was working at good ol' CompUSA.

I'd argue that DOS games were not intended for monitors such as that. I mean, first of all, DOS is one of the few game platforms that was active for a solid 2 decades. In that time it went from text only, to monochrome (both shaded and 4-color), to 16 color, to 256 color, to a palette of 16 million colors. During this time there was a high variable of screens with ever increasing refresh rates, less curvature, and better screen controls to minimize such issues. I personally never had any curvature on my 386 and later machines as I could even things out using my monitor controls. Point being, things changed a LOT during that 20 years. Essentially, the games were not built that way because that's how the developers *wanted* it. They were built that way because they had no choice. But those people with higher quality setups had much less pronounced issues. Not to mention flat screen monitors actually did exist in the 90's, and it wouldn't surprise me one bit of the more well off developers were using them. MAME is a different beast. The actual manufacturer built those machines. And apart from operators who were swapping boards into normally incompatible cabs, the manufacturer knew exactly what type of monitor, what size monitor, and what specs each machine would be when it left the factory floor. So a MAME game was designed for that cab. A DOS game was designed for any number of countless PC compatible machines. What is "accurate" to you may not be "accurate" to someone else. DOSBox is designed to emulate the operating system and hardware interfaces that powered those games. I'd argue it is not designed to mimic the exact monitor you owned. I mean, if that type of accuracy is the goal here, then you need a serial port mouse, a gravis gamepad, a pair of $20 speakers, and box that makes really loud clicking sounds every time the games thinks it is accessing the disk drive. Might as well throw in the acrid smell of smoke for those of us who used their dad's or uncles computers. Also, I want it to take about 5 minutes from the time I hit start to actually load the game and I want to have to switch disks 10 or 12 times before the first level. And when I get stuck in a game I want to have to drop to my terminal, dial-up to a emulated BBS, and watch it load character by character on an emulated 1200 baud modem. ? I'm exaggerating a bit here for the fun of it, but the overall point stands. DOSBox makes old games run on newer computers. The high variability of hardware at the time makes it nearly impossible to recreate the exact way that you experienced the game versus the way I experienced it. For me, personally, scan lines and screen curvature were things to try and work around or minimize. From an options perspective, I'd love to see those capabilities introduced at some point, but in relation to eXoDOS that becomes very tricky. As I mentioned before, I rely on several different branches of dosbox to get the collection working. Some of those branches are dead. DOSBox *is* the definitive dos experience right now outside of playing something on an actual DOS machine. Nothing will ever be the same as playing it directly on an older machine. Even though I was sort of joking above, all of those little things i talked about do play into what it was like to be a DOS gamer in the 80's and 90's. You want the "realest" display emulation? Don't emulate. Get an old SVGA monitor, hook it up to a VGA-HDMI adapter, and plug it into your machine. Voila - all the scan lines and curvature your heart desires.

Jason - I suspect it isn't that it can't read PDF files, I suspect it is because my "additional assets" do not reside in the same location as manuals. Manuals are right in the main LB folder, in a manuals folder. "Additional Apps" are found in their original location, so something like \lb\exodos\games\GameName\Extras. If it works on manuals but not additional assets, then the only difference would be this path. It must be playing a role in the error. Dan - Scanlines are a simple scaler, any version of dosbox can handle those. Here is some info on the various scalers: https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler One of the scaler options I included in eXoDOS is TV2x. Try that one. It adds the lines without going into fullblown missing lines like scan2x does. To get this, when you run an install on a game, first choose whether you want aspect correction, then choose fullscreen or windowed, and finally choose YES to change your graphics filter. Option 9 is 'tv2x'. See how that works for you. What "other processing" are you referring to though? Apart from scanlines, your monitor shouldn't have been affecting your image that much.

Are you trying to add scanlines? The games are being rendered identical to how they were originally written, with the only exception being a 2x zoom (so each pixel is twice as big as it would have been, however this only affects windowed mode and prevents the window from being so tiny you can hardly see it). When you install a game it asks a few questions. Enforcing aspect ratio will retain the original 4x3 ratio and prevent it from stretching to fit your entire monitor. It also asks if you want to change scaler. This affects how it renders. However none of these can make it look more original than it already is. What sort of filter/effect are you looking for?

Sounds like big box mode doesn't handle additional apps the same way as LB does. Considering they are in the same format (predominately pdf's), that would mean the issue is with big box mode itself. I would submit the issue for Jason & Co. to look into. Second, I'm curiuous why you are trying to change the version of dosbox? Of the games that use the vanilla version, they are all on 0.74, which was the latest release. However some of these games use SVN versions, which means they won't work with another version. Apart from that, these are not treated by LB as typical DOS games. All LB is doing is displaying them. My files take care of the launching of each game, pointing to the proper conf file, etc... To change the version of launchbox would require editing the batch file that the LB front end points to. There is no way to universally change which version of dosbox every single game uses without breaking the pack, mainly since so many games require one of 4 different versions of dosbox that I pack in.

For missing titles, I have a thread over at PD that I keep up to date with any known ones. It would be a bit much to duplicate the list here and then keep both of them up to date. The primary issue is they are mainly old shareware/freeware games at this point. Very few were commercially released, which makes them harder to find.

No idea Dan. To put it into perspective, I first released eXoDOS Adv in 2010 (or late 2009) I believe and it took me until summer of 2013 to get the final volume out. That was nonstop work for nearly 4 years. I don't have nearly the time now that I did back then. My job is more demanding now, kids were born, and in general life changes. I was simply lucky back then to get paid fairly well to not have to do much (automation for the win!). Obviously it doesn't take that long to release the updates, but the fact I have gotten 3 volumes out in 5 months isn't indicative of how long it actually takes. I had started work on the version 3 release in late 2016. I spent a good portion of 2017 adding games to Adv, RPG, and Strategy and working out the process of getting my work into LB. The volume I'm on now, Simulation\Educational\Sports and the one after (Action) have had zero work done on them before now. I have about 200 games I still plan on looking into for the Sim pack, at which point I'll do another check to see if anything new has surfaced. When that is done, I begin the process of bringing everything over into LB. Action is the real wild card though. I have 550+ games in queue to be added to that one. Some time goes into tracking those titles down, some goes into adding them, and some goes into creating the metadata for meagre. And then, after all that, importing it all into LB. The work Fisty has done helps a lot in bringing 2.0 titles over, but all the new ones have to be added by hand. So for 500+ titles, that's quite a bit of work. I hope to get it all done within this year but I'm not interested in trying to predict exactly when.

Won't know until they are done.

SHHH! It's a secret!

No, your work helps me a lot. I rely on your database entries when I first bring games over to LB. It's a lot slower when I have to add games from scratch versus pulling over most of the data from the DB. I haven't brought any vol 4 or 5 stuff over yet, so other than the games I add before I do the import, it will make a huge difference for me. The one field I over write is genre, simply because I like to track several genres not in the lb database.

Vol II is now up at PD, set to 'free' for one week.

The emulators.xml file in my set is just the generic one created my the lb install. Files in the metadata zip files are unique to eXoDOS. Manuals, images, and the ms-dos.xml file.

.\exodos\data\platforms\MS-DOS.xml

yea. There is no way to automate that process, as I can't create anything that can keep up with the constant parade of new launchbox versions or guess what sort of setup a person may already have.

The folder name has been a constant source of problems. Some people want it all to go to exodos. some say that causes problems. Hopefully doing it this way just allows everyone to decide for themselves.

It will be free for the first week. I'm waiting to space out packs 2 and 3 so my upload pipe doesn't get shredded. Also, for people who has limited download, if I release all three at once and they are only free for a week, they may not finish in time. Packs 4 and 5 will not be free the first week I put them out. I am making these first 3 free as a thanks to those who have stuck with it as I've released multiple versions so closely. There will be a combined pack sometime late this fall. I won't be combining the first 3 packs together. That would just lead to a silly amount of variations and confusion.

eXoDOS Vol. I: Adventure v3.11 is up at PD and is free for the first week.

Yea, point the new ones over your old ones. Then use torrentcheck. As long as you don't have your sets combined, it will remove all the files that have since been renamed or deleted. If your sets *are* combined, then I can make a torrent file for you of all 3 sets combined, which you could then use to strip out old files. As far as adult games go, let me see what I can work up. I had a method to remove them from Meagre, but it was essentially a script that deleted the front end folders for ever adult game, so a manual listing. I was thinking for LB I could have two versions of the xml file. One with adult games and one without. Then it asks the user which one they want, and proceeds to combine the appropriate files to generate the MS-DOS.xml file. The other option is to have a script that tries to remove them *after* the fact, and that would be much harder. I'll consider adding that functionality before I release the 3.11 packs.

I figure a month or so to finish up the Sim pack. Action... that is harder to estimate. I have some 500 games I am adding to that pack I believe. So I would guess August or so *if* other things don't come up. For example, I "finished" strategy like... 3 weeks ago, but I've spent time since then cleaning everything up, standardizing files, and add all the games mentioned above that were primarily ignored because my initial impression was they were in a foreign language. However some had english versions, and others were perfectly playable without needing to understand the text (puzzle games for example). So August/September seems like a fair rough estimate. Maybe a bit sooner if my summer is quiet, maybe a bit longer if I end up busy this summer.

Popping in to provide an update. Currently I have Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in what I believe is a finished state for v3.11 release. What makes 3.11 better than 3.1? And why is it only v3.11 instead of v3.4? Well, I picked 3.11 because that was the final version of Windows 3. But that has no bearing on this being a "small" update. Quite contrary, this is a big update. Adventure pack adds 22 games & fixes 4, with a total of 1,085 games now in that pack RPG pack adds 11 & fixes 3, with a total of 350 games now in the that pack Strategy pack adds 104 games & fixes 9, with a total of 1,470 games now in that pack Apart from the additions, every launch file has been modified to now minimize the command console, however if there is a question (like one of the games that can run in scummvm OR DOSBox) it will reappear, ask the question, and then re-minimize. I found that orignally the patch had actually broken the ScummVM supported games (now they only launched in ScummVM and didn't prompt for the dosbox version anymore), and got that fixed up. I've added lots of fun things like music intros for some of the games, lots more manuals, and some general clean-up. I've sent preliminary release versions to FirstRun70 for him to look over with his various tools, and we caught a few more things there. I've gone through the packs and marked what I consider the best games of each genre as "favorites". The idea being, that if you filter by favorites you will get a list of the "best" there is to offer (with my bias of course). You can easily un-favorite all of them to reset it, or you can start adding your own favorites to customize the list a little. The idea was to give people who are new to DOS a place to start. Opening a pack with several thousand games can be daunting. I'm hoping the favorites helps guide people to some of the gems they may not be aware of. Essentially, I've had these ready to go for about 2 weeks, but I've just been sitting on them finding small things to tweak or clean up. I've rushed releases in the past, and that has never turned out well in the end. So i'm moving fairly slow with these guys. I may release them next week, or I may sit on them a while longer while I work on the Sim pack. As you can see in this thread, bugs periodically pop up, and having these releases ready to go, but still being able to make small fixes like this, is invaluable. I've considered just sitting on all of them until i'm finished with all three, but releasing them over time allows people to download parts over time and not get stuck with 5 massive downloads all at once. For those with custom free tickets and a desire to have them all., I would suggest saving your tickets for "the big one". As I've mentioned previously, I plan to finish these volumes up, and then combine them all together and post it as a "complete" pack with all genres. Then going forward, any updates I make to eXoDOS will be to the complete collection, and not the individual packs. 3.11 will be the final release on the genre packs. This has been all I've worked on for the past few months, so I just wanted to give an update on were things are at and assure anyone waiting that good things *are* coming. Thanks!

wow. great find. I edited those game names, and then didn't fix the pointers in launchbox. Luckily I haven't put the updated version out yet, so I'm fixing it right now.