dosbox retroarch Q:

[eric]

has any one set up dosbox in retroarch Q: does it work as good dosbox ? point me to a good set vid ? for retroarch set up? thanks.... iv seen on how to set it up with dosbox but not dosbox_libretro.dll....thanks

[SentaiBrad]

I would advise against RetroArch in this case. There are only a few like PSP and DS, but I would certainly lump this in with that. With the way we are set up you would actually have to go out of your way to import it properly and with the way the importer works it would be severely broken. The DOS importer works really well and you can replace the default version of DOSBox for a more advanced fork of it like DOSBox Daum or DOSBox X or something like that.

[eric]

That's what i needed to know ,,thanks in going to start with the LB importer in the morning, and get things going.....peace....out

[Zombeaver]

SentaiBrad said The DOS importer works really well and you can replace the default version of DOSBox for a more advanced fork of it like DOSBox Daum or DOSBox X or something like that.

@SentaiBrad I've been messing around with DOSbox Daum recently - how exactly do you do this via the importer? I don't see anything in the prompts that indicate an option for an alternate version to be used. Or are you just talking about replacing the DOSBox folder in the Launchbox directory with an alternate version? I messed around with that a bit and it kinda works, but it's not exactly ideal. I'd definitely like to be able to just specify during the import "Use this version of Dosbox for this game". I was also able to successfully set up and use Daum as an "emulator" but that method gets kinda clunky when you need to specify a conf because then you have to specify in the game entry to use command line parameters and then "-conf [path to .conf file]".

[SentaiBrad]

I did just replace the DOSBox folder. Keep the folder name the same, and drop in DOSBox Daum. Backup the DOSBox .74 exe and rename Daum's x64 or x86 (depending on your system) exe to the dosbox .74 exe you backed up. Should be good to go. The conf is a bit tricky, but if you set the settings in Daum then specify to save it in the LB directory or the default directory (which might be in the documents folder... I can't recall) you just edit that config file from there on out. I wanted to use DOSBox-x. Superior to Daum, being updated regularly, but I had a lot of issues getting it to work. Also, some of the installing commands don't seem to work the same in Daum or x, so if we did implement using alternate versions of LaunchBox then the install process would probably break. So chances are, the best case scenario is "Choose your preferred DOSBox flavor!" with a drop down menu or something, then it sets the right commands and takes you to the download page.

[Zombeaver]

Yeah I kindof assumed that was what you meant after I posted that. I just got excited when I saw you mention "The DOS importer" and "replac[ing] the default version of DOSBox" in the same breath - I thought you meant I could do the latter through the importer It seems like this should be capable of providing the options that I want... but I haven't been able to get it to work. Hopefully alec can provide some assistance. As a temporary workaround I was able to setup Daum as an emulator, with standard "DOSBox" implementation in LB being regular old 0.74, so when I want to use Daum instead of 0.74 I just uncheck "Use Dosbox" in the game details, use Daum as the emulator, and then tell it to use the command line parameter -conf [specific path to the conf file]. It works but it's overly time consuming and you don't have access to the special integrated features LB has with DOSBox doing it this way, which means there'll be times where you'll be manually editing the autoexec section in the conf file

[SentaiBrad]

Having to edit each game is why I just replaced the .74 install with Daum instead. We do want to implement something to make it easier to replace DOSBox with your own version, but varying command line parameters and way it handles mounting things like discs and other changes make it difficult. Vanilla DOSBox is languishing though, so we might even find a fork to start using instead like -x.

[Lordmonkus]

So my crazy bug up my ass tinker project of the night was getting Retroarch DOSbox working because of shaders. Yeah this is probably not the best way to do DOSbox but anyways here is how you get it up and running. ***This is just a basic tutorial to get games up and running, nothing super fancy here*** 1) Make sure the game you are wanting to play this way works in the standard DOSbox first just to confirm it does indeed work. 2) In your Retroarch/system folder create a folder called dosbox 3) Now comes the tricky part but you need to get Retroarch to generate a dosbox-libretro.conf file in the dosbox folder you created in step 2. To do this load up RA > Load Core > DOSbox, then load content and browse to one of your DOS games and load up the exe you would run to start a game. The game I would recommend for this is the old game Zork and the reason for this is it will load up perfectly fine and then in game you can just type "q" and then Enter and it will kick you back out into the DOSbox dosprompt (you are still in DOSbox at this point). Now type in the command:

config -wcd

This should generate the dosbox-libretro.conf in your /retroarch/system/dosbox folder. 4) Copy this file to the folder of each of your dos games you wish to run through RA DOSbox. This is going to be the file you will import into Launchbox to run the game. Rename each of these .conf files you copied to each game folder to something easy to keep track of. For example I will use the game Eye of the Beholder which I have in a folder simply called EotB, I name the .conf file to eotb.conf. The name of the .conf file is probably irrelevant but I name them just so I know exactly what they are. 5) Each of these .conf files you will open in notepad and go to the bottom and paste in the following code

[cpu] cycles=30000 [autoexec] @echo off mount d E:\DOS\eotb d: start

This code is an example and you will have to edit "E:\DOS\eotb" so it is pointing to the game folder of the game you have the specific .conf file in. The line at the end with the word "start" you will have to rename to the actual file you run for the game so if the game was Duke Nukem 3D for example start would be replaced with duke3d.exe. Now if everything went right when you launch the game through Launchbox it should load up like a normal DOS game but it may or may not be running great and you may have some audio static. The best settings I found to fix this was to bring up the RA Quick Menu and go to Options, change the Machine type to svga_s3. Then below that you will see 4 entries of CPU Cycles X according to the Wiki these settings "allow fine control of the desired CPU cycles. Setting this too low may cause slow gameplay, setting this too high might cause sound crackling and bad performance." I had the best result from my quick testing (and I do mean quick) with setting the x10000 to 3. The combination of the svga_s3 and CPU cycle 10000x3 gave me perfect speed and no audio crackling. This may need to be adjusted on a game to game basis. Now you should be able to apply some fancy shaders to your DOS games and enjoy. Hope this helps someone get this up and running. It is by no means a definitive guide to Retroarch and DOSbox but it should get you over the first hurdle of actually getting games working.

[Zombeaver]

Thanks for doing this. I'm sure it'll be useful for people that want to give this a go. The only thing I would warn is that while some of the settings you've listed will work for most things like a machine type of svga_s3 that won't always be the case from game to game. 30000 cycles is also an okay place to start but some games will actually run at increasingly fast speeds depending on the cycle rate and were never designed for computers that fast (and are ideal somewhere in the 3000-5000 cycle range) so they'll be unplayable at such speeds. At the other end of the spectrum there are games that require upwards of 150000 cycles to be playable at a good speed. "auto" or "max 105%" is usually a good place to start, with manual adjustment sometimes necessary. I've got about 150 DOS games already setup with individual .conf files for each. As much as I love shaders, I can't see myself converting all that junk over just for that

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah it's a lot of work and DOSbox is not something I ever spend any time with so all the tweaking is way out of my realm. I just wanted to share a way to actually get this core working because much like MESS in Retroarch there is very little in the way of proper documentation and getting things running. Proper DOSbox and just forgoing any shader goodness is still probably the best way to do it. Though Eye of the Beholder did look pretty cool with the VGA monitor shader from the Analog Shader Pack that was just released.

[Zombeaver]

I wonder how difficult it would be to implement my existing .confs into this... I think the main problem would be that most of them are using LB's built-in autoexec append function (basically anything in the autoexec section of a .conf file is ignored if launched through LB if you have an exe/bat/whatever specified in LB's rom path field and you tell it to "Use DOSBox"). The cycles/machine type/audio drive/etc. settings should just cross right over (although I'm not sure if the RA version of DOSBox would hook into Munt, which would be a deal-breaker for me, if not) but I'd have to add in the autoexec section for nearly all of them; and that gets further compounded when you start dealing with things like multi-disc games...

[Lordmonkus]

I have no clue how well they would transfer over, I thought about trying it out but I got sidetracked with other tinkering, lol. Again keeping in mind that my knowledge and use of DOSbox is so extremely minimal everything I say is just from my very short personal use of it which is nothing more than just tinkering for the sake of tinkering. But I do think much like the Yabause core within Retroarch there is a certain amount of performance hit that stand alone just doesn't have. When I loaded games using just normal DOSbox there was no tweaking of settings to get games running smooth whereas in RA DOSbox there was immediate stuttering and frame issues that needed to be tweaked out.