When are we going to see a 386/286 emulator???

[Anonymous]

A google search didn't turn up much, so I'm beginning to wonder, when will we see an IBM 286/386 emulator, so I can play King's Quest, Space Quest, Maniac Mansion, etc. again? Is there one already out there?

[mike_himself]

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

There ya go.

[chadtower]

Uhm... why would you want to emulate an x86 chip on an x86 chip? That makes no damn sense. :hmm:

[Jorpho]

Actually, Bochs (http://bochs.sourceforge.net) is a real x86 emulator; there's even a PPC version. Dosbox I think is more of an execution environment. Dodge, VMware, and Virtual PC are other alternatives, but none of them are open source.

It is useful to emulate an x86 on an x86 because you can run games on their own little virtual computer, without having to worry about Windows XP et cetra reaching in and messing everything up.
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[chadtower]

Bah, just get a 386 and do it that way. It's not useful do deal with all the timing issues of dos games on a new machine.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the tips guys. I'd love to have a 386, but if I can't find room for a TG16, there's no way in hell I'm going to have a spot for a beige box and 14 inch monitor hehe.

Now all I need is a 5 1/4" floppy drive O_O

[chadtower]

You could always get a switchbox... they're easy to get.

[hydr0x]

Bah, just get a 386 and do it that way. It's not useful do deal with all the timing issues of dos games on a new machine.

WHAT?? do u really want me to get all pc's i need to play all old games??? pf thats ridiculous, sorry to say so

you would need a 386 with dos, a 486 with dos and win 3.11, a first-gen pentium without 3d card but with win95, a pentium 2 with a 2d/3d card plus 3DFX add-on and a recent system, NO WAY to have all that

[chadtower]

Yeah, just like there's no way to have an Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, ColecoVision, Intellivision, Odyssey2, NES, SMS, SNES, Genesis, TG16... shall I go on? It's the same concept.

[calthaer]

Consoles don't generally take up anywhere near as much space as computers - especially the old ones when they built them like tanks.

The useful thing about DosBox is you can use your regular computer to play the same old games you used to. Windows XP or even 95 didn't do so hot with the Sound Blaster DOS drivers required to play most of those old games, although things like Maniac Mansion generally run fine in WinXP DOS mode (no MIDI or other sound stuff, just PC speaker).

[chadtower]

Don't get me wrong, I see what you're doing, but a properly set up farm of computers takes up less space than your average nest of consoles I've seen in pictures on these forums. You can basically just put the cpus stacked or lined up in a corner and run switchboxes to a single or maybe two monitors.

[zektor]

A google search didn't turn up much, so I'm beginning to wonder, when will we see an IBM 286/386 emulator, so I can play King's Quest, Space Quest, Maniac Mansion, etc. again? Is there one already out there?

The emulator "Sarien" is a Sierra interpreter. You can use that to play the old DOS games in a Win32 environment. You can use "ScummVm" to play some of the Lucas games:

ScummVm:

http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/

Sarien:

http://sarien.sourceforge.net/

Hope that helps!

[Bratwurst]

There's a reason I don't mess around with old computers versus old consoles, and that's because they involve a lot of moving parts. I've always seen PCs as a single platform no matter what 'series' of machine a piece of software was originally meant to work on. They can be configured to support older programs and it's as simple as that.