Making retro DOS gaming simple - the standalone DOSBox Pure Unleashed is out now gamingonlinux.com/2025/10/maki…

#DOSBox #DOSBoxPure #Retro #Gaming #RetroGaming #OpenSource

Making retro DOS gaming simple - the standalone DOSBox Pure Unleashed is out now

DOSBox Pure Unleashed is a standalone fork of the classic DOSBox to run DOS games on modern systems, based on the libretro core.

^{Liam Dawe (GamingOnLinux)}

Lately I've been working on trying to add some speed / performance hacks to #DOSBox. The idea is a bit similar to the old DOSIDLE.EXE / POWER.EXE TSRs: detect when the system is idle or busy-looping, and give up the rest of the CPU cycles until something interesting happens (next frame, next BIOS tick, whatever).

There are a bunch of timing sources on the IBM PC and it's tricky to get them all, but as a proof of concept - here's the delay loop from GORILLA.BAS:

'Rest:
' pauses the program
SUB Rest (t#)
s# = TIMER
t2# = MachSpeed * t# / SPEEDCONST
DO
LOOP UNTIL TIMER - s# > t2#
END SUB

So, it busy-loops until the timer tick. In DOSBox I modified the BIOS INT 1A handler so that if the emulated machine requests the time twice and the same tick comes up, it's probably spinning, so I take away all the remaining cycle budget and sleep instead. And it actually works! Host CPU usage drops significantly - or, if you put it in Turbo Mode, the game plays WAY faster!

DOSBox Staging 0.81.0 out now with new CRT shaders and lots of graphics improvements gamingonlinux.com/2024/02/dosb…

#DOSBOX #FOSS #Emulation

DOS_deck brings DOS games to your browser with a Steam Deck interface gamingonlinux.com/2023/12/dos-…

#SteamDeck #DOS #DOSBox #RetroGaming

DOSBox Staging adds dual-mouse gaming and ReelMagic support

gamingonlinux.com/2023/01/dosb…

#DOSBox #Retro #Gaming #RetroGaming