DOSBox is een opensourceprogramma waarmee een DOS-omgeving kan worden geëmuleerd, waardoor het mogelijk is om oude software en spellen te draaien die niet of niet goed meer werken op moderne computers. De laatste versie van DOSBox is echter alweer meer dan zes jaar geleden verschenen. DOSBox-X is ontstaan als een fork en biedt naar eigen zeggen meer flexibiliteit en functionaliteit. Downloads zijn beschikbaar voor Windows, Linux en macOS. De changelog voor versie 2025.12.01 kan hieronder worden gevonden.
DOSBox-X 2025.12.01
- Video debug overlay: For Tandy and PCjr emulation, add information on the screen that shows the line mask, display and cpu memory banks and the corresponding segment values, which may aid in debugging issues with games and reveal any remapping or page flipping
- Tandy emulation: Add the string "Tandy" somewhere in the DOS kernel at startup if machine=tandy. The game "The Train: Escape to Normandy" scans from FFFF:0000 for the string "Tandy" which of course wraps around to the first 64KB of memory where the DOS kernel resides. If it does not see this string, it does not think it is running on a Tandy. Such a detection routine will obviously break if you're on a 286 based Tandy with HMA enabled, or you're running normal MS-DOS on a Tandy system. This change allows the game to run
- Tseng ET4000 emulation: Mode 0x24 is unusual in that it is a 130x28 text mode with a 13-pixel high character cell. The ET4000 VGA BIOS apparently has a specific font for that mode, so, incorporate that font into DOSBox-X and use it for mode 0x24
- Tseng ET4000 emulation: Fix modes 0x22/0x23/0x24 to match how the actual VGA BIOS programs them. This fixes problems where the 132x25 mode was rendered only on the upper half of the screen
- Fix Tseng ET3000/ET4000 emulation bug where CGA graphics modes were garbled. The main VGA emulation no longer uses M_CGA2/M_CGA4 and the ET4000 emulation needs to behave the same to fix the graphics modes. Apply fix to ET3000 emulation as well.
- Some extra code in shell processing was preventing drive change commands if the last character was a backslash i.e. "a:" instead of "a:". Fixed.
- INT 21h AH=4Bh EXEC: Real MS-DOS returns a nonzero value like 0x3E01. A buggy version of Magic Pockets fails to call INT 21 AH=4Dh to read the INTRO.EXE exit code and expects AL to just be nonzero to continue to the game. So to make it work properly (kind of), return a nonzero value.
- Tandy machine type: Many registers are WRITE ONLY according to SX documentation, yet "Troubadours" likes to read/modify/write those registers in what appears to be hand-rolled manual modesetting code to set up 320x200 16-color mode, so, add code to respond to reads from those ports with zeros and print a debug message to the log about how DOS games are not supposed to read those registers. Make the hand-rolled modesetting work by returning 0x00, rather than 0xFF. The code will not set up the mode correctly if 0xFF is returned, but will if 0x00 is returned. A side effect of this is that, since one of the registers controls the RAM address used as video memory, this moves it down to 512KB from base memory as well, which of course easily corrupts the very end of the MCB chain unless you enable more than 640KB of RAM and ask DOSBox-X to emulate the full Tandy 768KB of conventional memory. Though the game still crashes very easily, and in the exact same manner in both DOSBox-X and DOSBox SVN, this fix does solve the problem where the game was only able to draw 2 out of 4 scanlines on the screen.
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