Originally I wasn't even sure if I was going to add Dos. There is a wireless mouse and keyboard right there on the coffee table in front of me though. And there is a dosbox core so I can use the HSM shader... I see no reason not to!

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Actually, if there was a reason not to, it's because this is not your usual arcade cabinet system so there is not a whole lot of media that has been made out there. Things like wheels and gameplay videos may be an issue. Text wheels and still screen captures? Yuk!

 

Fortunately for me, I will be doing a LOT of trimming on this set. Although V5 is now out, I will be using the V4 set as a base. It contains a whopping 7000 entries! That may sound cool to you collectors out there, but really spend some time looking through the library. We're talking over a thousand very early text only "games". I realize this is the "roots" of PC gaming and all that, I may even keep the "Zork" series and the odd one that I actually heard of. Shareware is another issue. I will surely be keeping the ones that got "popular". Commander Keen, Jill of the Jungle, ect. However there is an insane amount of "redundant" programs. Even if your the biggest fan of Tetris in the world, you don't need 100 different "crappy" versions (I'm talking letters for graphics, not accurate in play) when there are 3-4 really good versions available. That's just one example, there are many like this plus more reasons.

 

It's still a WIP at the moment but I've already cut out 3000 games and I'm not done yet! I lived through these times, I bought these games (yes the crappy arcade ports too) and I want my wheel to be like walking in to my local computer shop back in the day. I am not here to discover a 1986 shareware version of Pong or a basketball sim based on an Italian league. No offence if you are from there or played any of these games when you were young. By all means, do your own filtering, I am just trying to give an idea to what will/won't be in my database when I do share it.

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Ok down to business. Straight up, this set is going to be a lot of work if you want to get this working with RA. The setup relies upon using stand-alone dosbox (a couple of versions to be precise along with scummvm) to run a few of these games. This means you are not going to get 100% compatibility. It's not bad, I still estimate 95%. The couple of games I came across so far are PCjr and Tandy titles. I never owned either of those machines but I am not even sure that they are Dos. I think there was a brief time when software was released with both versions on one disk so they could market it to users of either system at the same time. Regardless, I wasn't that hesitant to hit the delete key. If they didn't run on my 4x86 Dos system back then (which DosBox emulates very well!), then I have zero interest.

 

The hard part? You have to install/setup and play (at least once) every single game you want to use first. Then you have to copy those folders to the "Games" folder that we will be using in RA. Now RA is able to load .conf files directly so you have to copy the .conf files to the folder before the "Games" where the games are installed (in RA). The catch? All the .conf files are simply named "dosbox.conf". So we need to rename each one to match the "long name" of the game it launches.

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Reading it probably makes it sound harder than it actually is. It's not actually hard, just time consuming. I'll show you how I was going about it. One of the added benefits of this setup is that there won't be any installing/un-installing antics to put up with. Stuff will always load speedy. Sure a lot of the older games are small and extract super fast. Some are 2 and 3 CD games. You can in fact keep them installed through the stand-alone DosBox module in RL... but then you are keeping 2 copies of all the games. I dunno, I think the "gotta save every last MB cause I got low bandwidth and diskspace" meant more 10-15 years ago. These days I easily choose "usability" over HDD space. I can do some other small stuff as well like get rid of the prompt for CGA, EGA, VGA every single time you play. Personally, I always want to play with the best graphics so I will just edit it start with the VGA version. I can't "fix" all the prompts. Some games did in fact ask you these questions on start up.

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Still with me? At this point I totally understand if you want to go use the stand alone. It's pretty easy to get up and running. You won't be able to use HSM shader like every other system on this site though. We here at Spawk Zone scoff at easy. We want what we want and we don't mind rolling up our sleves and putting in the time.

 

For starters, I will give you an example using one game: "Need for Speed, The - Special Edition (1996)"

First 1. install, 2. setup, and 3. actually play the game from eXo's own Launchbox setup. This will fully install the game to:

..\eXoDOS\Games\TNFSSE\

Create another "Games" folder in your usual spot for games, and then copy all the installed games from eXoDOS into that folder... so:

R:\ARCADE\RetroArch-1.9.1-Win64\system\GAMES\Microsoft MS-DOS\Games\TNFSSE\

The go to /eXoDOS/!dos/TNFSSE/ and copy the dosbox.conf file to the "Microsoft MS-DOS" folder and finally rename the .conf file to whatever the .bat is named in that folder, so:

R:\ARCADE\RetroArch-1.9.1-Win64\system\GAMES\Microsoft MS-DOS\Need for Speed, The - Special Edition (1996).conf

This will keep the .conf file relative to the "Games" folder so that nothing has to be changed inside the .conf file itself.

These will load in RA now. Then simply add "conf" to the very long list of extensions for RA in RLUI. That character separating the extensions is called a "pipe" ("shift"+"\" on my keyboard).