Good prospects for DosBOX-X to be included in a Linux bootable distro (from a similar case scenario)

[dodleh]

In my search for the most accurate x86 emulation, in many years (as far back as the early 2000's), I have seen many emulation solutions centered around different concepts (Bochs, VirtualPC, QEMM, VMWare, VirtualBox, DosBox). I still think that for older systems DosBox brings a very good mix of performance and features and DosBox-X is very, very good (even if I am picky with some aspects).

I have been recently going down the avenue of Linux-DosBox integration with some interesting results. Of course, I am not really new to Linux either, but the point is that a bootable Linux-DosBox distro integration seems very promising. I have tested DosboxDistro. While it is severly lacking in some ways, the more important being that it uses an obsolete Dosbox from around 2009, it is highly interesting, and I hope that DosBox-X also gets integrated in way, in the future, in that distro or another.

The good things:

• I was really surprised to see how consistent the input lag (response is). I understand why Raspberry Pi can be so good in emulation when used properly (the same idea, different architecture, some other quirks, never used one)
• getting rid of the Windows Graphics stack d3d->drivers->kernel really improves graphics output quality despite limited acceleration (i was not expecting such a reasonable performance in OpenGL with basically very limited hardware acceleration, if any)
• getting rid of various concurrent threads and limiting everything to just the bare things also helps key-mapping and the "feel" of a vintage system
• competitive emulation speed, very close to running on Windows (again, despite limited native Linux hardware acceleration)

The bad things:

• the distro is quite unfriendly, in that it decompresses a targa archive that contains another archive which holds the apps and configuration files, including the ones for Dosbox
• the obsolete Dosbox 0.74 included really lowers compatibility/performance/features
• no sound support (in my case, using a High Definition Audio Device compatible output)

[Wengier]

Thanks for the suggestions! I certainly agree that are advantages for doing so. It seems that DosboxDistro is still in BETA status and has not been updated for a while. On the other hand, it appears that from the description it tries to do things such as calculator, calendar, image viewing, music playback, internet browsing, etc, which are well within the scope of DOSBox-X but outside the scope of vanilla DOSBox, so it will certainly work better if DOSBox-X is used.

[dodleh]

It is true that DosboxDistro is in Beta and, just as well, it seems to be less focused on being configuration-friendly but more of an experience or showcase. However, there is a clear advantage in that it completely frees resources that make the emulation much better knit altogether. Even if, in a best case scenario, it is still far from a Hyper-V implementation, the idea of building something akin to a hypervisor that runs the emulation is the closest to a bare-metal emulation and there are many qualitative and quantitative advantages. There are still drawbacks and I am sure of them, but since emulation is mostly CPU bottle-necked and not overly graphics intensive (at least at this stage), i see a lot of promise on such an approach. Hopefully there will be more interest from others as well. It is far from easy, though, and I congratulate anyone willing to fight such an uphill battle. I mostly can help only with testing, other things are beyond my expertise.