Classic Retro Games on MacBook Air M1 -- DOSBox SVN w/ VOODOO emulation & GLIDE pass-through

Channel:

KJ Liew

Subscribers:

448

Published on February 25, 2022 8:26:13 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_rFXrFt5gY

Game:

Blood (1997)

Duration: 12:00

1,001 views

9

This video demonstrates well-done 3Dfx support in VOODOO emulation and GLIDE pass-through on DOSBox SVN. For the purpose of playing games, DOSBox SVN is the best version of DOSBox. It has everything that matters for great DOS games experience. Many exotic forks simply add features that are not relevant for games, poorly integrated support for 3Dfx Voodoo/Glide or not supporting anything outside of Windows. There was once a false perception that GLIDE pass-through was redundant for forks that favor VOODOO emulation.

Here's the problems with some of the popular DOSBox forks:
- DOSBox ECE
No macOS build, only Windows & Linux. Most recent version dropped GLIDE pass-through. No upscale in VOODOO emulation.
- DOSBox staging
No 3Dfx support in any forms yet.
- DOSBox-X
No upscale or fullscreen in VOODOO emulation.
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/issues/3232
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/issues/2740
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/issues/2739
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/issues/2639
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/issues/2626

For any forms of 3Dfx support, if there is no way to upscale or do fullscreen rendering, then it is just useless for 3Dfx games. It is even more relevant for emulators such as DOSBox as people who play with emulation would be playing with modern machines, high resolution & HiDPI display. Without upscaling or fullscreen rendering, the 3Dfx games most common 640x480 resolution would just be a tiny rectangle on 32" 8K display panel.

The demo showed 3 classic 3Dfx DOS games either in fullscreen or upscaled to utilize the full height of retina display.
- Battle Arena Toshinden 3Dfx (VOODOO emulation)
- Blood 1.2 3Dfx (VOODOO emulation - fullscreen)
- Screamer 2 3Dfx (GLIDE pass-through w/ OpenGLide)

Regardless of which forms of 3Dfx support, the upscaling & fullscreen work seamlessly similar in DOSBox manner. When DOSBox is in fullscreen, the game will be played in fullscreen. When DOSBox is scaled, the game will be upscaled to match DOSBox.

DOSBox is a worthy companion together with QEMU for retro PC games on MacBook Air M1. It covers for all DOS games and even a handful of early 3D Win9x games which remain difficult to play with QEMU. The VOODOO emulation is especially useful outside of Windows in the absence of more capable Glide wrappers such as dgVoodoo2 & nGlide.

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