Can we talk about people who insist old DOS games run fine on a modern PC with just DOSBox...

Two months ago a guy at a retro swap meet in Chicago argued with me for 20 minutes that his sound card config was more authentic than my actual Pentium 166 setup. Wouldn't admit that DOSBox messes up the CPU timing on a lot of older games like Commander Keen. Has anyone else run into purists who refuse to use real hardware for this stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

river_hart181mo ago

And the guy probably never had to tweak HIMEM.SYS settings just to get Wing Commander to load.

loganhart1mo ago

Read a piece a while back where some emulator dev admitted DOSBox can't perfectly replicate the original CPU timing on games that rely on interrupts from old sound hardware. It's like trying to play a scratched vinyl record on a Bluetooth speaker, it'll get the tune right but the feel's off every time. Those guys who insist their config is more authentic than a real Pentium are probably the same ones who never actually used a boot disk to free up conventional memory.