Description

Several companies are using DOSBox to re-release old DOS games. GOG.com, a digital distribution website dedicated to old games, is one of the major users of our program; we sat down for a chat with Pawel (GOG.com technical department), Lukasz (public relations) and Guillaume (manager): What made you decide to use DOSBox, instead of creating your own? Pawel: Before we launched GOG.com, we did think about creating our own software for emulating DOS environment under Windows, unfortunately time was crucial here and we decided to use DOSBox instead. Having our own software would have its advantages, but then DOSBox is an acclaimed and the best working DOS emulator out there, with hundreds of thousands (or even millions) users who test it on different hardware. In short these were the reasons we decided to use DOSBox, can't complain we did that. Do you receive a lot of support requests for the third party products you use (DOSBox/ScummVM)? Pawel: Actually we don't see many support tickets concerning technical problems with games that run on DOSBox or ScummVM. Using DOSBox and ScummVM makes our life easier, as usually those emulators work miracles with DOS based games. This allows us focusing on games with problems which can't be solved by those two programs. For the games that use these OS's (DOS, 3.1, 9x, XP) which are the hardest to make compatible? Do you have any plans for 16bit Windows games? Pawel: Windows 95, early days - programmers tend to use old DOS-like technique, not quite compatible with Windows 95 standard. Therefore Windows 95 is the hardest. Windows 3.1 is a different story - as it's mainly 16bit platform, we cannot use those games - since Windows XP/Vista/7 64bit editions cannot run them at all. We're trying to get 32bit copies or rewrite the header to be compatible with 32bit systems, which is pretty difficult and time consuming.