eXoDOS to the Promised Land - Playing with DOS games

[John]

Growing up in the 1980's, we had an Apple IIe that my mom was able to borrow (and eventually buy) from the school where she taught, which was my intro to computing. I grew up playing with boot disks, green monochrome monitors, and shady software from computer fairs. Walking into a Babbages or Software Etc meant carefully looking at the packaging for games, because so many of the cool titles were only on Commodore 64/128, or the dreaded IBM/PC Compatible. It got worse in the 90's, when my mom upgraded to a Macintosh, and the games sections available for me in those stores shrank even more. I was still fascinated by the breadth of the types of games that I would never play.

Other people have nostalgia for these titles, as well as the know-how of configuring DOSBox and other front-ends. One person goes by the handle eXo, and they run a community that releases compilations of all DOS games that they have come across. Not just a typical abandonware project, this group has not only configured each game's frontend settings to work out of the box, but they've included title screens/screenshots, box and manual scans, and other ancillary material like full magazine scans from the time period. It's extremely slick, and they have over 7200 titles currently supported in their V5 release.

In addition, they also have collections for Windows 3.x titles, and SCUMMVM specific games. None of these game collections are small, so beware if you have a metered data connection or limited hard drive space. The DOS collection does have a "lite" version that downloads games on demand and cuts out some of the ancillary material, but it still weighs in at 52GB without any installed games.

This is also a potential legal gray area, since some of the games in this giant collection are currently offered for sale on other various platforms. I encourage people to still buy the games that are available, but dabble around with all the other unavailable stuff in these collections.

eXoDOS version 5
eXoWin3x
eXoScummVM

 

[John]

I said that these titles just work out of the box, and while that's true, they may not work with peripherals outside of a keyboard/mouse without some tweaking.

Mechwarrior 2

I loved the idea of giant mechs walking around blowing stuff up, and the Battletech/Mechwarrior universe was cool, based on the one time I played a tabletop version after a boy scout event. I always looked fondly at the Mechwarrior boxes with their amazing rendered box art, but knew it wouldn't play well on our budget Mac Performa. I've tried to get it working with various abandonware copies over the years, but it just wouldn't work right. This was the first game I tried on this collection, and it booted up fine, and mouse/keyboard controls are okay, but it could be better.

I've got a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick, a budget one that I picked up a decade ago, but it still works. If anyone has one of these and wants to get it working with this game, and possibly other DOS games, here's the settings I found to make it work:

• Install the game from the Launchbox front-end first
• Find the dosbox.conf file in the specific game's directory (for MW2, it's in eXo\eXoDOS\!dos\MechW2)
• Edit the file, go to the Joystick specific section, and put in the entries below.
• joysticktype=ch
  timed=true
  autofire=false
  swap34=true
  buttonwrap=false
• Install and/or run the Logitech Profiler app, and create a profile for your game, pointed at the dosbox app launched by the game's bat file (for MW2, it's in eXo\dosbox\ece).
• In Logitech Profiler, click on Twist, go to Axis Properties, and click the box for Invert Axis Polarity.
• Launch the game, press Escape, then Cockpit Controls. Make sure that only Keyboard, Mouse, and Flightstick Pro are selected in Red.
• Launch a mission or training, and hit escape. Select Device Calibration, and configure the joystick's boundaries.

Whew! That took me a few hours of tweaking different settings, and trying to see if others had gotten it working before me. This configures the joystick to act like a CH Products Flightstick Pro, which the Logitech joystick works well as. I haven't tried mapping all the other buttons to functions yet, but this at least got basic movement and the throttle working. The "swap34" setting got the rudder twist option working, but was backwards by default (twisting the stick left turned the robot head to the right). The Logitech app was able to correct that, and some dead zone issues I had just by it being an old joystick.

I don't want to scare anyone off from this edge case, just to help anyone that has my specific setup and wants. Most DOS games can be played with just a keyboard, since that's about the only standard peripheral, and everyone has one of those.

 

[Droewyn]

This looks amazing. And also dangerous. My poor gaming laptop is already practically full...

 

[John]

Last thing for now, there is actually a stealth version 5.1 upgrade, but the updater script in the install is broken. You can either dig out a link to their discord from the site's community page (which I hate as a support option) and then search pinned messages for the batch file, or you can profit on my spent labor and just copy/paste the text in the spoiler pop into the update.bat file located in eXo\Update.

Spoiler: Update.bat contents

@echo off
powershell -command "& { (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://the-eye.eu/DO_NOT_DELETE_EXO/ver.exo', '.\ver.txt') }"

if exist ver.txt goto verc

if not exist ver.txt goto failed

:verc
fc ver.txt .\ver\ver.txt

if errorlevel = 1 goto diff
if errorlevel = 0 goto same

:diff
cls
echo.
type .\ver\ver.txt
echo is your current version.
echo.
type ver.txt
echo has been found and will be downloaded.
echo.
pause
powershell -command "& { (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://the-eye.eu/DO_NOT_DELETE_EXO/update.zip', '.\update.zip') }"
powershell -command Start-Sleep -s 5

if exist update.zip goto updatenow

if not exist update.zip goto failed

:updatenow
del ver.txt
cd ..
cd ..
copy .\exo\update\update.zip .\
del .\exo\Update\update.zip
.\exo\util\unzip -o update.zip
del update.zip
cd eXo
cls
echo.
echo The updaters will now check to see if any of your installed games
echo need to be updated.
echo.
pause
copy .\Update\update_installed.bat .\
call update_installed.bat
del update_installed.bat

cls
echo.
echo Update was successful!
echo.
pause
:change
type .\Update\changelog.txt | more
echo.
pause
goto exit

:same
cls
echo.
echo You are already up to date.
echo.
pause
del ver.txt
goto exit

:failed
cls
echo.
echo The update version could not be found.
echo This typically means the internet is not reachable at this time.
echo Please check your internet connection.
echo.
pause

:exit

Run the batch file directly, or run Launchbox, right-click on the first entry (eXoDOS with the modified DOOM image), click Additional App(s), then Check for eXoDOS Update. This includes a bunch of fixes for games, removing copy protection, name changes, etc.

The next version of this is going to add in thousands more shareware titles, bumping the total software count to over 10,000, and hopefully this update script will be able to seamlessly handle it.