Incline eXoDOS v6 — It's coming!

[Rincewind]

If you have even the slightest interest in DOS games and you're not familiar with the eXoDOS project yet, you owe it to yourself to watch this video.

Apart from introducing the eXoDOS project and explaining why it's significant, eXo (the founder/project leader) talks about his general philosophy on the preservation of cultural artefacts and why 99.99% of GoG and Steam re-releases of old games suck.

The more observant among you might notice that he mentions DOSBox Staging in passing in the first few minutes in relation to "great CRT shaders". Those are my doing ; they will be released with the next Staging release and they will be part of eXoDOS v6. eXo will do a video about them shortly, I'll post it here.

We, the Staging team, are working closely together with the eXoDOS guys to help preserve DOS games in their best possible form for the generations to come, and *authentic* CRT shaders (not the wild ones that look like broken TVs...) are a very important part of that experience.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

This jerk wants me to download 70GB for playing DOS games?

Fuck off. Just use DOSBox.

 

[Rincewind]

This jerk wants me to download 70GB for playing DOS games?

Fuck off. Just use DOSBox.

No. He doesn't *want* you to do anything.

1st place medal for entirely missing the point.

 

[Lord_Potato]

This jerk wants me to download 70GB for playing DOS games?

Fuck off. Just use DOSBox.

No. He doesn't *want* you to do anything.

1st place medal for entirely missing the point.

How big will the full package be this time with all the games? I should probably expand my disk space.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Sorry mate. I like fiddling and modding my oldies.

 

[Rincewind]

Sorry mate. I like fiddling and modding my oldies.

Me too, but the point is preservation. If stuff doesn't get preserved, there will be nothing you can fiddle with.

 

[Rincewind]

This jerk wants me to download 70GB for playing DOS games?

Fuck off. Just use DOSBox.

No. He doesn't *want* you to do anything.

1st place medal for entirely missing the point.

How big will the full package be this time with all the games? I should probably expand my disk space.

From memory, the full v5 DOS collection is 500GB, then the Win 3.x collection another 400GB.

The v6 collection will include soundtracks, books, more magazines, etc. so dunno exactly, but more than 500GB.

Overall, how much does a 2TB drive cost? Not too much, like lunch money for a week? Then you have the full collection of all DOS & Win 3.x games.

 

[Rincewind]

Btw, the base pack that includes all manuals, booklets, code wheels, hint books, etc. is worth getting in itself. You can either download that once, then you have all that stuff for all games in existence, or you can fuck around for half an hour or more every single time you need those things for a given game.

Then once you have the base pack, you can simply download only the games you're interested in one by one if you don't want the full collection.

Btw, the individual game ZIPs of the v5 collection are available on this HTTP mirror:
https://the-eye.eu/public/Games/eXo/eXoDOS_v5/eXo/eXoDOS/

I quickly grab something from there if I need it for testing—super handy.

 

[Darkozric]

to help preserve DOS games in their best possible form for the generations to come

And how do you know that future generations will give a flying fuck about dos games?

Just admit, you're doing it because you're autists.

 

[Lord_Potato]

to help preserve DOS games in their best possible form for the generations to come

And how do you know that future generations will give a flying fuck about dos games?

Just admit, you're doing it because you're autists.

"How do you know if future generations will give a fuck about old paintings or sculptures?"

And yet we have museums.

 

[Rincewind]

to help preserve DOS games in their best possible form for the generations to come

And how do you know that future generations will give a flying fuck about dos games?

Just admit, you're doing it because you're autists.

How do you know they wouldn't? But if you don't, they wouldn't even have a chance, would they?

We're doing it because we love DOS games and they're worth preserving. We can agree all gaming history is worth preserving. And because it's fun

 

[Darkozric]

Ok, when your dos museum is ready I'll be the first in line.

 

[Rincewind]

Ok, when your dos museum is ready I'll be the first in line.

It is!

https://www.retro-exo.com/

 

[Darkozric]

Ok, when your dos museum is ready I'll be the first in line.

It is!

https://www.retro-exo.com/

 

[Vic]

I approve

 

[Great Deceiver]

Cool project, but why the decision to bundle the package with Launchbox?

 

[Bester]

Oh nice. I was amazed while watching the video that they included MT-32 and SoundCanvas, was wondering how did they pull this off from the legal standpoint? Went to their website. Oh, TORRENTS, that's how. Somebody with balls to do the right thing and disregard antiquated copyrights finally.

Glad to hear about the shaders, too. This can't come out soon enough.

I bought an 8bitDo Sega gamepad recently, have been going through the old favorites with retroarch. The correct controller (not ideal, but close enough anyway) really gives the best feeling, ten times better than playing on some xbox gamepad. They're compatible with the real sega console and with PC, too.

Now considering buying this baby:

It's some Model F clone, probably by Key Tronic, with buckling springs. Perfect condition, goes for 51 bucks here. Shit, I think I'll just do it for the ExoDos collection now. Going to add the tactile aspect of the retro experience into it.
Upd: ugh, it's foam and foil switch, cancelled the order.

 

[Great Deceiver]

The M30 is a great pad. I like 8bitdo, their products have very good build quality. Great battery life, too.

 

[Rincewind]

Cool project, but why the decision to bundle the package with Launchbox?

I guess eXo wanted to use a flexible, nice GUI frontend without having to write their own. There aren't many programmers in their team, AFAIK. And why write your own when something free/open-source does the job.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I personally use Playnite as my frontend, I find it much better and it has great emulator importing functionality.

I've downloaded both packages, will take a look later tonight. Thanks!

 

[Rincewind]

I personally use Playnite as my frontend, I find it much better and it has great emulator importing functionality.

Nice one, wasn't aware of this one.

I personally don't use frontends at all; I like to configure emulators individually. But eXo is doing this for people who just want download & click & play, which is a sizeable part of the population. As he said in the video, the number of people who are able to configure a DOS game correctly (or at all) is shrinking year by year. Those people simply die off! So such a pack as his is essential for preservation purposes.

I'm gonna approach this problem from a different angle by writing an extensive DOSBox Getting Started guide that assumes only basic computer skill (like you can turn it on, can copy files, and unpack a ZIP), and also a comprehensive User Manual for DOSBox Staging. The latter is going to be a multi-year project...

I've downloaded both packages, will take a look later tonight. Thanks!

Have fun, man. There's also eXoScummVM and eXoAppleIIgs, if you're into those things.

Actually, just realised the total package sizes are listed on their main page here:
https://www.retro-exo.com/index2.html

 

[AndyS]

Launchbox might have a bit of an advantage in that it technically is a DOS frontend above all else. Being a frontend for other emulators was a feature that got added a little ways into its development.

 

[mindx2]

Rincewind Do you know if he is going to do a physical boxed version for v.6 like he did for v.5?

 

[Nutmeg]

Not to draw too much attention away from the great work of friend Rincewind in dosbox staging and the eXoDOS team, this stuff is excellent, but as an alternative, I've been using TDC and Dosbox Pure. Really hassle free experience for games older than 1992. Great to see IBM PC compatible game preservation have so much tooling and attention these days.

 

[Rincewind]

Message from the man himself about the size of the v6 collection:

I haven't mentioned size, because it keeps growing. Yesterday I added like three gigabytes of novels to the extras of games
We added like four zork novels, five or six infocom novels, and four doom novels
I also have some things on my drive twice. The packed up version, and the extracted version. So there's always a difference between the download size and the setup size
And then of course there's a difference between just eXoDOS or eXoDOS with the media pack