G3 Macs and DOSBox

If you still have and use a G3-based Macintosh and are looking for an optimized version of DOSBox, look no further. Marcus Herbert has put together an “Inofficial DOSBox build for G3 Macs“.

Quoting Marcus:

Unfortunately the official 0.70 build of DOSBox for OSX has all kind of compiler switches set to juice the most performance out of your PowerPC G4 (and up) CPU and obviously doesn’t run on old G3 anymore. For those people I provide a precompiled DOSBox binary here.

Universal Binary of DOSBox, Performance on Intel Macs

Just a quick note about DOSBox (a DOS emulator for Mac OS X). According to a thread at VOGONS (official forums for DOSBox), they are working on making DOSBox perform much better on Intel-based Macs (it’s not too shabby as it is, but there are a few issues still remaining). It sounds like they could be making a Universal Binary version available in the near future.

DOSBox Reviewed: macosxhints.com

macosxhints.com has published a review of DOSBox for Mac OS X. DOSBox is a DOS environment that runs under Mac OS X (as well as several other OSes), and is primarily used to play old DOS-based computer games.

Macosxhints.com listed it as their Pick of the Week for August 28, and the reviewer mentions what most people use it for: DOSBox isn’t rich on user interface features, but it works quite well. There’s even SoundBlaster support, so you get in-game sound. I’m sure DOSBox could be used for more productive tasks as well, but it’s great as a flashback gaming machine!

Cocoon Wrapper for DOSBox – 1.0b004

Cocoon Wrapper for DOSBox version 1.0b004 has been released. It can be downloaded here.

Cocoon Wrapper for DOSBox is exactly what it sounds like – a wrapper for DOSBox, which is an emulated DOS environment (most people use it to play old DOS-based games).