I AM VERY FUCKING EXCITED FOR THIS!
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Incline eXoDOS v6 — It's coming!
- Thread starter Rincewind
- Start date
- Joined
- May 13, 2009
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- 28,548
Awesome to know that eXoDOS is alive and well and getting primed for the next release.
But I wonder if a point of concern of mine from a few years ago has been addressed. While discussing eXoDOS 5 shortly after its release on another forum, the claim was made that the team had modified various games to fix glitches, bugs and other stuff.
So out of curiosity I asked which ones, as in "is there a list of changes available somewhere?"
Turns out there wasn't, and I was told to join the Discord-server to keep track of any such changes, or make contributions to the project (which I have done in the past).
No. I'm sorry, but that's not acceptable. Not to me, and not to common sense. It's the equivalent of putting all of your eggs in one basket that's being held by a hungry-looking fox. It WILL end badly.
I can and want to contribute to the project, but being given an veritable ultimatum to do so is unacceptable.
But I wonder if a point of concern of mine from a few years ago has been addressed. While discussing eXoDOS 5 shortly after its release on another forum, the claim was made that the team had modified various games to fix glitches, bugs and other stuff.
So out of curiosity I asked which ones, as in "is there a list of changes available somewhere?"
Turns out there wasn't, and I was told to join the Discord-server to keep track of any such changes, or make contributions to the project (which I have done in the past).
No. I'm sorry, but that's not acceptable. Not to me, and not to common sense. It's the equivalent of putting all of your eggs in one basket that's being held by a hungry-looking fox. It WILL end badly.
I can and want to contribute to the project, but being given an veritable ultimatum to do so is unacceptable.
Naraya
Arcane
This is packed size though, no way of knowing how much it is unpacked - though I think it's under 1TB.
Good point.
Such a list of changes would be very useful because not knowing those things makes our life as emulator devs quite hard. Does something not work because of a bad crack, a bad dump, or an emulation problem? Or does one particular version found on the internet work and another doesn't because patches have been applied to the working one, or maybe the bad one is just a corrupted copy? And all the millions of variations of these basic situations.
Not sure I understand your analogy and I don't get the ultimatum angle either, and I don't know what people told you on the Discord, but eXo himself can be a bit harsh and stubborn. I guess it takes an unusual level of stubbornness to keep a project like this together and going for 15+ years, so I'm not criticising. He's a great guy, but you need to develop certain techniques to communicate effectively with him. For example, never say "You should do X", but rephrase it as "Hey, I just tried X and I found it great. You might wanna give it a go too if you feel like it!". Doing the former usually leads to a heated discussion, often leading to the permanent banning of the person in question
Well, it's his project.In any case, I asked this question from one of the "main guys" who is my "friendly interface to eXo", kinda, in more sensitive topics, because I'd be interested in such a list/spreadsheet as well.
My "friendly interface" has replied:
Just like I thought, and this is where the "we need help" bit comes in. Indeed, it would be an absolutely monumental task to collect all these details retroactively.
- Joined
- May 13, 2009
- Messages
- 28,548
Such a list of changes would be very useful because not knowing those things makes our life as emulator devs quite hard. Does something not work because of a bad crack, a bad dump, or an emulation problem? Or does one particular version found on the internet work and another doesn't because patches have been applied to the working one, or maybe the bad one is just a corrupted copy? And all the millions of variations of these basic situations.
Not sure I understand your analogy and I don't get the ultimatum angle either, and I don't know what people told you on the Discord, but eXo himself can be a bit harsh and stubborn. I guess it takes an unusual level of stubbornness to keep a project like this together and going for 15+ years, so I'm not criticising. He's a great guy, but you need to develop certain techniques to communicate effectively with him. For example, never say "You should do X", but rephrase it as "Hey, I just tried X and I found it great. You might wanna give it a go too if you feel like it!". Doing the former usually leads to a heated discussion, often leading to the permanent banning of the person in question
No one told me anything on the Discord, because I never joined. My issues with Discord stem from the platform itself. (With that said, thanks for confirming eXo's stance to me.)
In my experience, Discord is a platform that both discourages information retention (both in people trying to search past convos, and in the users themselves) and is run by malevolent entities. When a service provider updates its Terms of Services to announce that they will ban you if they feel that you have said something Wrong somewhere, sometime, on the internet, even if it's far away from Discord but it displeases the staff there, then it's time to drop said service. (See their ToS-changes that took effect March 2022.)
Trying to explain that to the few Discord-mods in the handful of Discord-channels I had signed up for was a heartbreaking moment. Literal sheep-faced looks all around.
Yeah, don't want to derail this too much, but Discord just works fine as a practical and *free to use* tool. About information retention, the search works splendidly; I can find info going back to several years with ease. I actually do use the search function a lot and never had a problem.
I haven't read the ToS, neither do I care too much because I'm not an "ideologist" or a "free-speech absolutist", but I can say that we are allowed to do our own thing and nobody cares, and we're posting ZIPs of copyrighted material all the time on the chat publicly. There are lots of digital archivist communities on Discord, e.g., The Eye, the Digitoxin guys, all dealing with copyrighted materials, which is at the very least a grey area, and some of them are actually the "free speech" types (like the "The Eye" guys). I'm not aware that they had any issues.
I can think of a lot of good reasons why a service provider would terminate one's free account immediately (e.g., I would find it troublesome if they allowed neonazi, extremist, terrorist, or pedophile groups to congregate on their servers). Like the "unregulated" CompuServe and "dark web" stuff; there's a lot of very shady and creepy stuff going on there and I actually wish that was supervised.
Ultimately, we're an emulator project—we don't have plans of overthrowing the government
, and I'm glad such nice free services exist.
I haven't read the ToS, neither do I care too much because I'm not an "ideologist" or a "free-speech absolutist", but I can say that we are allowed to do our own thing and nobody cares, and we're posting ZIPs of copyrighted material all the time on the chat publicly. There are lots of digital archivist communities on Discord, e.g., The Eye, the Digitoxin guys, all dealing with copyrighted materials, which is at the very least a grey area, and some of them are actually the "free speech" types (like the "The Eye" guys). I'm not aware that they had any issues.
I can think of a lot of good reasons why a service provider would terminate one's free account immediately (e.g., I would find it troublesome if they allowed neonazi, extremist, terrorist, or pedophile groups to congregate on their servers). Like the "unregulated" CompuServe and "dark web" stuff; there's a lot of very shady and creepy stuff going on there and I actually wish that was supervised.
Ultimately, we're an emulator project—we don't have plans of overthrowing the government
, and I'm glad such nice free services exist.
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Jack Of Owls
Arcane
Playnite doesn't appear to support videos (at least from what I saw in a 2022 YT video) so it's a no go for me. I guess it's okay for a free, basic alternative to LB though.
Regarding eXoDos 6.0: can I just torrent it and have it only download what I don't already have in eXoDOS 5.0? Could probably save a few hundred GBs needing to be downloaded.
Regarding eXoDos 6.0: can I just torrent it and have it only download what I don't already have in eXoDOS 5.0? Could probably save a few hundred GBs needing to be downloaded.
Many games have been fixed, upgraded, etc. So while you can, I think it's better if you just upgrade the whole thing, it's radically different in many other aspects too. I don't think they have an "upgrade path", well, and it wouldn't make much sense because for example they did not use DOSBox Staging much in v5, but they're using it a lot more in v6. That requires different configs, etc.
Naraya
Arcane
- Joined
- May 13, 2009
- Messages
- 28,548
I suggest you read it.
And just because it hasn't happened to you yet, doesn't mean it won't ever happen.
Oh, so you're just naive.
More than half of the groups you mentioned aren't just allowed to be on Discord, they're encouraged to use it to the point that they practically run it.
I'm gonna end this on the best advice I can give your team: Make backup plans.
And good luck.
flyingjohn
Arcane
- Joined
- May 14, 2012
- Messages
- 3,193
-Download individual dos games from Russians
-Download low quality manuals
-Download original dosbox
-Play game
Joking aside, I just don't like big collections filled with everything you need and don't need. Also as cat said, the undocumented modifications are a deal breaker for me because of mods/bugs.
Also, 15+years and the man still abbreviates the folder names for the extra stuff in the most incoherent truncated manner possible. If I want to remove stuff I don't need to save 50+gb's I have to spend hours dealing with this shit manually instead of just running a script.
But, a pretty good project otherwise.
-Download low quality manuals
-Download original dosbox
-Play game
Joking aside, I just don't like big collections filled with everything you need and don't need. Also as cat said, the undocumented modifications are a deal breaker for me because of mods/bugs.
Also, 15+years and the man still abbreviates the folder names for the extra stuff in the most incoherent truncated manner possible. If I want to remove stuff I don't need to save 50+gb's I have to spend hours dealing with this shit manually instead of just running a script.
But, a pretty good project otherwise.
Well, I'm not paranoid, that's for sure
...
Thanks, but we don't have much to lose. If we ever get kicked out, we'll simply use another service.I'm gonna end this on the best advice I can give your team: Make backup plans.
And good luck.
Naraya
Arcane
Well, it's not for everyone. It's for completionists or hoarders that want to have EVERYTHING (and there is a lot of them!). I was surprised separate games are downloadable (the link Rincewind posted) and that's very nice.
I had no idea about the modifications though, that's a bit of a bummer in my book.
But anyway - DOS is my childhood and games of $today are so crap that I could never buy another game and have fun in many a lifetime so thank you very much eXoDOS!
Oh yeah, and to be clear, I don't use eXoDOS myself in the "intended" way, just for quickly grabbing something for testing stuff. I like configuring things for myself too, but it's a great project for people who can't do such things, so they can just install it, click on a game in the frontend, then play it. Just sorting out what MIDI synth to use per game, then configuring the correct MT-32 ROMs is too much for many people... The thing is, 90%+ of people who want to play DOS games fall into this category, so for them it's better to use such a pack than to screw it up themselves, or use some mutilated and badly configured release from GoG or Steam.
So yeah, just thought it would be useful for the majority of people that's all
Plus just grabbing the manual collection is super handy; I have no time to hunt down that crap per game.For people like us, there's the Total DOS Collection, or yeah, just hunt down individual files. I just got the TDC, 500GB, storage is cheap, so who cares. That's for safekeeping, then I configure single games that I actually need. No point having 8000+ games configured, that's how I personally see it too.
To be clear, they don't go and mod the shit out of games, or apply random, arbitrary modifications. When they do such things, it's only done to get the games *running*, and that's it. So 90% of the cases it's only about applying cracks. Depending on your childhood, you might have only got your hands on cracked copies anyway (like me).
E.g., PC Booter games, well, many of them feature disk-based protection. DOSBox doesn't do low-level floppy emulation (yet), so what then? You just need to use cracked floppy images, there is no way around that currently.
To play the devil's advocate, if you download stuff from random abandonware sites, you still have zero idea how they were modified, what content was removed, what version that particular dump/rip is, etc. You might need to download 3-4 different ones until you find a "good" one. eXo talks about this in the video, they actually go and buy original copies off eBay so they can finally do a proper rip themselves. He claims he has spent around 10k out of his own pocket on buying originals because many "abandonware" copies in circulation are just a bit crap.
Jack Of Owls
Arcane
Bless the mad autists who dedicate their whole lives to their single obsession and individually configuring thousands upon thousands of old DOS games and apps so that we don't have to. eXoDOS and his team are A-Okay in my book.
Jack Of Owls
Arcane
I think the only problem I might have with eXoDOS is the tendency to use the CD-ROM versions of games, which is not always the best route, imo. Two words: SimCity CD. And I'm afraid to check out any CD version (?) of Martian Memorandum since even just the floppy disk version with the voice acting and digitized video of one of the developers doing a french guy with a beret gave me a near fatal cringe attack
flyingjohn
Arcane
- Joined
- May 14, 2012
- Messages
- 3,193
Doesn't exo have both cd and normal floppy versions? I just checked and I have both for v5.
From what I gather, they're not yet available in Staging or ExoDos. ExoDos 6 should come out "soon" and will have them, which I understand as within a month. As for Staging - no idea when their next version comes out next time, but I see they release updates a couple times a year, so could be months.
Both floppy and CD versions are included for many games. In general, when there are significant differences between the original floppy release and the later CD release, they include both. That's the goal.
Couple of examples that come to mind that include both: Darkseed (after I pointed out only the CD release is included), System Shock, Goblins series, Alone in the Dark, Monkey Island.
For games where there are distinct EGA and VGA versions, and the EGA version is culturally significant, they of course include both, e.g., for the LucasArts adventures. Then for Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, both the original (160x200, similar to the C64 originals) and the later enhanced versions are included (320x200). It's a very comprehensive collection!
Moreover, they aim to include versions that have the files for all graphics adapters. E.g., if game supports Hercules, CGA, EGA, Tandy, and VGA (common for games almost right up until the mid 90s), many "abandonware" versions miss some of the files. For example, VGA and EGA is there, but they didn't bother to include Hercules and CGA. This is important for preservation purposes and yes, they try to include all the files (I report cases when some are missing).
Yes, my zero-config, automatic CRT shaders will be part of eXoDOS 6. However, not *all* games in their collection use Staging. Re-testing 8000+ games with Staging would be a monumental task. So it will be a gradual adoption over the next releases. They give each individual game a thorough testing; "starts up" is not good enough.
Yeah, eXoDOS v6 will come out in a couple of months. More importantly, in v6 they figured out a way to push updates to the clients. So from v6 onwards, you get continuous updates (if you wish to get that, they're not forced) which could include Staging updates, fixes, more games being converted to Staging, and so on.
For Staging, a release will come out this year, at least that's the plan. Currently, the critical path is me
I'll be ready with my outstanding regression fixes & bugfixes in a month or so, then I want to have a mininum one month regression testing cycle. But two months would be better. During these periods, the team and community members churn through 400-500 games and test them for regressions—time consuming, but the only way.But you can try the new CRT shaders *right now*! Just download the latest dev build from here. They're enabled by default, and like I said, completely zero-config! I recommend the MSYS2 build for Windows users:
https://dosbox-staging.github.io/downloads/development-builds/
If someone is interested in the details about the massive video emulation related improvements, here are some of my big-ticket items. I write very comprehensive descriptions and explanations, so there's lots of technical info there and also screenshots.
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/pull/2777
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/pull/2819
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/pull/2654
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/pull/2503
Dungeon Keeper has been part of eXoDOS for a while. It's definitely in v5 already and it's working fine.
By the way, everybody enjoys tiddies, so here we go! I'm only showcasing the EGA shaders, of course
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