DOSBox Improves...

Version .65 of DOSBox, the amazing DOS emulator, has been released! This version contains lots of technical updates... but most simply it's been significantly streamlined and now includes a video capture tool! Justice put the new version through its Wing Commander paces at the Chat Zone. He reports that WC2, WC3, Armada and Privateer all run more smoothly than ever before! If you've never used DOSBox, now is a great time to start. We'll post a tutorial walking through setting up each Wing Commander game in the near future... but if you're technically inclined, you can go ahead and emulate all the old games perfectly today! You can find DOSBox .65 here.

... And HCl Ups the Ante

But wait, there's more! Even a spectacular new DOSBox release can be improved upon... and as you may expect, HCl was the man to do it. He has updated his NetBIOS code for the new release of DOSBox and has incorporated a new patch that fixes the timer flaw in Armada... which means you don't have any excuse not to play Armada online! Here are the details:

First of all, the dynamic core is now stable enough so that you can play Armada with it, so even if you don't have a bleeding fast system, you may still want to give DosBox a try. Also, improvements made on 0.65 no longer prevent Armada from loading when IPX is enabled, which makes my old IPX patch for Dosbox unnecessary.

Furthermore, although not part of the 0.65 release, a patch that fixes a timer flaw was released recently (today!) by a DosBox programmer (h-a-l-9000). This means three things for Armada: the game now works at the correct speed (no, lasers don't fire that fast ;-) ) , the joystick now calibrates properly without the help of my armadadb patch and there is increased stability in multiplayer games.

In order to make these improvements available to WC players eager to play Armada online, I combined the DosBox 0.65 codebase with a new version of my NetBIOS code and added hal's timer code into it. The result is available here. Give it a try, it should make online Armada matches a bit more pleasant :-)