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Dosbian: Boot to DOSBox on Raspberry Pi

• 48 Comments
• Whenever I see stuff like this, the ITX Llama [1], Pixel x86, etc. I think it's finally the time to build my ultimate love-letter to old school DOS and retro computing but always stop short because of the monitor issue.
  I feel like a lot of my nostalgia likely stems from the bright super low latency phosphor displays of a proper CRT. No amount of WebGL shaders/filters [2] ever quite seem to capture the original experience IMHO.
  [1] https://smallformfactor.net/news/retro-sff-itx-llama-is-a-br...
  [2] https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

  By vunderba 9 hours ago

• > "[...] but always stop short because of the monitor issue."
  I always stop because of the case and target audience issue. I have no interest in a tower or a pizza box, but I wouldn't be able to resist a well-designed retro industrial workstation-specced x86 machine in a metal wedge-style computer case à la Amiga 600.

  By spankibalt 7 hours ago

• High-res high-refresh-rate OLEDs with modern shaders are getting close. Now somebody needs to make one that has a convex shape like an old CRT.
  I wish we'd reach a point where modern technology allows us to make new CRTs relatively easily. I don't even necessarily care about the image quality, the screens and TVs I used in my youth were never particularly good. But it doesn't seem that this will become feasible in the next few decades.

  By InsideOutSanta 9 hours ago

• Shame that the Philips Zeus flat/thin (1cm) screen CRT never made it to market.
  Regarding latency, you should be able to do pretty well with a modern 120Hz or 240Hz display.

  By musicale 10 minutes ago

• CRTs were only ever made sense to manufacture on a really big scale, so that costs could be reduced. Early tubes which weren't manufactured on such a scale were accordingly stupid expensive.
  I doubt anyone is going to spin up another factory to satisfy the potential demand, since the demand isn't that great to begin with (OLED satisfies most use-cases that CRTs do), and very few people are going to pay $5000+ for a new CRT, and I doubt they're going to be any cheaper than that.

  By Telaneo 7 hours ago

• > I wish we'd reach a point where modern technology allows us to make new CRTs relatively easily.
  I have 100% confidence that we are at this point, at least for monochrome tubes. Only color tubes would be more complicated.

  By numpad0 5 hours ago

• Can’t you still just use a real CRT? Or is it then just back to the latency question?

  By mikepurvis 7 hours ago

• Who's spreading that CRT latency thing? Latencies for CRTs are in nanoseconds.

  By numpad0 5 hours ago

• Right but you still have the latency of frame buffers inside the emulator, plus more again when that’s converted out to analog, especially if an HDMI connector is still in the mix— ideally you’d do this on original hardware or at least a PC with a graphics card that has native s-video or VGA outputs.

  By mikepurvis 4 hours ago

• You only need one pixel worth of RAM to display HDMI input into a CRT. You don't need to buffer the whole thing, at all. Especially if you were driving the tube with your own driving circuit.

  By numpad0 4 hours ago

• CRTs wear out with use, so they're only getting rarer by the day. The electronics can mostly be fixed, but the tubes can't. You can extent their lives a bit, but you're only delaying the inevitable. When it's gone (too low brightness, burn-in, bad focus), there's nothing that can be done about it to get it back to the way it was when it was new.

  By Telaneo 7 hours ago

• That's almost true, but just almost. Behold: https://colorvac.de/service/

  By actionfromafar 7 hours ago

• Every small city used to have a repair shop that could fix them.

  By trollbridge 6 hours ago

• Re-adjust, not fix.

  By a96 20 minutes ago

• Were there really companies repairing the phospher wearing out?
  Repairing the tvs, sure, but i find it hard to believe there were repair shops for the issue parent was mentioning.

  By bawolff 5 hours ago

• For me they are weirdly hard to obtain. Don't show up in second hand shops. Ebay shipping is prohibitively expensive.

  By treve 7 hours ago

• Interesting. I still have a bunch showing on my local Facebook Marketplace, but who knows what shape they’re in plus it probably varies a lot from city to city.
  I can well imagine that it’s gotten expensive finding a quality one (eg trinitron) of reasonable size.

  By mikepurvis 4 hours ago

• They don't show up in second hand shops because their value is essentially negative. If it doesn't sell, you have to pay to dispose it.

  By mark-r 4 hours ago

• They are truly dying out. Wish I'd kept my color c64 monitor -- it would probably be worth a lot now (or at least would be awesome to use for retro purposes).

  By reverius42 7 hours ago

• This is a fun project - https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass

  By gman83 9 hours ago

• There's filters on retroarch for emulating or trying to recreate the appearance of a CRT. I have not personally tried them, but the screenshots are noticeable

  By AtlasBarfed 8 hours ago

• Projects like this are some of my favorite uses for single-board computers. Another one is Bare Metal C64, which aims for low-latency vsynced Commodore emulation on the Pi: https://accentual.com/bmc64/

  By jasperry 9 hours ago

• There is one small difference, BMC64 uses Circle and circle-stdlib to produce a bare metal image and does not rely on a Linux distribution: https://github.com/smuehlst/circle-stdlib

  By rzzzt 9 hours ago

• I have an original Pi with BMC64 "permanently" slotted in. It seems to work great, even though I was a Sinclair ZX81/Spectrum kid.

  By rcarmo 9 hours ago

• On the other hand arguably the best DOSBox version now is the new Pure Unleased, just released 2 days ago (Dosbian is using DOSBox Staging)
  https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure
  https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed

  By haunter 9 hours ago

• > Dosbian is compatible with the following Raspberry Pi models:
  I am amazed this doesn't run on literally any Pi since forever, it seems to be limited to Pi 3 and up. I have an old Pi 1B+ that I still use to host all of my websites.

  By ok_dad 10 hours ago

• I had it running on something old (a zero I think) playing with old Word Perfect and dbase. I later wanted to do the same and it no longer supported the zero. Must be some update at some point that dropped support. Too bad, I wanted to put the zero in an old mechanical keyboard.

  By wkjagt 8 hours ago

• I'd assume it is 64-bit, which would explain why it is limited to Pi 3 upwards

  By zokier 9 hours ago

• Shame it doesn’t run on a Pi Zero (or at least a Zero 2).

  By teaearlgraycold 9 hours ago

• > Join the official Facebook group […]
  Of all the things, why Facebook?

  By shreddit 10 hours ago

• At least is not discord?

  By kwanbix 9 hours ago

• I think most people consider discord a much better choice than fb group.

  By bawolff 5 hours ago

• I'm totally unaware of anything related to Discord or its reputation, other than having joined a PicoCalc server (board? group) and it seems fine. What's up with Discord?

  By wkjagt 8 hours ago

• Facebook at least can have public groups that get indexed by the search engines.
  since web crawlers can't join non-public group chats, nothing there gets indexed and chats don't show up in web searches. This is opposed to bulletin boards like phpbb or even google groups and listservs where all the messages are submitted to a public repo. This is a choice by discord to give users a feeling of being in a private space, but it's kind of like being in a signal chat, the illusion only holds as long as you know and trust everyone in the group to not just screenshot all of it, so in that sense I appreciate Bluesky's choice to be public first. Somehow no one has rebuilt phpbb on atproto tho, seems like a minor rejiggering of the feeds-of-tweets interface. old forums didn't have threading anyway.
  Anyway, it annoys me how there's all these open source projects that ostensibly believe in the mission of open source software, but they're all on proprietary third party hosted discrods when self hosting zulip or element is right there, in this sense facebook is better because

  By jazzyjackson 2 hours ago

• The UX is even worst than facebook groups if that is even possible.

  By kwanbix 6 hours ago

• I loathe most of Facebook, but private Facebook groups work enormously better than Discord, IMO. (Public groups are nearly worthless)
  Discord is a distracting fidgety visually overloaded place.

  By exasperaited 6 hours ago

• So many retro things are on Facebook. It's a stereotype that the GenX/Boomer audience interested in retrotech is on Facebook, but it's kinda true.

  By jhbadger 10 hours ago

• Free hosting?

  By guestbest 10 hours ago

• Why not use https://www.freedos.org? Or boot FreeDOS straight from QEMU. Using Debian seems incredibly bloated when the goal is to use DOS. Alpine Linux would be a better base. Then you can use real DOS or a compatible one like FreeDOS.

  By nullbyte808 7 hours ago

• The Raspberry Pi isn't x86 (or even x86_64) so it isn't compatible -- you have to do (at least) CPU emulation to get a DOS-compatible hardware environment. You probably also want to do other hardware emulation for sound, graphics, etc. to be compatible with DOS software.

  By reverius42 7 hours ago

• So can I run Kings Quest on it if I get the files from GOG?

  By geophph 9 hours ago

• You should be able to -- https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/GAMES:King%27s_Quest:_Quest_for_....

  By rhdunn 9 hours ago

• SummVM is probably a better option for it - it doesn't need any emulation.

  By shmerl 4 hours ago

• Related: https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...

  By MaximilianEmel 8 hours ago

• What features or games are you most excited to explore with Dosbian?

  By dsamy 8 hours ago

• I was thinking how to “boot to Lode Runner” on my Pi400, so this might be close enough:)

  By indigodaddy 10 hours ago