Donating the surplus

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DOSGuy
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Donating the surplus

Post by DOSGuy »

I recently made a $1000 donation to the jDosbox project, which I feel has directly benefited this website by allowing games to be played in-browser, and far better than was possible under JPC. I was about to make some more donations when I noticed a note on the site that says that all forum members are supposed to get a vote on how the surplus is spent. I humbly apologize for not asking the community for making the jDosbox donation.

I would like to make donations to the DOSBox and ScummVM projects, so this is your opportunity to vote on that intention. I feel that DOSBox has done more than any other project to keep DOS gaming alive on modern platforms (and without DOSBox, there would be no jDosbox!). I also feel that ScummVM is an important project for keeping adventure games from all platforms running on modern computers.

Is anyone for or against?
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Lunick
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Re: Donating the surplus

Post by Lunick »

Do whatever you want with the surplus :)
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MrFlibble
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Re: Donating the surplus

Post by MrFlibble »

Thank you for your generous contribution to the jDosbox project - although I don't use the play-in-the-browser option, it certainly factors a lot in attracting visitors to the site>

I totally support donations to the DOSBox dev team, and probably to the ScummVM thing too, although once again my personal preference is to play a game it its original form - via an emulator if the need be - and not through some "one size fits all" engine recreation which, if I my understanding is correct,was not created from original source code of the games it supports, or the reverse engineering thereof, but by some other means.

I was also a bit disappointed that I couldn't get the original DOS version of the freeware Flight of the Amazon Queen, as the ScummVM site (which is the only legit place to get the game if I'm not mistaken) only offers a resource pack to work with the ScummVM executable.

That said, I actually think you should do whatever you deem reasonable with your own money. Maybe it's a good idea to start a forum poll when you are planning where to donate, but I actually believe this is an optional thing.
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Re: Donating the surplus

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I wonder - are there any features in these programs that are missing and would provide a big improvement if they were implemented? Perhaps instead of just donating arbitrarily to one of these projects, that money could be used to sponsor the addition of a specific feature that the community has been missing? Then there would be a direct benefit visible from the donation.

Of course perhaps all the features are already there and working well, so maybe this is a moot point...
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MrFlibble
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Re: Donating the surplus

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Malvineous wrote:I wonder - are there any features in these programs that are missing and would provide a big improvement if they were implemented? Perhaps instead of just donating arbitrarily to one of these projects, that money could be used to sponsor the addition of a specific feature that the community has been missing? Then there would be a direct benefit visible from the donation.
That is actually a good idea :) Do the projects in question allow for such kind of "targeted" donations though?
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Re: Donating the surplus

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I think you'd probably post on their mailing list and ask whether anyone would be willing to implement that feature for $x, along with any conditions - like the code must be of sufficient quality to be included in the official codebase.

But perhaps the more pressing question is what feature would be needed? I can't actually think of any!
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DOSGuy
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Re: Donating the surplus

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MrFlibble wrote:I was also a bit disappointed that I couldn't get the original DOS version of the freeware Flight of the Amazon Queen, as the ScummVM site (which is the only legit place to get the game if I'm not mistaken) only offers a resource pack to work with the ScummVM executable.
Agreed. It bothers me that they don't include the executable, which forces you to use ScummVM whether you want to or not. There may be legitimate reasons why they do that, though.
  1. The copyright holder didn't grant permission to include the executable
  • Some games were released for many different platforms, so which platform's executable do they include, or must they include all of them?
  • Any executables that they include would increase the size of the zip file, thus increasing their bandwidth requirements
I'd love to get an answer from someone on the ScummVM team, though.
Malvineous wrote:I wonder - are there any features in these programs that are missing and would provide a big improvement if they were implemented? Perhaps instead of just donating arbitrarily to one of these projects, that money could be used to sponsor the addition of a specific feature that the community has been missing? Then there would be a direct benefit visible from the donation.
I don't have many requests for either project. It would be nice if DOSBox included some of the features from the mega builds (like the ability to change the date for demos that stop working after x date, or the inclusion of extra hardware support), but you can always just use the mega builds. I think ScummVM should thrown in a Z interpreter for Infocom text adventures and maybe change its name to AdventureVM.

A project I'm quite excited about is ReactOS. It's a free and open source operating system that's attempting to be binary compatible with Microsoft Windows executables and drivers. It's made a lot of progress in the last year, both in becoming a complete operating system for everyday use, and in successfully running popular Windows software. It currently only supports Win32 software, but I had hoped that it would also support Win16 and DOS software in order to become a true replacement for Windows XP. A new branch has recently been created for NTVDM development, which means support for running DOS software. I'd like to reward and encourage that effort by sponsoring an NTVDM contract. The developer in question isn't sure if he can commit to a contract at this time.
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MrFlibble
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Re: Donating the surplus

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DOSGuy wrote:A project I'm quite excited about is ReactOS. It's a free and open source operating system that's attempting to be binary compatible with Microsoft Windows executables and drivers. It's made a lot of progress in the last year, both in becoming a complete operating system for everyday use, and in successfully running popular Windows software. It currently only supports Win32 software, but I had hoped that it would also support Win16 and DOS software in order to become a true replacement for Windows XP. A new branch has recently been created for NTVDM development, which means support for running DOS software. I'd like to reward and encourage that effort by sponsoring an NTVDM contract. The developer in question isn't sure if he can commit to a contract at this time.
So it does work, right? To what extent? I remember some discussion of it some time ago - here or somewhere else, I forgot and am too lazy to look it up right now - and someone told me that it was still in some developmental stages, not your everyday use stable stuff. But anyway, I'm interested in a freeware Win98 replacement, so yeah, I totally support your idea to submit a donation to that project :)

As for DOS support, I fancy that you could always make a dual-boot with a free DOS version, like Freedos or DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhanced, right?
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DOSGuy
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Re: Donating the surplus

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ReactOS is still in alpha stage, but progress over the last year has been very encouraging. It runs pretty well in QEMU, VirtualBox and VMWare, and it's getting better at running on real hardware. A number of useful Windows programs are working, and it's recently added support for USB and Wifi. It doesn't have a print spooler yet, and it supports FAT32 but not NTFS. It will continue to be in development for years, but the pace of progress is increasing, not slowing down.
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Re: Donating the surplus

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DOSGuy wrote:A project I'm quite excited about is ReactOS. It's a free and open source operating system that's attempting to be binary compatible with Microsoft Windows executables and drivers. It's made a lot of progress in the last year, both in becoming a complete operating system for everyday use, and in successfully running popular Windows software. It currently only supports Win32 software, but I had hoped that it would also support Win16 and DOS software in order to become a true replacement for Windows XP. A new branch has recently been created for NTVDM development, which means support for running DOS software. I'd like to reward and encourage that effort by sponsoring an NTVDM contract. The developer in question isn't sure if he can commit to a contract at this time.
That would of course mean you'd still most likely have to have a dedicated machine or dual-boot ReactOS instead of DOS, and live without the many games that never worked very well under NTVDM (or maybe ReactOS has a "restart in MS-DOS mode" like Win95 did to address this issue?)

However that has given me an idea. Given that modern CPUs have hardware-accelerated virtual machine capabilities, I wonder whether it would be possible to add support for this to an emulator like DOSBox? So rather than providing a virtualised environment for a server OS with emulated server hardware, you could have a virtualised DOS environment, with the code running natively on the host CPU at full speed with emulated Sound Blaster cards and the like. VirtualBox does this (except it's not focussed on emulating DOS-era hardware) and it's cross-platform, so DOSBox with this capability should work on Windows, Mac and Linux, providing it's running on x86-64 hardware. I wonder whether that would be worth the effort, or whether the emulation is fast enough now that it's not really a problem?
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Re: Donating the surplus

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Per the support I perceived in the previous posts, I've made a $1000 donation to the DOSBox project on behalf of the site. I'm still deciding what, if anything, to do about ReactOS and ScummVM.
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Lunick
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Re: Donating the surplus

Post by Lunick »

Awesome! :D
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MrFlibble
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Re: Donating the surplus

Post by MrFlibble »

DOSGuy wrote:I'm still deciding what, if anything, to do about ReactOS and ScummVM.
ReactOS seems like a promising project and quite needed, especially in the wake of Microsoft's actively dropping legacy support (no Virtual Machine with XP for Windows 8 etc.). I know there has been some controversy regarding the development of ReactOS but nothing really serious IIRC (some debate about whether the clean room reverse engineering was carried out properly or somesuch - Wikipedia has some info on that).

ScummVM on the other hand has a much more limited use, and it's functional enough already I suppose (never used that program really). Many games it supports run in DOSBox, and I think that in some cases ScummVM might not recreate the playing experience of a game accurately (again I must emphasise I'm not sure about this).

So in my opinion ReactOS should have a greater priority than ScummVM.
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