dosbox

9 Articles

Left: old and busted. Right: New hotness.

Game Of Theseus Gets Graphics Upgrade, Force Feedback 30 Years On

October 19, 2025 by 9 Comments

Indycar Racing 2 was a good game, back in 1995; in some ways, it was the Crysis of the Clinton years, in that most mortals could not run it to its full potential when it was new. Still, that potential was surely fairly limited, as we’re talking about a DOS game from 30 years ago. Sure, it was limited– but limits are meant to be broken, and games are made to be modded. [TedMeat] has made a video showing the updates. (Embedded below.)

It turns out there was a 3D-accelerated version sold with the short-lived Rendition graphics cards. That version is what let the community upscale everything to the absurd resolutions our modern monitors are capable of. Goodbye SVGA, hello HD. Specifically, [sharangad] has created a wrapper to translate the Rendition API to modern hardware. It doesn’t sound like higher-res textures have been modded in, in which case this looks spectacular for graphics designed in 1995. It’s not the latest Forza, but for what it is, it impresses.

The second hack [TedMeat] discusses is a mod by [GPLaps] that pulls physics values from game memory to throw to a modern force-feedback wheel, and it shows just how good the physics was in 1995. You really can feel what’s going on– stopping a skid before it starts, for example. That’s normal these days, but for the kids playing with a keyboard in 1995, it would have been totally mind-blowing.

As tipster [Keith Olson] put it: “What can I say? Fans gonna fan!” — and we’re just as grateful for that fact as we are for the tipoff. If you’re in a fandom that’s hacked its way to keep old favourites alive, we’d love to hear about it: submit a tip.

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Cranking Up The Detail In A Flight Simulator From 1992

December 5, 2024 by 22 Comments

Nostalgia is a funny thing. If you experienced the early days of video games in the 1980s and 90s, there’s a good chance you remember those games looking a whole lot better than they actually did. But in reality, the difference between 2023’s Tears of the Kingdom and the original Legend of Zelda is so vast that it can be hard to reconcile the fact that they’re both in the same medium. Of course, that doesn’t mean change the way playing those old games actually makes you feel. If only there was some way to wave a magic wand and improve the graphics of those old titles…

Well, if you consider Ghidra and a hex editor to be magic wands in our community, making that wish come true might be more realistic than you think. As [Alberto Marnetto] explains in a recent blog post, decompiling Stunt Island and poking around at the code allows one to improve the graphical detail level in the flight simulator by approximately 800%. In fact, it’s possible to go even higher, though at some point the game simply becomes unplayable.

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Under The Hood Of Second Reality, PC Demoscene Landmark

May 3, 2020 by 31 Comments

In 1993, IBM PCs & clones were a significant but not dominant fraction of the home computer market. They were saddled with the stigma of boring business machines. Lacking Apple Macintosh’s polish, unable to match Apple II’s software library, and missing Commodore’s audio/visual capabilities. The Amiga was the default platform of choice for impressive demos, but some demoscene hackers saw the PC’s potential to blow some minds. [Future Crew] was such a team, and their Second Reality accomplished exactly that. People who remember and interested in a trip back in time should take [Fabien Sanglard]’s tour of Second Reality source code.

We recently covered another impressive PC demo executed in just 256 bytes, for which several commenters were thankful the author shared how it was done. Source for demos aren’t necessarily released: the primary objective being to put on a show, and some authors want to keep a few tricks secret. [Future Crew] didn’t release source for Second Reality until 20th anniversary of its premiere, by which time it was difficult to run on a modern PC. Technically it is supported by DOSBox but rife with glitches, as Second Reality uses so many nonstandard tricks. The easiest way to revisit nostalgia is via video captures posted to YouTube (one embedded below the break.)

A PC from 1993 is primitive by modern standards. It was well before the age of GPUs. In fact before any floating point hardware was commonplace: Intel’s 80387 math co-processor was a separate add-on to the 80386 CPU. With the kind of hardware at our disposal today it can be hard to understand what a technical achievement Second Reality was. But PC users of the time understood, sharing it and dropping jaws well beyond the demoscene community. Its spread was as close to “going viral” as possible when “high speed data” was anything faster than 2400 baud.

Many members of [Future Crew] went on to make impact elsewhere in the industry, and their influence spread far and wide. But PC graphics wasn’t done blowing minds in 1993 just yet… December 10th of that year would see the public shareware release of a little thing called Doom.

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A Jaw-Dropping Demo In Only 256 Bytes

April 21, 2020 by 58 Comments

“Revision” is probably the Olympics of the demoscene. The world’s best tiny graphics coders assemble, show off their works, and learn new tricks to pack as much awesome into as few bytes as possible or make unheard-of effects on limited hardware. And of course, there’s a competition. Winning this year’s 256-byte (byte!) competition, and then taking the overall crowd favorite award, was [HellMood]’s Memories.

If you watch it in the live-stream from Revision, you’ll hear the crowd going (virtually) wild, and the announcer losing his grip and gasping for words. It’s that amazing. Not only are more effects put into 28 bytes than we thought possible, but there’s a full generative MIDI score to go with it. What?!?

But almost as amazing is [HellMood]’s generous writeup of how he pulled it off. If you’re at all interested in demos, minimal graphics effects, or just plain old sweet hacks, you have your weekend’s reading laid out for you. [HellMood] has all of his references and influences linked in as well. You’re about to go down a very deep rabbit hole.

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Hail To The King, Baby: Reverse Engineering Duke

June 8, 2019 by 15 Comments

If you’re a fan of DOS games from the 1990s, you’ve almost certainly used DOSBox to replay them on a modern computer. It allows you to run software in a virtual environment that replicates an era-appropriate computer. That’s great for historical accuracy, but doesn’t do you much good if you’re trying to leverage modern computing power to breathe some new life into those classic titles. For that, you need to dig in a little deeper.