> there are DOSBox forks, most popular one would be DOSBox-X
Straight from the article:
> there are actively developed alternatives like DOSBox-X
thaumasiotes 1 hours ago [-]
> Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one.
What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox?
haunter 1 hours ago [-]
Read what the others offer
GUI config, load games from zip and image files, controller support, save states, various sound, graphics, and network enhancements etc.
There is more to this than simply being a DOS emulator.
nsxwolf 1 hours ago [-]
The Slirp backend for the NE2000 networking driver is the big one for me.
nihilismislove 52 minutes ago [-]
Heroic Launcher makes it even simpler, also for non-DOS Windows games (both very old and newer) - https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
b3lvedere 47 minutes ago [-]
Heroic Launcher is awesome on the Steam Deck
benoau 1 hours ago [-]
This is why Rosetta 2's looming retirement sucks.
GeekyBear 34 minutes ago [-]
x86 gaming and running x86 Linux software are the exceptions.
> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”
It's the Mac native x86 software that hasn't been updated in most of a decade that would be affected.
benoau 16 minutes ago [-]
> Retro gaming
What they say is "we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks" which sounds like OS X games. But even if it was "retro" games, that means the 1,000s of contemporary games runnable via Crossover through Steam for Windows are being shut out.
They relented under pressure to continue allowing Linux virtual machines, so hopefully they continue to revisit this decision.
That's an "I'll believe it when I see it working on my machine" matter.
As my sibling post says, it's more likely to work only for some older mac os native games.
ptek 11 minutes ago [-]
Enjoy paying for your yearly Adobe subscription as your shrink wrap software won’t work.
smith7018 54 minutes ago [-]
I get why Apple wants to remove it but it genuinely sucks. I can't imagine it costs them a lot to put it into maintenance mode and just support 20 years of macOS games and apps going forward. They want developers to fully move to ARM but older titles or software whose developers have moved on/passed will be lost to the sands of time.
chii 24 minutes ago [-]
If they choose to discontinue it, it would be nice to have them opensource it so that the community could have a go at maintaining it tbh. Surely that's better than letting it rot (both rosetta and the old software that it runs).
ryandrake 8 minutes ago [-]
That would be ideal, but given Apple's general hostility towards Open Source, it sounds extremely unlikely. I wonder what it would take to re-implement it. If it's "just software," I suppose there is a chance.
fragmede 46 minutes ago [-]
I imagine that the area it takes up on the chip is non-trivial and so it'd cost them a ton to continue to have it.
rimunroe 37 minutes ago [-]
I thought Rosetta 2 was a purely software layer
fwip 20 minutes ago [-]
Rosetta 2 is software, but there are design decisions made for the M-series chips that are specifically made to improve the ability of Rosetta to work in a performant way. The main one I'm aware of is the x86-TSO memory-ordering mode - most ARM chips don't support this, but the M-series have it so that Rosetta can toggle it on for x86 emulation.
I'm not sure what the total cost of these are, but it's not zero.
kbolino 10 minutes ago [-]
There's another big one, 4K page support. The MMU can be told to set up a virtual address space with smaller, x86-compatible 4096-byte memory pages instead of the default 16384-byte pages.
wat10000 37 minutes ago [-]
It’s software.
lastdong 1 hours ago [-]
My favourite project to run these old games was Boxer (1). Based on dosbox, it creates a runnable self contained disk (app) for each game or set of games / software. It is pretty neat, but I am not sure if it has been maintained recently.
1 boxerapp.com
giobox 11 minutes ago [-]
Boxer was wonderful in its day, I think it also became the basis of the official GOG Mac DOS game releases for a while too:
I've hoped for years someone would pickup the source and get it going again, it's essentially abandonware right now, no changes in nine years. The website is like a time machine back to the peak skeuomorphic mac app era. It still has the nicest UX of any of the DosBox variants I've tried. In this era of agentic rewrites, modernizing this app is probably the cheapest it has ever been too...
I do the opposite and put all games together, with DOS BAT-files to launch the games. I boot up my virtual dream DOS machine by just starting DOSBox-X and then I launch the games the way they are meant to be launched, from the DOS COMMAND.COM command-line. And as I mentioned in another comment, all of that is in one big DOS git repo.
Nice thing with DOSBox-X is there is a built-in command to set config parameters, so for games that require special settings or to slow down etc that can be set up from its launcher BAT file. All games share the same dosbox config file with default settings.
lastdong 28 minutes ago [-]
Thanks, I’ll check it out
rigonkulous 1 hours ago [-]
This is awesome, and I can't wait to have the time to set this up and install my GOG library .. but one thing has been bugging me for a long time about my GOG library, and that is: local multiplayer network gaming was awesome then.
So .. is there going to be any chance of getting multiplayer networking setup for some of the GOG's? Has anyone accomplished this in the DOXBox-*'en .app'o-sphere yet?
fragmede 48 minutes ago [-]
Dosbox-X has network support via NE2000 drivers.
rigonkulous 10 minutes ago [-]
Ooh, that is really great to know - thank you! I will start with that first ..
47282847 52 minutes ago [-]
Is it really necessary to first install and copy from a Windows machine?
1313ed01 39 minutes ago [-]
I never had any issues using WINE to install GOG games, but maybe running WINE on a Mac is not as easy now as it was back when I did that on a x86 Mac?
I always run the GOG installer in WINE and then copy the game into my git repo for DOS stuff, make sure the game works, git commit it, and then I know it will always just work and I will not have to think about that again (plus I can version manage all settings and save-games for all the games and also sync between my different machines without relying on any cloud service).
f055 38 minutes ago [-]
Hmm i guess this would require figuring out how to extract game data from an .exe installer GOG distributes. I guess AI would figure it out in like 3 minutes ;) I’ll check later.
Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one.
Nowadays the three most popular one would be DOSBox-X, DOSBox Pure, and DOSBox Staging
https://dosbox-x.com/ https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x
https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed/
https://www.dosbox-staging.org/ https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging
Straight from the article:
> there are actively developed alternatives like DOSBox-X
What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox?
GUI config, load games from zip and image files, controller support, save states, various sound, graphics, and network enhancements etc.
There is more to this than simply being a DOS emulator.
> Starting with macOS 28, Rosetta 2 will be largely discontinued. Apple says that after that point, it “will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.”
https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/16/macos-26-4-will-notify-users-...
It's the Mac native x86 software that hasn't been updated in most of a decade that would be affected.
What they say is "we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks" which sounds like OS X games. But even if it was "retro" games, that means the 1,000s of contemporary games runnable via Crossover through Steam for Windows are being shut out.
They relented under pressure to continue allowing Linux virtual machines, so hopefully they continue to revisit this decision.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
As my sibling post says, it's more likely to work only for some older mac os native games.
I'm not sure what the total cost of these are, but it's not zero.
1 boxerapp.com
> https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/mac_dos_game_editi...
I've hoped for years someone would pickup the source and get it going again, it's essentially abandonware right now, no changes in nine years. The website is like a time machine back to the peak skeuomorphic mac app era. It still has the nicest UX of any of the DosBox variants I've tried. In this era of agentic rewrites, modernizing this app is probably the cheapest it has ever been too...
> http://boxerapp.com/
> https://github.com/alinebee/Boxer
Nice thing with DOSBox-X is there is a built-in command to set config parameters, so for games that require special settings or to slow down etc that can be set up from its launcher BAT file. All games share the same dosbox config file with default settings.
So .. is there going to be any chance of getting multiplayer networking setup for some of the GOG's? Has anyone accomplished this in the DOXBox-*'en .app'o-sphere yet?
I always run the GOG installer in WINE and then copy the game into my git repo for DOS stuff, make sure the game works, git commit it, and then I know it will always just work and I will not have to think about that again (plus I can version manage all settings and save-games for all the games and also sync between my different machines without relying on any cloud service).