DosBox for the GP2X

Bjimba has posted this news on his site:

Most work in the open-source world is done by developers scratching their own itches. This is another example of that.

As my prior blog posts attest, my current favorite toy is the GP2X handheld. One of the things I want to do with it is to play an old DOS game that I loved seventeen years ago (yikes!), BlockOut. This was a fantastic 3-D variant on the Tetris theme.

I looked into various options: porting one of its clones, running it under the already-ported Bochs emulator, rewriting from scratch... I finally had some success by porting DosBox to the GP2X platform. It's similar to Bochs in that it is a software emulation of the Intel CPU, but it also directly provides the DOS infrastructure, and is designed primarily for DOS games.

Well, it works well enough for me to play BlockOut, so I'm making what I've done so far available for download here. It's definitely for people who like to fiddle, since you really have to rewrite obscure text configuration files for every game you want to play, and you have to creatively map the GP2X buttons to enough keys to make the game playable.

If you've got an old DOS game working on the GP2X using this, please let me know!

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