Almost pure DOS setup with sound card emulation

mt-32 emulators are good.

>>3698264
DOS on a modern processor unthrottled is going to be way way worse than just using DOSbox. Get a Pentium 2-3 laptop or something.

>>3698319
I would say it depends on the game. Admittedly I've only tried with System Shock so far but it runs just fine on a modern CPU.

>>3698359
this has a great windows port, why bother with the dos version?

>>3698363
The Windows port is just a modified DOS version running in DOSBox.

>>3698264
When they talk about DOSbox being an emulator, it's not in the same sense as a console emulator. It's essentially just replicating the DOS environment, the only hardware that's actually being emulated is the video and possibly audio.

You'll have a much better experience playing DOS games on DOSbox than on a real DOS machine with no loss of "authenticity".

>>3698384
That's not true, since DOSBox is able to run on non-x86 platforms, meaning that it has to emulate an entire PC.

>>3698380
it's native windows, you idiot.

>>3698421
I'm almost sure the Enhanced Edition is just a commercial version of SSP. I doubt they took the time to port an old DOS game to modern Windows.

>>3698431
they did. They hired a guy who was working on a port to windows from the systemshock.org forum. They gave him a full salary for finishing that port as his job, it was finished, they sold the game as the enhanced edition.

SSP IS the optimized DOSbox build. Dumbass.

>>3698434
>They hired a guy who was working on a port to windows from the systemshock.org forum

Source? I don't understand how a single fan without access to the source code can port a game to a totally different platform without lots of painstaking reverse-engineering.

>>3698421
The enhanced edition isn't a port. System shock classic runs in dosbox.

>>3698264
>possible
Sure. It wouldn't necessarily be great though. Previous attempts at emulating synthesis have been highly inaccurate. Probably not an issue for you since your goal is just to play old games on a cheap netbook. But I don't think you'll get a lot of people with the skills required to do this to get behind this.

>>3698264
go to vogons

they know more about this and can help steer you in the right direction

>>3698264
No, probably not because DOS has very tiny memory for drivers so doing an entire emulation inside of it would probably be prohibitive.

That being said, I do have two interesting tidbits for you.

The first is that somebody developed a driver that has vastly increased the number of game compatible MT-32 devices due to interface emulation. That means that many MT-32 devices that couldn't work with video games in the past will now work inside real DOS.

The second is that there are relatively "modern" PCI cards like Sound Blaster Live!, even up to Audigy 2 and Aureal Vortex that come with DOS drivers that will (hardware) emulate both FM and General MIDI. The comparability is not 100% and even the parsing driver is a bit heavy on the DOS memory, but it does work pretty well and the sound quality isn't awful.