I Wrote This in Microsoft Word 6.0
Bobby waxes lyrical about DOSBox and rants about his failure to emulate x86 platforms with UTM.
Published:
I failed miserably with my plan to make serialized reviews for the Mass Effect trilogy, so I'm back on my retro computing bullshit!
In my defense, I did get a bit distracted with "life stuff" throughout June. I revamped a back garden, attended a family wedding, watched a lot of televised Euro 2024 games while drinking Belgian beer, and got far too excited about a general election in my country that finally ousted the Tories from government after fourteen profoundly incompetent years.
On balance, trying to review three games at once was a bit over-ambitious for someone that's just trying to have fun writing some blog posts about non-work topics so that I don't succumb to the temptation to turn this into an extension of my CV/résumé.
Re-discovering DOSBox
My only interaction with DOSBox over the last five years has been in the form of pre-packaged games I bought from GOG, so picking it back up again to play some retro games and run old software on my M2 Macbook Air has been an interesting experience.
I have a folder set up at ~/dosgames that I mount in vanilla DOSBox as C:\ drive. I've been having some fun playing games with which I'm familiar such as Doom, Sid Meier's Civilization, Colonization, Oregon Trail, SimCity, and Wolfenstein 3D. I'm looking forward to exploring games with which I'm less familiar such as Lemmings, Command Keen, Prince of Persia, and Zork.
The more interesting exercise was tinkering with
DOSBox-X,
which allows for a wider range of options. I now also have a folder set up at ~/win311, where I've installed Microsoft DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I also found a great compilation called
"Cup of Tea"
on the Internet Archive, which provides a lot of useful software and early Windows games on a single ISO file.
So far with the DOSBox-X setup I've just been fiddling with Microsoft Office 4.2 and small games in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack while I get used to handy keyboard shortcuts as they apply on a macOS host, such as Control + Fn + F10 to release or capture the mouse cursor, and Fn + F12 + F to toggle full screen.
My next step is to get Sid Meier's Civilization II up and running. I haven't been able to play it since I dismantled my gaming PC a few months ago, and as it turns out, x86 platforms are harder to virtualize or emulate on Apple Silicon than I initially thought.
Raging at UTM
Last year I discovered that I could save money on £89.99 per year Parallels Desktop licenses by installing the AARCH64 version of Windows 11 Pro on UTM for a one-off cost of £14.99 instead. While it doesn't integrate as nicely with macOS, it does cover all the basic functionality I need on the rare occasions when only modern Windows will do, so I think it was a good bit of money saving computing savvy on my part.
I then spotted on social media, and subsequently several blog posts, that UTM can also be used to emulate x86 platforms and run Linux. "Brilliant" I thought, "I can get even more bang for my very tiny buck."
Unfortunately what I actually got was a lot of stress and rage. Whenever I tried to create a VM or emulated system myself, I'd either run into problems with the boot process or the Spice tools. The only systems I had any success with were prebuilt appliances from the UTM gallery, but again I'd often discover that important functionality, such as shared folders or network adapters, didn't work and therefore rendered the entire exercise useless.
Having had some time to think about it though, I'm not frustrated with UTM for my lack of success. UTM will save me hundreds of pounds over the next few years, and during that time a lot of exciting progress is going to be made by the developers, particularly as the Apple Virtualization platform matures, the Rosetta binary level emulation feature progresses, and support improves for GPU emulation on Apple Silicon.
It's also worth considering that the alternatives are currently either very expensive or very broken. So for now I'm just grateful that UTM exists, and long may it continue!
And Finally...
In case proof were needed, here's a screenshot of this blog post open in Microsoft Word 6.0 running in Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on top of DOSBox-X. Enjoy!
