Fun and games with Bochs
Jul 24, 2004I was cleaning up my office and found in a storage box of floppy disks an old nDOS-based game, VGA Planets. It was one of the first and is still the best play by nemail turn-based games ever written. There are [newer versions available from the authornTim Wisseman on his web site](http://www.vgaplanets.com/) but I wanted to play anothernround of the old game. One catch, I don’t have a machine running DOS. I know, I’ll run Bochs and everything will be great. So I end up frittering away most of an afternoon and then two evenings with [FreeDOS](http://www.freedos.org) and DRDOS to find out, finally, that thenvideo mode support is flakey and the game is more or less playable but n[VPA, the VGA Planets Assistant](http://vpa.sourceforge.net) that I rely on won’t nrender it’s screens properly under the emulator. I even tried [VMWare](http://www.vmware.com) and while it’s faster the video support for the odd-ball modes is even worse.nnOh, well.