Can you run DOSBox on Windows XP with an Atom CPU?

Overview

A customer asked if DOSBox can run on Windows XP thin clients with Atom CPUs. In this video, I test Duke Nukem 3D running both in DOSBox and in a native DOS command prompt window, comparing performance and responsiveness. The answer might surprise you—it actually works pretty well!

Key Moments

• Hardware overview: Intel Atom N270 at 1.6GHz with 1GB DDR2 RAM
• Installing and configuring DOSBox on Windows XP
• Running Duke Nukem 3D in DOSBox (windowed mode)
• Comparing performance: DOSBox vs native DOS window
• Testing CPU utilization during gameplay (around 50%)
• Running 3DMark 2000 benchmark on the Intel GMA 950 GPU

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey there, YouTube. I have an interesting video for you today. So I don’t know if you know, but I sell some of these retro Windows XP gaming thin clients on eBay, and one of the customers asked me a question that I found kind of interesting. The customer asked me if it’s possible to use DOSBox in Windows XP to run DOS games.

Now, I personally would not do this necessarily. I would prefer to run the game natively in a DOS prompt window. But I went ahead and gave it a shot just so I was able to answer the customer’s question. And to my surprise, it actually works! So let me show you. I’ll do a comparison between running Duke 3D in DOSBox and Duke 3D in a command prompt window.

All right, so before I do that though, let me give you a little bit of a quick recap on this machine. I have another video where I go into detail of what’s inside this machine, but just in case you haven’t seen that yet, I’m going to load up Hardware Info.

This machine has an Atom CPU, and it runs at 1.6 gigahertz. So like I said, this machine has an Atom N270. It’s a single core, dual-threaded CPU, so it has two threads. It’s running at 1.6 gigahertz, and it’s got one gigabyte of DDR2 RAM running at 266 megahertz. It’s got a two gigabyte solid-state drive inside. The video card is an Intel GMA 950—it’s an embedded chip. Yeah, it’s very bare bones. Everything is integrated except for the solid-state disk and the memory module.

So yeah, not a very powerful modern machine. I honestly wasn’t sure if DOSBox was going to work properly because it is emulating hardware, and I wasn’t even sure whether DOSBox required special virtualization options that the CPU didn’t have.

But let me load up and show you. I went ahead and installed DOSBox and started it up, and I saw this—it works! So I can do DIR. Now I don’t have anything mounted, so I’m going to mount my 64 gigabyte USB flash drive with some apps and games on the S drive as C.

I’m going to go to the Duke 3D folder and I’m going to run Duke 3D. There’s something in my file system because I was messing around with these settings. I’m going to go to SETUP and SOUND SETUP. In DOSBox, the IRQ for the Sound Blaster was set to 7, and in DOS in the DOS window it was 5. So I’m going to do that, save, and launch Duke 3D.

And there you go, it loads! Let me get some speakers so you can actually hear it running. Yeah, so you can actually have Duke 3D in a window under Windows XP! Let me start a new game. Let’s rock! And it has the mouse—you can use the mouse. If I press Alt+Enter, you can enter full-screen mode.

Yeah, so everything works and it looks pretty smooth here. Let me go back into window mode and I’ll show the Task Manager with the CPU usage at the same time. I am not a good player, but yeah, so the CPU is at about 50% utilization.

Yeah, so there you go. You can actually play Duke 3D in a DOSBox window in an Atom N270 thin client running Windows XP.

Now let me show you how this runs when I run it in a DOS box. So if I go to RUN, COMMAND—now this is a DOS box, a command prompt window that you would see in Windows XP. Let me go to my H drive, which is my USB disk drive that I’m using for installing all my programs. Let me go back and change it to use IRQ 5 for Sound Blaster, and let’s run that.

Now here you don’t have the option to do it in a window, so DOSBox might be a good option if you’re playing an old DOS game and you want to just record that window.

Also, I just noticed that the music didn’t work. I can definitely feel that it’s much more fluid in native DOS like this, and I can definitely play better like this because it does feel much more responsive and fast. In DOSBox it felt fine, but here you definitely feel like your mouse feedback is immediate, whereas in DOSBox it felt very smooth and almost like tapered.

But yeah, I’m going to try—can I do window mode? No, it doesn’t like window mode.

Yeah, so as you can see, you can run DOSBox games in Windows XP, and there might be some use cases for that. Some games that are not known to work well in DOS command prompt windows could work in DOSBox because you could configure that to be whatever you like in terms of memory and different settings that you might need for some special games. Also, you’ll get full Sound Blaster support in DOSBox, whereas you might not always get that in a DOS window unless you have the right software emulation in place.

What else can I show you? That was the goal of this video, but as a bonus, I’m going to show you that this little onboard video card isn’t that bad. This is an Intel chip, but if I run the 3DMark 2000 benchmark suite, you’ll see that it can do quite a lot.

All right, so I’m going to run the default benchmark. [Running benchmark] As you can see, that is pretty good. And there you have it—4,560 3D Marks! I think I ran it another time and I got over 5,000, but I’m not sure what happened there. Might be that I had something else running in the background or something, who knows.

But 4,560 3D Marks for this little machine—I’ll look up what the comparable results are from other 3DMark 2000 runs and I’ll put them up here on the screen so you can see how this compares to other video cards.

So yeah, if you like this kind of stuff, subscribe to the channel because I’m always experimenting, adding new things to the channel that are computer-related, and I would love to hear your feedback. Leave a comment if you like this kind of stuff, subscribe, and share the video to anybody that you think would enjoy watching this. So yeah, until next time, thank you!