This is an announcement that a lot of you guys have been waiting for for a long time. From now on, SDA will accept submissions of PC Games run on virtual machines or using DOSBox. The reasons for this decision and the exact rules on it are detailed below.
Video Game Consoles have a very specific architecture and components that are consistent across multiple units. Although some consoles have had multiple releases with slightly adjusted hardware their specifications remained almost constant. This is not at all true for Personal Computers, who have and still are undergoing major revisions in architecture and component design. This means that, even for a specific era of PC Gaming, there is no such thing as a reference system. For modern or more recent games this is mostly noticed by differing framerates and adjusting graphical settings, but the games tend to run at the same gameplay speed across vastly different PCs. This is not true for a lot of old DOS games, which were designed with specific CPU speeds in mind. We will get back to this point in a bit.
Another major difference between old consoles and old PCs is their availability these days. Even old consoles like the NES are still fairly easy to find and run these days, whereas PCs and components from the golden age of DOS gaming are fairly hard to come by. Even if you do have access to a system that can run these old games in their intended environment, getting SDA quality footage of gameplay may require some very intricate and complicated setup.
There are two major ways these issues have been mitigated by the gaming community. For DOS games, the most popular approach for playing them these days is using DOSBox, an emulator replicating an environment games would have experienced back in the day, including emulating widespread graphics and sound cards used then. The quality of its emulation and popularity has spread so far that plenty of game publishers have rereleased classic DOS games bundled with DOSBox in the past couple of years. These rereleases have been accepted for SDA submissions for quite a while now under the "officially sanctioned emulator" rule. We feel that DOSBox has become the de facto industry standard for rereleasing DOS games to a point where we are willing to consider it an officially sanctioned emulator for the platform as a whole and not just for each individual rerelease.
This does not represent a change in our policy on emulation, it is simply a reclassification of DOSBox within this policy. For the time being, it has no effect on other emulators.
For games past the DOS era, no such popular emulation option exists. Nevertheless a lot of games from the Windows 95/98 era don't run properly on modern Operating Systems and no official compatibility patches exist. While modern hardware isn't all entirely incompatible with these versions of Windows, they still don't run to their full capacity under these old OS, if you can get them to work at all. Although Windows natively offers compatibility settings for executables, those rarely seem to do anything at all. A common solution for running programs or games from this era is to use a virtual machine to run an old operating system on a modern PC. Virtualization software such as Virtual PC or VMware act as a sandbox and communication layer between modern hardware and an old OS. A virtual machine still executes code natively on the hardware as the x86 architecture hasn't fundamentally changed. As such, we do not consider a virtual machine an emulator in the usual sense. This is not too dissimilar from how Gamecube backwards compatibility on the Wii works.
To return to a point made previously, we have already stated that no reference system for DOS games exists. As such, there is no obvious specification that we can require or want DOSBox to replicate as closely as possible. The default settings in the most recent release of DOSBox run most games well, but may need tweaking for individual games. Instead of trying to centralize an approval process for settings for individual games, we have decided to incorporate that into the verification process of DOSBox recorded runs. As such, all runs on DOSBox emulated games will require the DOSBox settings as part of the submission process. These settings then need to be approved of by the verifiers as playing the game "the way it originally played". As that term is hard to define in a non arbitrary way, requiring community approval is the best solution we found. Note that this is an issue that would have existed on old hardware as well and is not introduced by DOSBox emulation. This is the official topic for discussing DOSBox settings beforehand so you can try to come to a consensus on settings to use for a specific game way before the verification process. Verifiers do still have the final verdict in the end, though.
Note that WINE is still considered to be an emulator under these rules, as it doesn't natively run a windows environment but rather aims to replicate it by reverse engineering its system calls. Thus, WINE is not allowed to be used for SDA submissions.
To recap, the following are the new rules on this topic.
Virtual machines and DOSBox are allowed to be used for running old PC games for SDA submissions in case they cannot be otherwise run properly on a modern PC. If an official compatibility patch exists you are required to use it. Think of these tools as a last resort, not a default option.
Runs recorded on DOSBox require the settings used to run the game to be included as part of the submission process. Verifiers need to approve these settings as part of the verification process for a run to be posted on SDA.
If a game has received an official DOSBox bundled release you are required to use those settings (but not necessarily that release of the game) for your run unless you have a strong argument against it. (Such as version differences introduced by the rerelease or incorrect playback under these official settings.) If a game had multiple such releases with differing settings, use whichever settings are best for the run.
Video Game Consoles have a very specific architecture and components that are consistent across multiple units. Although some consoles have had multiple releases with slightly adjusted hardware their specifications remained almost constant. This is not at all true for Personal Computers, who have and still are undergoing major revisions in architecture and component design. This means that, even for a specific era of PC Gaming, there is no such thing as a reference system. For modern or more recent games this is mostly noticed by differing framerates and adjusting graphical settings, but the games tend to run at the same gameplay speed across vastly different PCs. This is not true for a lot of old DOS games, which were designed with specific CPU speeds in mind. We will get back to this point in a bit.
Another major difference between old consoles and old PCs is their availability these days. Even old consoles like the NES are still fairly easy to find and run these days, whereas PCs and components from the golden age of DOS gaming are fairly hard to come by. Even if you do have access to a system that can run these old games in their intended environment, getting SDA quality footage of gameplay may require some very intricate and complicated setup.
There are two major ways these issues have been mitigated by the gaming community. For DOS games, the most popular approach for playing them these days is using DOSBox, an emulator replicating an environment games would have experienced back in the day, including emulating widespread graphics and sound cards used then. The quality of its emulation and popularity has spread so far that plenty of game publishers have rereleased classic DOS games bundled with DOSBox in the past couple of years. These rereleases have been accepted for SDA submissions for quite a while now under the "officially sanctioned emulator" rule. We feel that DOSBox has become the de facto industry standard for rereleasing DOS games to a point where we are willing to consider it an officially sanctioned emulator for the platform as a whole and not just for each individual rerelease.
This does not represent a change in our policy on emulation, it is simply a reclassification of DOSBox within this policy. For the time being, it has no effect on other emulators.
For games past the DOS era, no such popular emulation option exists. Nevertheless a lot of games from the Windows 95/98 era don't run properly on modern Operating Systems and no official compatibility patches exist. While modern hardware isn't all entirely incompatible with these versions of Windows, they still don't run to their full capacity under these old OS, if you can get them to work at all. Although Windows natively offers compatibility settings for executables, those rarely seem to do anything at all. A common solution for running programs or games from this era is to use a virtual machine to run an old operating system on a modern PC. Virtualization software such as Virtual PC or VMware act as a sandbox and communication layer between modern hardware and an old OS. A virtual machine still executes code natively on the hardware as the x86 architecture hasn't fundamentally changed. As such, we do not consider a virtual machine an emulator in the usual sense. This is not too dissimilar from how Gamecube backwards compatibility on the Wii works.
To return to a point made previously, we have already stated that no reference system for DOS games exists. As such, there is no obvious specification that we can require or want DOSBox to replicate as closely as possible. The default settings in the most recent release of DOSBox run most games well, but may need tweaking for individual games. Instead of trying to centralize an approval process for settings for individual games, we have decided to incorporate that into the verification process of DOSBox recorded runs. As such, all runs on DOSBox emulated games will require the DOSBox settings as part of the submission process. These settings then need to be approved of by the verifiers as playing the game "the way it originally played". As that term is hard to define in a non arbitrary way, requiring community approval is the best solution we found. Note that this is an issue that would have existed on old hardware as well and is not introduced by DOSBox emulation. This is the official topic for discussing DOSBox settings beforehand so you can try to come to a consensus on settings to use for a specific game way before the verification process. Verifiers do still have the final verdict in the end, though.
Note that WINE is still considered to be an emulator under these rules, as it doesn't natively run a windows environment but rather aims to replicate it by reverse engineering its system calls. Thus, WINE is not allowed to be used for SDA submissions.
To recap, the following are the new rules on this topic.
Virtual machines and DOSBox are allowed to be used for running old PC games for SDA submissions in case they cannot be otherwise run properly on a modern PC. If an official compatibility patch exists you are required to use it. Think of these tools as a last resort, not a default option.
Runs recorded on DOSBox require the settings used to run the game to be included as part of the submission process. Verifiers need to approve these settings as part of the verification process for a run to be posted on SDA.
If a game has received an official DOSBox bundled release you are required to use those settings (but not necessarily that release of the game) for your run unless you have a strong argument against it. (Such as version differences introduced by the rerelease or incorrect playback under these official settings.) If a game had multiple such releases with differing settings, use whichever settings are best for the run.
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