2002: DOSBox, Xbox Ports, and the PS2 Frontier

A new PC ought to make old games easier to play. In 2002, it could make them stop working altogether.

The game was still on the hard drive. The manual was still in the drawer. But Windows had moved on, and the DOS game that once knew exactly where to find its sound card no longer had the run of the machine. Elsewhere, Dreamcast owners were feeding their consoles homemade discs, Xbox programmers were moving arcade games into the living room, and a very young PlayStation 2 emulator was asking people to be patient.

It was an odd moment to follow emulation. You could spend an evening enjoying an old favorite, then download something experimental enough to leave you staring at a blank screen. Both experiences belonged to the same scene. The distance between them gave the year much of its energy.

A point-and-click adventure finds the Dreamcast

On February 3, ScummVM announced that Marcus Comstedt had committed a Dreamcast port to its development repository. Comstedt was already one of the programmers behind DreamSNES. Now his Sega console had another job: running adventures built for computers. The announcement sent readers to Mark Thomas’s development site for binaries and to DCEmulation for the wider console scene. The original notice survives.

ScummVM supplied new code to run the games’ scripts and data, rather than recreating an entire PC. That made it a different sort of preservation project from a console emulator. For a player, the appealing part was simpler: a favorite adventure could make the journey to another machine without becoming an entirely new game.

There were still plenty of opportunities to get lost before reaching the first puzzle. In a September SegaXtreme discussion, Quadriflax wanted to try ScummVM but was unsure which files belonged on the disc. He owned the full games and had tried demo material, yet the path from a computer installation to a working Dreamcast disc remained confusing. Another poster explained that the needed files came from the original game.

That question sounds small until you remember the setting. A fan was trying to carry a computer adventure across to a television, with a different controller, a different operating environment, and a CD he had prepared himself. Getting the files right was part of getting to play.

DreamSNES gets a Valentine, then a pumpkin

DreamSNES had already made the Dreamcast a tempting home for Super Nintendo games. It had also taught owners to temper their expectations. A game could look convincing while running slowly enough to change its feel.

The team’s February 14 release tackled that problem with a rewritten CPU core in the Dreamcast’s own SH-4 assembly language. The same update improved VMU saving and added a visible save indicator, so players could tell when their progress was being written. February 24 brought repairs, including multiplayer Bomberman and saving fixes. In October, the Halloween release added C4 support for Mega Man X2 and X3 and repaired SA-1 handling. These were distinct advances in getting troublesome games to behave; the version number did not promise full-speed play across the library. The team’s dated release notes put the changes in order.

A save indicator deserves its place beside the faster CPU core. You can forgive a slightly sluggish game when you are experimenting. Losing an evening’s progress makes the experiment much harder to love.

NesterDC was following a steadier path. Takayama Fumihiko, who had continued the project after Ken Friece, brought it to version 7.1 on December 2. The preserved project page describes the things that made an NES disc comfortable to use: menus, controller support, and saves. A dependable evening with older games was becoming a reasonable expectation on Sega’s supposedly finished console.

The PS2 mountain comes into view

The Dreamcast programmers were fitting older machines into a console. PCSX2 was taking on a machine that still sat near the center of the contemporary games market.

Its first listed public version, 0.026, dates to March 23, 2002. Several further releases followed before version 0.1 in December. The developers known as Linuzappz and Shadow were attempting something whose eventual success is easy to take for granted now: making the PlayStation 2’s complicated collection of processors and graphics hardware cooperate inside a PC program. The project’s release history preserves that early progression.

The project’s 2010 retrospective remembers the early struggle to get beyond simple homebrew. The PS2’s own startup software became a milestone after days of debugging. When it finally booted, the graphics were distorted and the machine was painfully slow. It was still progress: the emulator had persuaded more of the real console’s software to execute.

That made an ugly startup screen worth celebrating. There was no useful evening of PS2 gaming waiting behind it yet, but there was now another failure the team could examine instead of an unexplained halt. Small victories gave the programmers somewhere to start the next day.

Those tiny numbers matter. This was the beginning of a long experiment, well before the familiar modern experience of picking a PS2 game and expecting a useful session. A screenshot could excite people without settling whether the emulator could carry them through a game. The useful questions were still basic ones: what would execute, what would draw, and which piece of the machine needed to be understood next?

For readers following the releases, that was enough reason to return. The previous generation had already shown how far an emulator could travel. Here was another group starting the climb.

A little box for the PC games Windows left behind

While PCSX2 looked toward newer hardware, DOSBox addressed a more immediate annoyance. The old game you wanted to play might already be yours, and your new computer might already be powerful enough. It was the relationship between the two that had broken.

In a later SourceForge interview, project leaders Sjoerd van der Berg and Peter Veenstra traced DOSBox to the trouble Windows 2000 caused for DOS games. They wanted those games running again, with windowed play and graphics scaling. Their milestone list dates the first open-source release, version 0.50, to July 22, 2002.

DOSBox recreated an x86 computer with an integrated DOS environment and emulated sound and graphics hardware. Instead of asking an old game to negotiate with whatever a new PC happened to contain, it gave the game a machine it could recognize. Its speed could be adjusted too. For software tied closely to the pace of its original computer, buying a faster PC had not always been a favor.

The earliest release notes show how ordinary the first victories could be. They record repairs to instructions, graphics, batch files, and Sound Blaster behavior, including fixes involving Dune and Wolfenstein 3D. An adventure that reached the next scene or a shooter that finally sounded right was a useful result in itself.

That was a different problem from squeezing another console onto a desktop. DOS gaming had never been one tidy machine. Players remembered different graphics cards, different sound cards, and the boot configurations that made a particular game cooperate. DOSBox had to bring some of that unruly past along with it.

By 2009, publishers were using DOSBox to rerelease their old games. In July 2002, the immediate achievement was getting the code out and giving other people a chance to help.

The Xbox starts collecting other machines

The original Xbox had arrived with a hard drive, a DVD drive, and considerable appeal to people who wanted a console to do more than its manufacturer intended. In 2002, emulator ports started turning that curiosity into something players could use.

XPort’s work offered a particularly inviting spread. A September contemporary report pointed readers to his new site and listed Xbox ports covering the Atari 2600, Game Boy, NES, PC Engine, Master System and Game Gear, Genesis, Neo Geo Pocket, and even a PC emulator. These represented adaptations of existing projects, whose original developers remained essential to the story. The attraction was having so many older machines available through one console.

Getting those projects to players also took websites and hosting. David Becker’s XB-Power built and hosted sites for XPort, SuperFro’s MAME-X, and Lantus’s xSnes9x. XPort’s September 2002 welcome page thanked xb-power.com for hosting. Lantus later became known as Modern Vintage Gamer.

Lantus’s xSnes9x gave SNES fans another reason to experiment. The preserved XB-Power-hosted project page records save states, IPS patch support and a way to rescan games after changing discs. These were useful conveniences for somebody sitting across the room from a television. You could resume a difficult section, use a compatible patch or bring in another disc without treating every choice as a fresh installation.

Lantus later recalled learning from SuperFro’s MAME-X source. In his 2018 first-person retrospective, he credited that code with inspiring his own work. The ports could look like separate collections from separate authors. Behind them, one programmer’s example was helping another get started.

MAME-X brought arcade emulation into that expanding Xbox scene. Contemporary news preserved on the DCEmulation forums followed the handover from Opcode to SuperFro and described Beta 5 improvements: loading information, clearer errors, and a way to escape some black-screen situations. For somebody waiting in front of a television, a progress indicator could answer the question a silent screen could not: is it still working?

Distribution was more awkward. The same period discussion reported that Microsoft pressure had stopped binary downloads from the official MAME-X site while source updates continued. The thread preserves the community’s report, rather than a complete exchange with Microsoft. It also shows the practical divide between writing a port and putting a downloadable build in players’ hands.

In a December Xbox FAQ at Overclockers Australia, StratosFear gathered emulator links and cautions about builds made with Microsoft’s development kit. Fans wanted a clear answer to “where do I get it?” The scene could not always give one from the developer’s own front page. That friction helped make news sites, forums, and hosting arrangements part of the everyday experience of Xbox emulation.

The fixes that made another playthrough possible

Arcade emulation was changing too. MAME 0.60, released on May 1, dropped an older way of using Sound Blaster hardware for FM audio. Software emulation had become good enough to take its place in most cases, according to the official MAME history. It was a small milestone in loosening the connection between an emulator and the particular hardware inside its host PC.

The original arcade boards still set the target. But the computer running MAME no longer needed that same old shortcut to reach it. People upgrading their PCs could take another piece of the experience with them.

On the desktop, established projects had a less spectacular but equally important job: getting familiar games right.

Gens 1.90’s April notes covered a new YM2612 sound core and further sound work, alongside Sega CD fixes. The follow-up, 1.91, repaired problems exposed by the earlier release. The contemporary April archive makes the back-and-forth visible. A replacement core could improve one part of a game while uncovering a fault elsewhere.

If you grew up with the Genesis, the music in games such as Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was part of recognizing the machine. Getting a familiar tune closer to the original could matter more than another entry in a supported-games count. Those changes reached players through the next download, often with only a few lines of explanation.

There was cooperation behind the apparent competition. March reports recorded Kega and Gens agreeing on a modified save format, alongside Kega fixes involving The Adventures of Willy Beamish. A player’s progress did not have to become collateral damage every time they tried another emulator. That same month’s news reported a much harsher setback for NESten: a hard-drive crash had cost its author source code. A surviving older copy was little comfort when it meant reconstructing work that had already been done.

Game Boy Advance emulation had similar work ahead, with adventures such as Castlevania: Circle of the Moon inviting long sessions. VisualBoyAdvance 1.3 arrived in December with changes including 128 KB Flash saves, sound mixing, and recording support. Version 1.3.1 followed almost immediately with a Flash-saving repair. The December news archive preserves both releases.

A handheld adventure asks you to trust its save system for hours. Looking good in a screenshot is the easy promise; remembering your progress when you return is the one that keeps you playing. That quick follow-up was the sort of unglamorous maintenance on which a growing audience depended.

LucasArts sends a letter

ScummVM’s year had another obstacle besides getting games to run. On June 25, the team announced that LucasArts Legal had contacted it requesting removal of the site. According to the team’s account, the request assumed ScummVM was distributing LucasArts’ own engine. The developers replied that their implementation was original work built through reverse engineering and decoding. Their announcement was confident enough to promise continued development.

Fans were putting effort into keeping LucasArts adventures playable on more machines, while the company’s legal department was questioning the project that enabled it. That tension did not need an invented villain or a courtroom climax. The prospect of a project disappearing was enough to make people worry about what would happen to games they still wanted to play.

The issue was still unresolved when ScummVM announced version 0.3.0b in December. Its release post discussed ongoing negotiations while offering another build to players. Work had carried on in the meantime.

ScummVM ended the year with another release available and the correspondence still unfinished. A player could download the new build while its developers continued to defend the work that made it possible.

The next obstacle might be a faulty save, a misunderstood processor, a difficult disc or a letter from outside the project. The releases kept arriving anyway.

Try the projects today

For the modern descendants of this story, visit our DOSBox and PCSX2 profiles. Current releases have traveled a long way beyond the early builds discussed here.

Sources and further reading

• ScummVM’s dated project announcements — 20020203
• SegaXtreme: September 2002 ScummVM discussion
• DreamSNES: original release notes
• DCEmulation: project archives and dated forum discussions
• PCSX2: official release history
• DOSBox developers interviewed at SourceForge (2009)
• DOSBox: preserved NEWS and release notes
• Swedish Emulation News: contemporary release reports
• DCEmulation: project archives and dated forum discussions
• Overclockers Australia: December 2002 Xbox FAQ
• MAME: official development history
• Swedish Emulation News: contemporary release reports
• Swedish Emulation News: contemporary release reports
• Swedish Emulation News: contemporary release reports
• ScummVM’s dated project announcements — 20020625
• ScummVM’s dated project announcements — 20021207