Bhole Pc Emu?

[Rigor Mortis]

Well, I've been here a long while, and know quite well what the general consensus of DOS emulation is. Exactly the same things were said among the Dreamcast emulator scene. However, someone recently found the Bhole emulator and started porting it. Now, it's already running some DOS games, and some people speculate it can reach 386 level on a DC. Since I can't remember it ever being mentioned on these forums, I thought I'd bring it up. Also, the original author has expressed an interest in assisting the DC port. Maybe he'd be willing to assist in a GP32 port at some point.

[random speculation]And hey, if the DC can reach 386 level, maybe the GP32 could reach 286 level.[/speculation]

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/bhole/

 

[Enslaved]

Cool, can you give me an example of a 286 game and a 286 game? I don't know the difference! Would a 286 be like Ultima 1-5 and a 386 be Ultima 6-8?

 

[Rigor Mortis]

With a 286 you could run pretty much all the classic Apogee and Epic Megagames shareware e.g. Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Solar Winds, Bio Menace, Monster Bash, etc. A 286 would not run, say, Jazz Jackrabbit or One Must Fall 2097.

 

[lizard808uk]

Colonization ran on a 386 w/4MB RAM - I know, I had it (and still do).

 

[EvilDragon]

There were quite a lot of games which ran - I played A LOT of games on my 286...

 

[Shirohagen]

Woo Hoo! Colonization!

He He He

®

 

[El_Diablo]

I would be extatic if I could play Commander Keen 4 on my GP32...cant really see it happening though since dos emulation is effectively emulating a PC and that is daaaamn demanding on our poor little GP (overclocked or otherwise)

 

[jmetal88]

....So....

Anyone taken a look at a doing GP port of this yet?

 

[toxibunny]

i've got either a 286 or a 386 (20MHZ/2MB RAM, if I remember rightly) in my bedroom, and it plays filled-3d elite very nicely...

*some* sort of PC emulator would be nice on GP32.

 

[Blah]

A 8086 with a less than 2 mhz cpu and a 640k vga graphics card could browse internet through dial-up. Wasn't the 8086 introduced in 1970? I'd jump with joy
if I saw even a 8086 emu. It'd just be cool to see EDIT running, and get a li'l hope
for a 386+ emu.

 

[Tobriand]

Heheh - well, I can't say I've heard of Bhole before, but if a group of porters have got it running on the DC at 386 level, then 286 level is, as has been said, a realistic hope for the GP32.

I think the word, ladies and gentlemen, is woo. At least once someone decides to try porting the port across. Which I'm sure sooner or later, they will

 

[Shirohagen]

Who knows how possible this is, but if someone has already ported a PSX emulator out of curiosity, then maybe we will see this too. The fact of it ever running DOS software is really a question which would come after that, but I'd love to see the issue tackled, I think it's a far more worthy endeavour than the PSX project personally. Until GP64 of course!

®

 

[Hanz™]

With a 286 you could run pretty much all the classic Apogee and Epic Megagames shareware e.g. Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Solar Winds, Bio Menace, Monster Bash, etc. A 286 would not run, say, Jazz Jackrabbit or One Must Fall 2097.

​

Awesome....

I used to love those games...

 

[Goity]

I like to BUMP posts

 

[argon0]

This would really rock if we could get it, I had an old IBM XT PC - with EGA graphics - that would have been an 8086 running at 4.7MHz, with a 10MB hard drive (double spaced to 20MB) Had LOADS of shareware on it, not to mention Word Processor, which I wrote most of my University Essays on, and spreadsheet & DB (PCType, PCDB, can't remember the spreadsheet...) progs.... Was thinking about throwing all my old floppies away the other day - instead stuck them in the Loft - phew!!!


Oooh, oooh, oooh, someone please port this...

pretty please...

 

[kknd_cf]

I would love this, I hope someone does decide to port it

 

[leebf]

I used to have a old Amstrad 286
In fact it was one of these:
http://www.cyberiapc.com/classicsys/pics/amstrad1.jpg

CPU: 12.5MHz 80286 16-bit processor
RAM: 1MB
Cache: 64KB
Hard Disk: 40MB - (but mine was corrupted so I had 34Mb to work with)
Graphics adaptor: VGA adaptor supporting MDA, CGA, Hercules, EGA, MCGA and EVGA.
Ports: Serial, parallel, 5.25 inch disk port, mouse port.
Operating system: MS-DOS 4.01/Microsoft Windows and Microsoft GW-BASIC

I had Windows 3.0 on mine but i uninstalled it cos i had QDos- which was cool, sort of*

Any way I could run stuff like wolfenstein 3d, Rick Dangerous, Curse of Enchantia even F1 Grand Prix, the original version. Of course the cars looked very boxy , but it ran at a good frame rate, even had the old Grand prix music at the start and an intro.

Um... anyway, it would be cool to see a 286 emulator on Gp32.

*just did a search and it seems Qdos was what came before Dos, but i'm sure the thing I had was a graphical version of Dos? So i'm not sure what I had. You could use a mouse and the files where arranged in a tree shape. Hmm, doesn't matter.**

**Needless update - I found it. It was called Q-Dos 3.
http://home.pmt.org/~drose/aw-dos-42.html



Bah

 

[FabreNZ]

Has anyone considered porting FreeDos? It's an open source version of DOS available at http://www.freedos.org

Design Goals
The goal of the FreeDOS Project is to create another implementation of MS-DOS. DOS is a popular system, and there is plenty of PC hardware already available that is ready to support it. Microsoft will not develop DOS forever, and one cannot count on third-party commercial entities to continue DOS. I feel it is then up to those on the Internet to develop their own DOS (FreeDOS) and I feel there is a lot of support for this type of project.

We intend to write a free replacement for MS-DOS; therefore, our first goal must be to achieve MS-DOS compatibility. We have chosen to become compatible with MS-DOS 3.3, because it is our opinion that MS-DOS 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x are really just improvements upon MS-DOS 3.3. Expanded memory support was improved, and some other things fixed, but on the whole the underlying DOS kernel didn't change that much.

The MS-DOS 3.3 compatibility extends only to the FreeDOS kernel. FreeDOS programs should be compatible with MS-DOS 6.22, because those are the features that users will be most familiar with.

FreeDOS should not be targetted towards certain users. That is, the end product should be something that programmers and non-programmers may both enjoy and find useful.

CPU's To Be Supported
The FreeDOS kernel and all FreeDOS programs (utilities, drivers, compilers, etc.) should run on all levels of PC hardware. FreeDOS should operate on processors as low as the 8088 (XT) with as little memory as 640k.

I do not think there is a problem to distribute optimized versions of the FreeDOS or FreeDOS programs for the 80386 and above. Any FreeDOS program may choose to take advantage of a '386 or other enhancement if detected, but the program should still run on low-end hardware such as the XT.

Exceptions to the XT rule are programs like EMM386, which were originally specified by MS-DOS to run on a '386 or better. Only if a program that was originally distributed with MS-DOS, that specifically says it will run on a certain PC architecture, may be written to support only that PC architecture.

 

[Blah]

Yes, Worldwriter has talked it to death. Freedos runs only on top of a real pc cpu. You need a PC emulator running under it. So we're back to our original problem.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, yeah, you COULD port FreeDOS... but it wouldn't make sense.
All you could do is use the standard DOS commands to copy files around on the SMC or rename them (either using a virtual keyboard or a chatboard), but you couldn't RUN any games as you are missing the actual hardware...

If you want to compare DOS with anything GP related, you could say DOS is a kind of firmware, able to run programs and do some file operations.

You can also port slubmans firmware to the PC - it would not turn magically into an emulator