Dosbox 6.1

[shotaway]

Information

DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. DOSBox has already been ported to many different platforms, such as Windows, BeOS, Linux, MacOS X...

DOSBox also emulates CPU:286/386 realmode/protected mode, Directory FileSystem/XMS/EMS, Tandy/Hercules/CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA graphics, a SoundBlaster/Gravis Ultra Sound card for excellent sound compatibility with older games...

You can "re-live" the good old days with the help of DOSBox, it can run plenty of the old classics that don't run on your new computer!

DOSBox is totally free of charge and OpenSource.

this dosbox thing run over 1500 old pc game's....is it possible to port?
even if it only run's some of the older game's it would be a start....
please someone take on this project as it would mean a large boost to the type of game's that we could play on our gp32's.....

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/download.php?main=1 ...for the source code
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/comp_list.php?letter=a ...for start of game list


thank for listerning.

 

[washo]

sound great and remember that the GP can use a CHA01 keyboard...
PLZ make it (if its possible)

see you :lol:

 

[divadsci]

think it needs too much ram

 

[washo]

I dont think so....Its emulating a 386 so we are back in 1986 (to 1994)...or something like that....at that time 2M was great...
4M was the best...
so with 8M it sounds possible...I hope...

see you :lol:

 

[Tobriand]

I believe its possible. But I don't think it'd run fast, nor give people the same level of playability as, for example, CaSTaway. Although if someone DID release a port, I'd be very very happy (Commander Keen and potentially Tyrian on the move - yaaay!).

But I doubt it. IIRC Dosbox requires something like a 1GHz machine to emulate a 16MHz one. Or am I thinking of BOCHS?

 

[Ringo]

It does'nt seem likely. According to the readme.txt the requirements are something like a 400+ Pentium II to get decent emulation of games written for 286. Now I don't really know which games that would include, since I first became a PC-owner much later (around the first pentium i think).

I think Wolfenstein was 386 - although I'm not sure.

 

[shotaway]

readme.txt

dam....should have read it...before i open my mouth!!!

 

[Spaz O Mataz]

I don't think that dosbox would work. the best thing you could do is create a sort of dos program that runs dos and not emulates it. it required the 8.3 format of files and the old pc are about the same power as the gp32. it would take a little bit coding but i think it will work if someone create this. all someone would need to do is turn the dos files to gp32 understandable files. then even windows 3.1 could be ran. if the card is big enough that is.

 

[WhizzBang]

I am not sure there is any point in having a DOS emulator anyway. As I understand it, DOS is just the software that controls the execution of software and various disk operations such as moving files so DOS games were not actually written in DOS commands, they just needed to be launched from DOS (which avoided the problem of space being taken up on the computer by running Windows at the same time). I think you would need to emulate hardware, such as sound cards, that DOS controlled to get something like this working.

I don't pretend to be particularly knowledgable about PC stuff though, so I could be wrong.

 

[loki666]

well dont dream
ive take a quick look at the code and even if it seems portable (that mean it could run on gp32)
a poor 133mhz risc could maybe emulate a 8 or 16mhz like a 8088 or 8086... maybe alley cat could run, but forget prince of persia 2 and wold3d
(those games are allready emulated on other systems, or ported)

sure it could be intersting but not really usefull

WhizzBang: your right, but dosBox 0.6 is a full 286 and 386/7 emulator with a DOS as OS(for what i've undestood), so it could allow the gp32 to run dos exe files

 

[mr.mirko]

It is possible to port dosbox to gp32, but it is not usefull...

The arm9 cpu with 156Mhz is to slow to run something in real speed.

I tryed Dosbox6.0 on my old Pentium 200MMX Notebook, and it is
sooo slow, Maniac Mansion, or Zak Mc.Cracken are unplayable slow.

You need a 3000+ CPU to emulate a 486@50Mhz speed.


NO WAY !!!

 

[khephren]

Dos box uses the brute force aproach- it emulates everything. Which isn't necesary.
When I used to run Mac software on my amiga, it worked so well because they wrote native graphics and sound drivers for the amiga hardware. The mac just thought they were a different type of mac card, so they ran natively.

You could do the same with a DOS emu. Write native dos drivers for the GP sound and graphics (they are fairly rudimentary anyway)-then all you would really need to spend time doing is emulating the CPU. DOS BOX goes the full emulation approach because it's easier on the user to just pick up and play +the developers also don't have time to write dos drivers for every bit of modern hardware.
On the GP however, there is only one type of graphics chip, and one type of sound chip. I reckon that by spending most of the power of the GP emulating an intel CPU (and with judicous use of ASM) you could get decent performance.

 

[shotaway]

cheer's khephren... from what you say i think it may be possible with some hot coding to get round the sound and graphic's chip driver's....

so what do you think now?

 

[divadsci]

On the GP however, there is only one type of graphics chip, and one type of sound chip.

urm since when did the gp have a graphics chip or a sound chip?

 

[mr.mirko]

On the GP however, there is only one type of graphics chip, and one type of sound chip.

urm since when did the gp have a graphics chip or a sound chip?

Yes, there is a sound chip in gp32, its from Phillips, connected to the arm9 cpu.
And there is no seperate graphics chip in, the arm9tdmi is doing all video stuff.

 

[EvilDragon]

When I used to run Mac software on my amiga, it worked so well because they wrote native graphics and sound drivers for the amiga hardware. The mac just thought they were a different type of mac card, so they ran natively.

You forgot one thing:
The Amiga had an 68k processor and the Mac did have an 68k processor.
That's why it ran pretty fast - you only needed to emulate graphics and sound.

A PC / DOS - Emulator needs to emulate sound, graphics and the processor, 'cause the x86 and the Arm9 are completely different...

 

[khephren]

That isn't the point I was making.... I wasn't talking about them having the same CPU.

The first Mac emu I ever used on the Amiga ran like a dog because it had to emulate the graphics and sound. A few years later I used one where the coder had written NATIVE DRIVERS for the amiga graphics and sound- it ran a hell of a lot better (as in native drivers on the Mac side). As PCDOS also has many different graphics/sound card combinations, you could do the same. Why emulate something you can have running natively at their full GP speed? I state again, you should only have to emulate an 808x CPU, and provide drivers for the rest.

e.g. If you could plug a macintosh graphics card into a PC, would you emulate it, or would you write a driver for it? You'd write a driver for it. Of course I don't know anyone who can write old dos drivers

 

[khephren]

On the GP however, there is only one type of graphics chip, and one type of sound chip.

urm since when did the gp have a graphics chip or a sound chip?

just because they are included on the same die as other chips ( I think the sound is on the ARM, and the graphics are on the LCD controller- but I could be wrong about that), does not mean you can't reference them for driver writing.

 

[MegatronUK]

Why emulate something you can have running natively at their full GP speed? I state again, you should only have to emulate an 808x CPU, and provide drivers for the rest.

Unfortunately, almost no Dos based game ever used graphics or sound drivers, they accessed hardware directly ... thats why you had to choose your sound card type in game menus etc.

There's no getting around the fact that you would have to emulate a vga bios, the registers and memory, in addition to one or more sound cards (bog standard SoundBlaster would be the best bet).

Dos is completely unlike Windows, or even Amiga-OS or Mac-OS; they all communicate with the system by sending standard messages and commands to the driver sub-system (eg. draw a box 4x4 pixels at co-ordinates 123x45), which in turn knows how to speak directly to the hardware - Dos doesn't - apart from filesystem based routines (which the GP32 must have anyway - the card is FAT), almost everything in Dos is banging on the hardware (e.g write the pixels direct to video memory via vga bios hooks).

As for memory requirements, you have to take into account that the emulator needs to fit entirely in RAM before anything else is even thought about, then for decent performance with x86 on ARM you'd have to think about caching, again, more ram, then there is Dos itself to load, then the game on top of that. You'd be pushing it to have more than a few mb of memory left over once the emu, filesystem and instruction caches and dos has been loaded.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but nowhere near as easy as some people think. I've said it before, but if people want to take it further, how about looking into the old, native-ARM based emulators for the Acorn? Contact the programmers, if you can find any more details - at the end of the day, the GP32 is like an A7000 or something on steroids, without RiscOS.

 

[khephren]

at the end of the day, the GP32 is like an A7000 or something on steroids, without RiscOS.

now you've reaching my technical limitations! yes,I guess it would not have a VGA bios as it is not a seperate graphics chip, and was never meant for desktop PC use.
I'm guesing it has similar draw functions, though would the registers be written to GP main ram? As it does not have seperate graphics mem. So you would have to provide a new VGA BIOS, but while draw functions could run native, a lot of programming would be involved emulating the memory registers. I'm no coder, but I would guess that a lot of work would be involved. To much perhaps

I'm very fond of the Arch and other riscOS based machines- I think we would have more fun if someone did a riscOS emu, rather than intel DOS. You'd certainly get more speed out of it (well, you would not have to emulate the CPU would you? )
Then we could just run all their emulators...