Dosbox Ready For Pandora

[Hotcooler]

Another great 3D Dos Game that comes in my mind when I'm thinking onto "Stunts" is "Stunt Island", one of the most underestimated DOS Games of all Times. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_Island ) If this game would run onto the Pandora, then it would be a big reason to instantly install DosBox.



Wow. Never seen this game. Graphics is really good for the time. I'll look into it on pandora.

 

[PoisonedV]

Pickle, this is phenomenal. I love you. at least KNOWING that there was someone attempting DOSbox on pandora locked in my preorder

 

[Pickle]

Pickle, this is phenomenal. I love you. at least KNOWING that there was someone attempting DOSbox on pandora locked in my preorder

thanks, it would happen one way or another. Really its mostly a matter of setting up the toolchain. The original dosbox authors have done a great job of keeping dosbox very portable. The fact SDL is the only dependency helps a lot too.
The way pandora was designed helps, more memory, pc like controls.
I hope i can get that SD lib soon.

Im going to post about this in the coming week, but it appears there has been built in support to map joysticks to dosbox internal keys. If it works as it appears to there wont need to be any hacking of the current code,
I want to test it more and if its works well I might even scrap the current hsck in the gp2x version.

 

[Vince2501]

Quick question about Dosbox on Pandora: Do you still need the source code for a game to run it in Dosbox?

If not, great. I get to play Blood on the go.

 

[Joshwaan2k]

Pickle if you can get full speed Blackthorne and Warcraft 1 or 2 I'l kiss ya

No seriously I'll donate some cash your way

 

[benjymous]

Quick question about Dosbox on Pandora: Do you still need the source code for a game to run it in Dosbox?

If not, great. I get to play Blood on the go.

No - Dosbox is a dos emulator. so it'll just run the games (just like you don't need the source to a megadrive game to run it on a megadrive emu)

 

[vputz]

Heh... DosBox on the GP2X was one of my first tries, but alas my horrible 1996 shareware game ("Flynn Sprint"--lol) wouldn't run at a playable rate. If the Pandora lets me play my game on a portable, I'll be a happy man.

(it's a horrible game, but I'm still proud of it)

 

[Pickle]

Pickle if you can get full speed Blackthorne and Warcraft 1 or 2 I'l kiss ya

Warcraft 1 will is realistic, I doubt war2 will be fullspeed (we have wargus for that anyway)
Ive never played or tried Blackthorne we will just have to see.

 

[Drack]

Do you think this will run Megarace? Installed from a CD.

Sysreqs:
386 processor, 33Mhz
2Mb RAM
MCGA of VGA
CD-Rom Drive

The game used FMV extensively, streamed from the CD.

And if Dosbox can't handle it, there's a Sega CD port of it too, so no worries. I've got so many great memories of this game.

===
How about Lode Runner: The Legend Returns? Smaller game, installed from 5 floppies. Here are the sysreqs:

Minimum CPU Speed: 25 MHz
Minimum RAM Required: 4 MB
Minimum Hard Disk Space: 12 MB
Minimum OS Version: 3.3
Graphics Type: VGA
Color Depth: 256 Colors

Should be no problem, but there's a console port if DosBox can't do it, this time for Playstation.

 

[joa]

anyone remember bioforge, I'd LOVE to play that through again!

system requirements 80486DX 50 MHz CPU
8 MB RAM
double-speed CD-ROM drive

/me wonders

 

[Pickle]

Do you think this will run Megarace? Sysreqs:386 processor, 33Mhz
How about Lode Runner: The Legend Returns? Minimum CPU Speed: 25 MHz

The best test you can do is run them on computer (pc/mac/linux) and see how many cycles they take to run.
My guess cycles guess for pandora was between 3k and 4k, but thats just a guess and might be too high.

 

[sold]

Hey Pickle. I just tried out some old dos games in Dosbox .72 on an eeepc 701 wih 2GB ram and I tried the following titles at 3500 cycles, normal core with 16MB ram, sound on and 0 frameskip.

Alien Carnage
Blake Stone
Blood
Dark Ages
Duke Nukum I and II (platformers)
Raptor: Call of the shadows
Solar Winds

All ran kinda choppy except for duke 1 which already works on GP2x dosbox. Blood loaded and ran at 0-1 fps :lol:

Is this a fair indication of what you think the performance will be like on the actual pandora hardware? Or are you sorta being conservative with your expectations?

 

[Alex777]

Hey Pickle. I just tried out some old dos games in Dosbox .72 on an eeepc 701 wih 2GB ram and I tried the following titles at 3500 cycles, normal core with 16MB ram, sound on and 0 frameskip.

Alien Carnage
Blake Stone
Blood
Dark Ages
Duke Nukum I and II (platformers)
Raptor: Call of the shadows
Solar Winds

All ran kinda choppy except for duke 1 which already works on GP2x dosbox. Blood loaded and ran at 0-1 fps :lol:

Is this a fair indication of what you think the performance will be like on the actual pandora hardware? Or are you sorta being conservative with your expectations?

Are you sure 16MB of RAM is an accurate simulation? The Pandora has 128MB- will it really be using 112MB of that in overhead?

 

[anexanhume]

Yeah, I would say you can assume 64mb with no problems.

 

[Pickle]

Is this a fair indication of what you think the performance will be like on the actual pandora hardware? Or are you sorta being conservative with your expectations?

It might be a ok idea what is possible.

Optimistic guess:
Lets say the GP2X can mange 1000 cycles and the pandora gives us 3x performance gain = 3000 cycles. I think this might be generous though.
Pessimistic guess:
But most of the games I run on my gp2x seem to be the best at 500-800 cycles. A performance gain of 2.5x gives 1250 - 2000.
And this is at 500 Mhz, so if we overclock we might be able to push into high 3000's?

Another thing to consider is core type. If we ran both simple core then it might be pretty good idea how the performance scales between x86 and arm, but we are going to use the dynamic arm core, which is faster then the simple core, but maybe not a fast as the x86 dynamic core.
You could also turn off sound too.

Yeah, I would say you can assume 64mb with no problems.

I agree, 128 mb sure beats the 32 mb on the gp2x. But 16mb emulated is more than enough for what will be runable

 

[Vince2501]

Very interesting, if we can get playable Blood on Pandora, it would be a killer FPS to have.

 

[sold]

No, I don't think Blood will be playable. I tried it just to see if it would run using the dosbox the settings Pickles said would be comparable to the Pandoras performance. Plus, I forgot to add in my previous post, I had to run it with 64MB of memory in dosbox or it would crash. It loaded, the sound worked, but there were like 0-1 fps at 4000 cycles using the normal cpu core. And after a few minutes, it would crash.

I only tried it because it was one of the games that I would love to have running on pandora.

It may run a little better or worse on pandora. But I doubt it will be a good experience either way.

 

[PoisonedV]

i cant wait- god of thunder, darklands, dark seed, dungeon master, wizardry... :'D

 

[Warpshade]

Portable X-COM.... mmmm.....
....What, I can dream, can't I?

 

[sold]

I was hoping for carmageddon on the go. I think that it might be a little bit much to ask though Still got my fingers crossed that the port might exceed everyones expectations. Any word on the libs you needed Pickles?