Release Qemu for Pandora (for rebirth competition)


I gave Crusader No Remorse a try. A little slow, but looks to be quite playable. However, the controls seem to stop responding soon after launching. Also, I need to find a way to rebind the buttons to make the controls useful.


I'll mess around with it a little more when I get a moment.
 
Got a question on the HD Image creation utility included with this. I am installing win 95 but when I create an image it goes and goes and goes and does not stop. If i hit OK when it says running, then the image starts and formats but then crashes when I install win 95. I get a HD error message.


Any ideas or help?
 
Got a question on the HD Image creation utility included with this. I am installing win 95 but when I create an image it goes and goes and goes and does not stop. If i hit OK when it says running, then the image starts and formats but then crashes when I install win 95. I get a HD error message.


Any ideas or help?

Imho is not really good use the Pandora for Windows 95 install unless, as Ingoreis said, you use a very fast USB stick and overclock your Pandora at least to 800 Mhz. I personally used Qemu Manager 7 on my Windows XP machine and Windows 95 installation didnt take much time.
 
Im surprised no one has mentioned Windows NT 4 here... After an evening of playing around with it the following seems to be true;


Pros -


1. It's very quick (back in the day it flew on systems with 32Mb ram). Mines overclocked to 1.2Ghz but boots so quickly I dont see why less would be a major concern.


2. Graphics and sound work fine.


3. Directx 3 available with service pack 4 (although you'd have SP6 installed)


4. Oh USB and tablet HID work (you need to install a 3rd party USB stack, I used - http://ftp1.digi.com/support/driver/i4usb406.exe)


5. The only early 9x era games that refuse to work are the ones that cry "This isnt Windows 9x". I find that often running the game exe directly always started it. I used to game on NT 4 back before 2000 was out :) .


Cons -


1. It's a throw of the dice if you can boot into it. Some IRQ error comes up every other reboot. Once youre in, youre in and the built in Cirrus drivers work fine. You'll even have to reboot during the install due to a STOP. but the install will resume (just make sure you select FAT rather then NTFS). - Oh, I use system_restart in the qemu control to quickly reboot past this.


2. At 16m colours the mouse cursor is just a white box with the top left of it being the point. at 65k colours, you have no mouse pointer. I haven't figured out a way past this yet.


3. I need to find a copy of the NT4 resource kit were you can enable auto-login. Until then you have to go to the qemu menu (alt-ctrl-2) to run "sendkey ctrl-alt-delete" to logon. I suggest easy password as well.


Lean mean USB driving machine, I'm a full time Linux user these days but I'll always remember NT4 fondly :)
 
I gave Crusader No Remorse a try. A little slow, but looks to be quite playable. However, the controls seem to stop responding soon after launching. Also, I need to find a way to rebind the buttons to make the controls useful.


I'll mess around with it a little more when I get a moment.

I was thinking about this the other day, I wonder if there's a script we can make to bind certain keys on startup of the shell / game. Like the usual fire keys.
 
2. At 16m colours the mouse cursor is just a white box with the top left of it being the point. at 65k colours, you have no mouse pointer. I haven't figured out a way past this yet.

The yellowish and grey pointer works normal, if it's missing copy it from an w9x install.
 
2. At 16m colours the mouse cursor is just a white box with the top left of it being the point. at 65k colours, you have no mouse pointer. I haven't figured out a way past this yet.

The yellowish and grey pointer works normal, if it's missing copy it from an w9x install.

Ah thanks I'll try that! Now I just gotta to figure out a way past the 50/50 crashing. Although the touchscreen works as well, the pointer doesnt seem to link with the screen in a logical way, every press in one direction from the center say, moves the cursor twice the distance from the press... strange.
 
Grunts works quite well.. Just need to get Windows 98 working somehow for touch support
 
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Oh I wanted to ask, without hunting through 43 pages of posts. What are the default settings for a qemu vm on the app? Be handy knowing so I can play with the option switches a bit more
 
I'm using Qemu with Windows 95, and I noticed that when the SD card is in use (the led ON), the system freeze and is unusable as long as the led is ON (the mouse cursor freeze ect.). Is there a solution for this ? (maybe the IO part of qemu is running on the same thread as the main emulator, or something like that...).
 
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Just in case no one else has mentioned it; Windows 95C has usb support. Tablet seems to work on that as well. Same issue as NT 4 though where the mouse is a little off to where you point on the screen but it does work.


Does tablet work perfectly on win98? I'm installing that now but win95 should be good enough for the sort of games were limited to playing on qemu. (ah brings back memories all this)
 
Oh boy, I don't ever do anything easy do I?


Ok. I managed to get MS-DOS 6.22 up and running with Soundblaster 16 support, OAKCDROM.SYS cdrom driver and NE2000 NIC card support working. HIMEM and EMM386 leaving 540ish KB of RAM free in lower memory. Not too shabby.


What did I use to test this beast? None other than the perennial Arachne DOS Web Browser.


On my PC host this setup works great. Arachne runs well and can take full advantage of the Cirrus Logic VGA adapter to display beautiful 16M color 1024x768 web renderings.


The Pandora is not so great. It does work, but the graphics routines either bug out, or crash QEMU. The best Resolution I could get was pure 640x480X16 VGA. 800x600x256 VESA mode almost works, but it renders chunks of the screen haphazardly around the display.


The great news is that the NE2000 packet driver that Arachne installs for you does work in DOS on the Pandora QEMU.


I also found that QEMU pegs out the CPU unless you run the tiny utility called DOSIDLE. The program fixes the HLT instruction to actually let the virtualized CPU truely idle in QEMU. Must have piece of software here.


Anyways. I wish I knew what I could do to get Arachne to do 800x600x16m colors on the Pandora.. Not that it's a great web-browser, but some of the plug ins are actually pretty cool to play around with. Still it's been a fun exercise. Probably going to divert my attention somewhere else again. :D
 
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