Hi! Forwarding a message from Lukas, accidentally sent only to me.
To already reply to his points: It is a common problem that 486 can not boot from CD-ROM, but we provide a boot floppy image with the right drivers to boot your 486 and then start our CD installer :-) Note that our installer expects FreeDOS command.com, not others, as it uses some extended functionality from that. You write that you have tried our floppy, but ran into other bugs: Please explain which bugs you saw. I think Jerome would tell you to switch to advanced mode while inside the installer to avoid the bugs, but without knowing WHICH bugs, I cannot say for sure. Lukas, please keep us posted about the CD-ROM based games and the drivers which they do or do not like, e.g. UDVD2, SHSUCDX, JEMM386 (but remember: the best EMM386 version often is the one which you do not load at all, unless the game really needs to use EMS). You can also compare XMGR to HIMEM if any game would dislike our HIMEM, or use our HIMEM command line options to limit RAM. Some games are known to fail if they see more than 31 MB of XMS2: /X2MAX32 helps. What exactly made DOSBOX bad in playing your 486 games, by the way? That OSSC - http://junkerhq.net/xrgb/index.php?title=OSSC - really is fancy! It upscales SCART, Component or VGA input to HDMI or DVI using small fractional N/M scaling factors in HARDWARE (an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA, DVI out chip, analogue I/O chip, CPU/SoC, 110 EUR) https://videogameperfection.com/products/open-source-scan-converter/ Common modes seem to be deinterlace and multiplying lines by 2 to 5. Of course running 320x240 games on 4k screens is a bit strange, you have to turn every retro pixel into 108 ultra high resolution ones, but for those who happen to have 4k screens with bad built-in scalers it still is a very elegant solution. You should ASK the DOSBOX people to implement the scaling algorithm of your choice instead of just telling US how bad DOSBOX looks according to your taste. You say you dislike having to reconfigure DOSBOX for each game: In Linux, there is Plays on Linux which automatically uses a collection of optimized configs and dependencies for your Windows games in Wine, so I imagine something similar would exist for DOSBOX and DOS games? Regards, Eric @Jerome: The installer will fail somewhere at the end, like 99% or 100%. Even with BASE install. It will say that it failed to copy some package on the drive. Another use case: adding 10 packages from 5 categories in already installed FreeDOS system -> you will get runtime error / out of memory on 486. My previous e-mail without photo: Hi, yes I did use Win 98 floppy. That found my CD-ROM, which is connected to onboard IDE, not to soundcard. Just 486 BIOS did not know CDROM / ATAPI back then. I tried even FreeDOS floppies, but it goes straight to the installer and that installer has some other issues. So that's why I ended with Win98 floppy + FreeDOS CD. But it is impossible to install it on 486. I had to do it on Pentium machine. Today I am experimenting with FreeDOS drivers. Regarding the CDROM drivers, I did not try MS-DOS 6.22 yet. Only MS-DOS 7.1 from Windows 95 and Windows 98. There are some cdrom drivers out of the box that MSCDEX will find the drive. I have plenty of CD and DVD roms. From oldschool NEC, through LG, to Pioneer and Plextor. I have even some installation disks with drivers for these units. So this should be easy to fix. You know, every review is a little bit biased. Yes, a lot of classic DOS games do run in FreeDOS. But only classic DOS games without CD-ROM. If I would make this kind of review, it would be biased towards opposite direction because the percentage of games I have that is not working is much higher. So Arkanoid II on 5.25'' works :-). But Mass Destruction on CD does not work. On the same configuration, with different OS, it works as well. So I'm going to figure out why is that. I tried DOSBOX on my Windows 10 machine. I did not like it at all. Because I played these games on 486 like 10 hours every day. I remember it was not like this. That was the point when I decided to invest hundreds of dollars into retro stuff. DosBox will scale the graphics in a wrong way. It is always like 1024x768 then it will upscale to 4K HDMI display. On the other hand OSSC, the FPGA unit, will scale it naturally. You can even add scanlines for more CRT feel. Sometimes DosBox will feature some GoG update, which will "update" the game to 16:9 instead of the original 4:3. That completely destroys the aspect ratio. For example Jazz JackRabbit does this. So I don't get the feel that I would enjoy playing in DosBox. For a lot of stuff, you need to change dosbox config game by game. For example if you use external MPU-401 device such as Roland SC-55. So instead of messing with hardware, you start messing with software. And as it is my daily job, I want to get rid of it. Also you have the distractions of the internet and notifications. When I boot my 486, I just install the game and it is working. The only thing I might do is choose some XMS option in the boot menu, that is all. I also have like 100 physical copies of the games either in Big Box or CD case. DosBox vs Hardware is same flame war like if you are music producer and go on producer forum and start talking about virtual synth (VST) or hardware synth (Roland, Korg, Access Virus). Someone prefer twiggle with software and digitally clean filters. Someone prefers hardware knobs and analog to digital converters with a little bit of noise. It is a never ending story. As a music producer, I'm on the virtual synth side and software. As a gamer, I'm on a hardware side where I want to have the real hardware with top components from that time. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
