Hi Eric,
> (...) but my goal would still be finding out how > to make all games work in FreeDOS - if necessary, by pointing out > bugs in FreeDOS. > That's what i wish too. And i'll do my best to help. Because the moment FreeDOS is better than MS-DOS in compatibility i'll never look back. Hoping for that day to come soon. > That said, in case you have Linux (not sure about the porting state > of DOSEMU2 to Windows or other OS), could you test the games here > with DOSEMU2 and FDPP? The FDPP module of DOSEMU2 is a port of the > FreeDOS kernel to the Linux side of the emulator, with some glue on > the DOS side, so it is a bit hard to compare to classic FreeDOS, but > it has lots of patches which may have already solved the game issues > so it would be cool to know how well the tricky games run with that. > > FDPP is the default "DOS" for DOSEMU2, but you can still use DOSEMU2 > like a more generic VM or emulator and install classic FreeDOS on it, > either in a diskimage drive or in a "Linux directory posing as a DOS > drive". The latter requires loading some special DOS drivers to gain > write access after boot. In DOSEMU (non-2), some magic was built-in > to provide more services without manually loading DOS drivers, so that > just had a normal FreeDOS kernel as default guest operating system. > At the moment i don't have a Linux install, but i regarding fdpp i've found this: https://www.mail-archive.com/freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg12117.html >From that page notice the following quote: *many games work better with fdpp than with FreeDOS, says > https://github.com/dosemu2/fdpp/releases/tag/beta-9 > <https://github.com/dosemu2/fdpp/releases/tag/beta-9> > (Test Drive 2, Tetris Classic, Elite Frontier, Empire > Soccer, Virtual Chess, Alone in the Dark, Alpha Waves)* > > Whatever was done in fdpp to fix Test Drive 2 will probably solve the issues for the other DSI games that use the same engine, Grand Prix Circuit and The Cycles. DSI games, running on bare metal, go to a black screen and just stay there. This feels like the games are stuck in an infinite loop, just before anything is written to the screen (graphics that is). At least, it seems that the INT 10h call to set the video mode is actually triggered, and somehow it just stays in some infinite loop afterwards. This needs some debugging. It seems though that a few more games are mentioned,*Tetris Classic, Frontier Elite, Virtual Chess and Empire Soccer. *I'm curious, and i'll be testing those soon. Also notice 2 Infogrames games in there, Alone in the Dark and Alpha Waves. These games apparently: > > * 2 of the above games "resize PSP to 0 > and then terminate it" which apparently MS DOS accepts* > > So MS-DOS accepts something that is completely illegal in FreeDOS. I don't understand why Infogrames developers would mess their code to resize the Program Segment Prefix to 0, but since MS-DOS accepts this either they never bothered or they never noticed. So i guess this can't be considered a bug in FreeDOS? Or in the sake of compatibility should FreeDOS behave the same way? What are your thoughts on this? That surprises me, as a default install of FreeDOS has FAT32 enabled. > Do those games just refuse to run when the game itself is on a FAT32 > drive? Or do they actually care about whether DOS knows about FAT32? > Well Starflight 1 and 2 refuse to run on a FAT32 drive in Win98 DOS, or MS-DOS 7.1, if you prefer. I would be inclined for the former, but i've found this: https://www.oocities.org/timessquare/maze/4979/sfbugs.html Something to do with locked files and direct disk access. Making a RAM drive and copying the game folder into that helps, if i run the game from the RAM drive there's no issue at all. In FreeDOS there's no need for a RAM disk, the games just run perfectly from the FAT32 install. Some Tsunami Media games, i also fail to understand what the issue is. In FAT32 MS-DOS they refuse to run. If i use a FAT16 partition or even a RAM drive they run fine. I just grabbed a HDD i have around and limited it for LBA 28bit with Sea Tools (my socket 7 board has LBA 28 bit limit), so i'm going to install FreeDOS 1.3 on that and then just copy all the games i have on my main DOS 7.1 machine into the FreeDOS install. It will take me weeks to test everything (i have more than 1000 games installed) but i want to see if more stuff refuses to run on FreeDOS, and on the other hand, see if there's more stuff like Starflight 1 and 2, that has issues in FAT32 MS-DOS but run fine in Free DOS. It would be great to make an official comaptibility list: FreeDOS games that won't run: - Alone in the Dark 1 and 2 (floppy versions only, CD versions run fine) - Alpha Waves - Empire Soccer - Frontier Elite - Grand Prix Circuit - Test Drive 2 - The Cycles - Tetris Classic - Virtual Chess Regards, Carlos
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