Hi Lukas,
> Phil has even FreeDOS starter pack, but it is for FreeDOS 1.2. I tried it. > The driver VIDECDD is not working at all. It will not find my CD-ROM drive. Such is life. Try OAKCDROM or stick to UDVD2 in that case. This should not depend on your BIOS, though. As long as the CDROM is connected to the mainboard, it should be easy. If your CDROM is connected to some ATAPI-style connector on your soundcard, additional configuration or command line options may become necessary in DOS. > Perhaps because 486 bios cannot find the CDROM. > But driver such as MSCDEX or SHSUCDX will find the drive. This actually is a two layer system: UDVD2, OAKCDROM or VIDECDD are what talks to your hardware as layer 1. MSCDEX and SHSUCDX only talk to layer 1, NOT directly to your hardware. There also is ELTORITO, which talks to the BIOS which in turn talks to your hardware, but that only works when you boot from the CD drive in question. When UHDD is loaded first, UDVD2 will additionally talk to UHDD to cache. In short, if VIDECDD does not work, use UDVD2 or another layer 1 driver. Whether you use MSCDEX or SHSUCDX makes no difference in that point, but it might make a difference for copy protections. Different layer 1 drivers may ALSO make copy protection differences, so you really have to try a few combinations to find out more. > Yes, he mentions that a lot of games will fail because they cannot > find a CD drive at all. And this must be something specific to > FreeDOS (I think it can be driver for CD or EMM386). You forget that he also mention many games which work immediately. If you say EMM386 is a likely source of problems, I repeat my recommendation to simply avoid loading it. Much easier than to wonder whether another version or other options make it better. > You know I spent last 3 days with FreeDOS, trying to make it work. I don't > think I'm impatient. We spent one day here and I did not have any solution I spent at least half an hour finding and watching Phil's videos, youtube comments, pausing short screenshots of error messages etc. It would have been a lot easier if you just answered my questions and actually you would have saved four hours of experiments with Windows boot floppy and our installer if you had carefully read the instructions, or had asked immediately, to know that there is a FreeDOS boot disk which should be used with the install CD when your BIOS cannot boot from CD (in general, this is common for 486). So again, life is hard with DOS. When we used it in the 1980s or 1990s, it was not uncommon to spend some time wondering about the drivers or configuration for some new hardware or software. This is not specific to the FreeDOS style of DOS. Remember that with MS DOS 6, you were not even able to use more than 8 GB of your harddisk (often less, depending on BIOS) or more than 2 GB for each drive letter. Hardware has not become simpler since then, so it is quite nice that UDVD2 covers a large range of systems. Thirty years ago, you just used the driver which came with your CD-ROM drive and hope that it was of good quality, but nobody would have complained about having to copy that BRANDCD.SYS from the CD vendor to their DOS directory and read the docs and so on. Compared to that, UDVD2 is very plug and play. For everything not automatically done right by that, pretend that it is 1990. > Therefore I will try hack my way around. Copy MSCDEX and EMM386. That would be a very interesting experiment, yes. Please tell me which games work better with those. Again, you should also try different layer 1 drivers if MSCDEX is not sufficient to make the CD-ROM detected by copy protection schemes. > If that won't work, I will format the drive and install Windows 95. You do know that DOS games are not exactly famous for running inside Windows, right? Or do you mean the MS DOS 7 which came with Windows? That might work, but it may actually have fewer drivers for modern hardware than FreeDOS does. Again, let me know how well your games work with it if you test MS DOS 7. > PS: CD Audio was fixed in Freedos 1.3 RC2 thanks to updated UDVD2 driver > and I use XT-IDE custom BIOS attached on Realtek NIC. That allows to > unlimited disk size (limited only by filesystem, 8TB for FAT32). That is a pretty fancy way to solve the disk size limitation compared to your expectations about plug and play DOS drivers. Note that disk size is limited to 2 TB, not 8 TB, because DOS only supports MBR partition tables and 512 byte sector size at the moment, but both can be fixed in future FreeDOS updates :-) > ...took a vacation this week to solve stuff like this. Because I won auction > with 15 retro gaming PCs after someone's brother deceased. And it was whole > weekend for me with only FreeDOS installation crashing because of out of Sad thing about the brother! Still, if I had FIFTEEN new PC, I would not be surprised to spend a lot of time to install them. > memory. Then other stuff and now I see the compatibility with MY MS-DOS > software that I need to test is like 50%. I feel like in the old days, when > you could install Redhat Linux on 486 and play DOOM there, but nothing else You should watch Phil's video again. Plenty of games run out of the box and actually we already have quite a few on our CD :-) > I think FreeDOS is a little bit like Redhat 20 years ago. Again, DOS is not really a plug and play OS. Today, you have Linux installers which non-destructively resize Windows 10 to live next to it and automatically select Linux 3d drivers etc. This is not the goal of DOS. You may remember MEMMAKER, which iterated you through all combinations of low or UMB loading of drivers to get a bit more free RAM several reboots later. That is the level of automated config support DOS had. FreeDOS does not take that approach: Instead, it aims to have small drivers to have more free RAM. And drivers which access common modern hardware, possibly with help of BIOS, autodetecting some, but not all differences. This is better than having to find brand drivers for everything, but for the example of networking, you still have to select specific drivers by hand. Just like in the past, but now you often have open source drivers available. Yes, there are network detection scripts or DOS boot disks which just include dozens of network drivers, but tastes do differ there. > It is a little bit better of course, but still feels more like > Unix system than native DOS system. That sounds odd. In which way would "native DOS" feel more like DOS than FreeDOS? You remember that MS DOS also had an installer, maybe looking less fancy, but both FreeDOS and MS DOS have not much more than config and autoexec to configure, not like Unix which has many files in /etc on the complex side and automated installers which mean that you never have to edit the /etc files by hand if you do not want to on the plug and play side of Linux. Same for package install by some GUI versus by command line in Linux and by XCOPY or UNZIP versus via a GUI in FreeDOS, or XCOPY or UNZIP but no GUI in MS DOS. > You see how many subscribers and views Phil has. There are others like this > on Youtube. Everyone from time to time tries FreeDOS for gaming hoping that > this time it will be more modern and efficient solution for this type of > use. Every discussion ends that it does not work and it is not worth it. By asking for support earlier, such videos could be a bit more constructive than "I tried to click on start but my microwave had no touchscreen. I will use my smartphone again instead." It is disappointing that Phil got no response when he asked for UDVD2 to be updated in a FreeDOS 1.2 and it is great that he made those easy to use config and autoexec examples for gaming users who have not enough patience or knowledge to fine-tune their own configuration. I still think you are biased in your interpretation of the video: Phil mentioned that many games worked immediately and we both know that the new UDVD2 works better (actually even better than his suggestion of VIDECDD in your case). He has also mentioned that MS DOS has issues with modern hardware. So while there clearly is room for improvement, FreeDOS has scored quite a few points in this non-competition. Phil has not tried to run all the same games on the same hardware in MS DOS, with the same config, he just remembered that they once worked in MS DOS with some config, not evaluating whether that config was hard to find and not checking whether it would work on his current hardware. Which is why I am not treating his video as a proper competition. For me it is quite disappointing from a "scientific" point of view that he has not even tried MSCDEX. If you both claim that SHSUCDX has some sort of bug which breaks the copy protection, show that MSCDEX works better. Copy protection is designed to be picky, so it may fall over some details neither brand can fix. The expert way to test this would be to keep replacing parts of FreeDOS or MS DOS to narrow down which parts are to blame. This is made a bit more complicated because parts of MS DOS could be unhappy to run outside their own brand, so some parts might need to be replaced simultaneously, but in most cases, you should be able to get a result such as "EMM386 and MSCDEX are better for game X, while game Y only needs EMM386, game Z and W only need MSCDEX and games A to V all work fine with FreeDOS anyway" ;-) Of coure it is perfectly normal if you do not want to go into so much detail. But testing a few of the more specific suggestions from Phil and me (e.g. use MSCDEX) would be really interesting. > This is a long term problem. I know open source is difficult and you > don't have time to watch social media, what people say about FreeDOS. To be honest, why would I want FreeDOS to be the coolest DOS for gaming for the average WINDOWS user who has found a DOS game in some corner of the internet? Using DOSBOX inside Windows already is perfect for those. It also avoids having to find mainboards suitable for ISA sound cards etc. People who want the real thing with DOS on old hardware can be expected to update the config sys just like everybody else who ran DOS when old hardware was new. As you say DOS should get fan money via social media, which aspects of DOS would you want to be improved in which way by PAID coders? And which aspects of the already popular DOSBOX have BEEN improved with the help of fundraising and paid programmers, in comparison? Or if you prefer that as competitor, which aspects of Linux or Wine? > Because it cost me time and a lot of users are unhappy. Follow the example of Phil. He wrote an optimized config and autoexec for gamers who have no time to optimize themselves. You could donate your own improved config to our installer to make those "many unhappy gamers" more happy with FreeDOS. This is not enough work to say that we need to hire experts to do it and then hope for tips from fans of the improved config to pay those experts. I am already giving you free support and instead of donating money for a FreeDOS Patreon, you could donate time. In fact, you already have spent that time to improve your configuration ANYWAY. So instead of being unhappy about the loss of time, you could simply donate the outcome of your research ;-) And no, it is not a solution to say "A few copy protected games do not work in FreeDOS unless you replace FreeDOS by MS DOS", as we cannot distribute parts of MS DOS. But we can make a few of OUR files better if you confirm that 2 MS DOS files work better than the FreeDOS counterparts. Preferably, you could even tell which API calls misbehave. This does not need to be a hit and miss situation: When you have more specific information about the problem, you can search for solutions in a more targeted way. I think you should look at the DOSBOX forums about those games which have copy protection troubles with FreeDOS: Because DOSBOX is even less "realistic" by design, but has more gamers as users, it certainly has some people telling each other how to configure things just right to convince the copy protected games to run in spite of less realism. When the forums say "Game X uses CD-ROM driver call Y with parameter Z and expects result W as part of the protection scheme, do this or that to configure DOSBOX to behave like the game wants, or update DOSBOX to include this or that patch which implements it" then we can look whether there is a bug in call Y of our CD-ROM driver (or SHSUCDX) etc. Good night and keep us posted :-) Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
