Hi! Please stay relaxed about this topic, it would be great to know WHY certain games do not work well in FreeDOS, so we can improve it :-) Of course you can also run those games in various emulators or using other versions of DOS. This may even provide insights regarding how to configure FreeDOS, another DOS, or some emulator the best way for the game in question. So I would not want to exclude talking about other DOS or emulators, 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 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. Regarding the option of using MS DOS 6.22: That one has not been updated for 30 years and it fails to understand things such as disks beyond 8 GB (or even 0.5 GB) in size, modern amounts of RAM, FAT32 partitions, and so on. Plus of course it is neither free nor open source. So FreeDOS has many nice features which MS DOS 6.22 is missing, but of course games from 30 years ago have only been tested by their developers with DOS from 30 years ago, so there is always a risk that we broke compatibility in how we implement exotic APIs. As you mention, Win9x DOS 7.x is an option for some - but even that is neither free nor open source and there is no ongoing development, so nobody who can help you to improve it if anything is not working well for example on any "too modern" hardware.
Alas, FAT-32 MS-DOS introduces issues of its own with other games. Starflight 1 and 2 have problems on these installed, and Tsunami Media games (Man Enough, Return to Ringworld, just to name a few) refuse to run completely. All these games Run flawlessly on FreeDOS.
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?
So you downloaded some of those games and they ran but had speed issues and exited with error code. Then you tried your Floppy versions and you report black screen with no errors (same as others and me included had reported). And you tested all this between 1.3rc4 and 1.3 live on a VM.
That sounds like a lot of effort in testing, but if all tests were on virtual machines, the problem can simply be caused by the VM itself, for example not properly emulating DOS age VGA graphics or SB16 etc.? Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
