Hello. I agree with you, a VM isn't a viable solution for testing. I'm in favor of using real hardware.
My floppies games i tested on VM run well on my IBM 286 (real machine). The downloaded games had options that my don't have. I do have a PII and PIII that i'll try freedos, but no anytime soon... for now i'l stick to emulation. On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 10:35 PM Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > 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 >
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