Author Topic: Dosbox  (Read 22765 times)

vader

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« Reply #15 on: August 23, 2018, 07:31:04 pm »
Quote from: depscribe
Slightly OT: are there any Fn key mappings generally in SFOS for Gemini? I have some terminal mode utilities that don't much work without them, but I cannot find any combination of keys that profuces a function key.
There are probably key mappings somewhere - in the X11 days, it would be easy to fix - but I'm not a wayland guru....

Quote from: depscribe
Back on topic: Your Dosbox package installed easily and perfectly. Great work! I have Word for DOS running well. It *seems* to run a bit more nicely in one of the graphics modes allowed in the Edit>Preferences settings. And you're entirely right that the "Application not responding" sideways pop-up is really, really irritating.

Good news! Thanks for trying it. I think I know what is happening with the "not responding" popup - there are no graphics updates from dosbox, and the system thinks the app is broken. As soon as there are any updates, the popup goes away. I was testing using day of the tentacle, and when the scene was still, the popup would trigger. As soon as something happened in the game (ie. the a character moved), the popup would disappear. Dosbox probably only updates the screen when it changes. Games like doom are always updating, and so never generate the popup. The initial screen has a blinking cursor, so also doesn't trigger the popup.

Quote from: depscribe
A probably stupid question: are we limited to the various SFOS repositories, or might we harvest RPMs from elsewhere? Do we know the distribution and version on which Sailfish is based and therefore know where we might resolve dependencies?

Openrepos is actually a collection of repositories. You add the repository, then install files. If you haven't got openrepos yet, install "storeman" from the jolla store. There are also other locations - the previous link I posted has a downloads section I think.

depscribe

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« Reply #16 on: August 23, 2018, 11:55:58 pm »
Quote from: vader
Good news! Thanks for trying it. I think I know what is happening with the "not responding" popup - there are no graphics updates from dosbox, and the system thinks the app is broken. As soon as there are any updates, the popup goes away. I was testing using day of the tentacle, and when the scene was still, the popup would trigger. As soon as something happened in the game (ie. the a character moved), the popup would disappear. Dosbox probably only updates the screen when it changes. Games like doom are always updating, and so never generate the popup. The initial screen has a blinking cursor, so also doesn't trigger the popup.
Word has a blinking cursor, and it does blink. I'll see if my running it in its graphical mode -- also with blinking cursor --  makes the popup stop.
Quote
Openrepos is actually a collection of repositories. You add the repository, then install files. If you haven't got openrepos yet, install "storeman" from the jolla store. There are also other locations - the previous link I posted has a downloads section I think.
Right, and I've been to all of them. I was thinking of Linux repositories, ideally the RPM-packaged distros that use Wayland. There's probably a reason why those packages wouldn't work, but I can't guess what it would be.
dep

Atari Portfolio (yes, it still works and yes, I bought it new)
Libretto 110 CT (with docking station and all kinds of PCMCIA stuff)
And, now, a Gemini and, fortunately, a GPD Pocket

vader

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« Reply #17 on: August 24, 2018, 09:40:45 am »
I Think I have fixed the annoying "not responding" problem. I force a redraw if there has been none in the last second (normally 25 per second). This seems to work. I have attached version 0.2 with this little fix. gunzip it first (cant upload an rpm)

Enjoy.

PS. If you have made changed to the config files in .dosbox, keep a copy as the installer will copy the original files over the top.
« Last Edit: August 24, 2018, 09:51:53 am by vader »

depscribe

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« Reply #18 on: August 24, 2018, 08:13:46 pm »
Quote from: vader
I Think I have fixed the annoying "not responding" problem. I force a redraw if there has been none in the last second (normally 25 per second). This seems to work. I have attached version 0.2 with this little fix. gunzip it first (cant upload an rpm)

Enjoy.

PS. If you have made changed to the config files in .dosbox, keep a copy as the installer will copy the original files over the top.
I just installed and used it. An important tip -- uninstall the previous version first (it won't delete the ~/dos directory or its contents), or else when you install the new version atop it and start it you'll just get a white screen.

But wow! This is simply perfect for my use, which for now is to run Word 5.5 for DOS as a word processor on Gemini. What's especially cool is running Word in graphical mode -- graphical, 80 columns and 25 lines. What makes it so good is that in addition to the text cursor there's an actual mouse pointer, which follows finger movement (in a way that I really wish the mouse would work in a Gemini Linux install, because this one is useful) and then, when it's where you want it, double-tap to click. Additionally, the text is actually readable -- it's a useful word processor, and there's no word processor for SFOS so it's worth doing. It does suffer from keyboard colon disease, but in due course I'll remember how to produce a colon, which I'll write down after scrolling up in this thread. Even the tutorial in the help menu works. Anyway the graphis mode really opened my eyes to just how useful this might be on the Gemini.

This all is really an order of magnitude better than I imagined it world be, and with the pop-up thing gone it's just great. (Of course, people who have other favorite word processors or such could do the same thing with doxbox and those applications. The hard part will be getting Word Perfect and Wordstar and Lotus 1-2-3 off those 5.25-inch floppies and onto the Gemini! I'd install the wonderful note/address/information manager Info Select for DOS, but it sadly doesn't seem to have survived Y2K. (Though I might, some snowy and boring day this winter, install GeoWorks, not that it would be good for anything except the satisfaction.

(I do these stunts. I wrote a book almost 20 years ago for Que called "Practical KDE" and in one of the illustrations I showed how you could run Windows 3.1 in a VMWare virtual machine. But I wasn't content with plain old Windows, so I dug up an old copy of Microsoft Bob, the worst user interface in the history of computing, and ran that atop Win 3.1, thereby becoming the first and I'm confident in saying only person ever to do that. For those who do not know Microsoft Bob: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob )

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Caption: As threatened, here are, back to front: KDE-1.1, A VMware DOS window running the great Textra word processor, a VMware Windows 95 boot running eBid '98, a construction estimating program, and front and right, a VMware Windows 3.1 boot running Microsoft Bob. The little hand was the mouse pointer -- click on things and stuff would happen corresponding to what was clicked upon. It really, really sucked. But, hey, I had 16 megs of RAM!

Hell if it's a whole snowy weekend maybe I'll install Win 3.1 and Microsoft Bob on the Gemini, and achieve the pinnacle of meaningless activities!

All that having been said, great work, and thanks.
« Last Edit: August 24, 2018, 08:46:37 pm by depscribe »
dep

Atari Portfolio (yes, it still works and yes, I bought it new)
Libretto 110 CT (with docking station and all kinds of PCMCIA stuff)
And, now, a Gemini and, fortunately, a GPD Pocket

vader

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« Reply #19 on: August 28, 2018, 12:55:09 am »
Ok, this is a bit silly, but here is windows 3.11 running under dosbox. It is actually quite quick. You might be able to run an old version of winword or your favourite old game.
« Last Edit: August 28, 2018, 12:56:27 am by vader »

depscribe

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« Reply #20 on: September 01, 2018, 12:45:49 pm »
Quote from: vader
Ok, this is a bit silly, but here is windows 3.11 running under dosbox. It is actually quite quick. You might be able to run an old version of winword or your favourite old game.
In my estimation, not at all silly -- there are applications that have no analogue in SFOS, and this is a way to get there. And Windows 3.11 has a really good solitaire game.

Out of curiosity, did you happen to notice the size of the Windows install? And another question, added later: Did touch work with it at all. the way Word 5.5 for DOS does?
« Last Edit: September 01, 2018, 09:20:05 pm by depscribe »
dep

Atari Portfolio (yes, it still works and yes, I bought it new)
Libretto 110 CT (with docking station and all kinds of PCMCIA stuff)
And, now, a Gemini and, fortunately, a GPD Pocket

vader

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« Reply #21 on: September 01, 2018, 11:33:58 pm »
Quote from: depscribe
Out of curiosity, did you happen to notice the size of the Windows install? And another question, added later: Did touch work with it at all. the way Word 5.5 for DOS does?
Windows takes about 35M (around 20M if zipped). The mouse behaves exactly the same as word - the screen becomes a touchpad, with the double and tripple click actions. You can change the graphics resolution in the normal windows 3 way (run setup from the command line). I put it up to 800x600, any smaller and you can't read anything  

On another note, after a lot of searching, I found out how to make the overlays work correctly in dosbox. By this I mean that the volume bar is at the top, and the swipes to close/switch app are the same as any other app. I've attached version 0.3, and as usual I have gzipped it so it can be attached. Just gunzip it to install. I also rename my .dosbox directory to .dosbox.old, uninstall the old dosbox, reinstall the new, then delete .dosbox and rename .dosbox.old back to .dosbox . Probably don't need to do this, but it means nothing is overwritten. You don't have to worry about the dos directory.

depscribe

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« Reply #22 on: September 02, 2018, 12:58:28 am »
Quote from: vader
Windows takes about 35M (around 20M if zipped). The mouse behaves exactly the same as word - the screen becomes a touchpad, with the double and tripple click actions. You can change the graphics resolution in the normal windows 3 way (run setup from the command line). I put it up to 800x600, any smaller and you can't read anything  

On another note, after a lot of searching, I found out how to make the overlays work correctly in dosbox. By this I mean that the volume bar is at the top, and the swipes to close/switch app are the same as any other app. I've attached version 0.3, and as usual I have gzipped it so it can be attached. Just gunzip it to install. I also rename my .dosbox directory to .dosbox.old, uninstall the old dosbox, reinstall the new, then delete .dosbox and rename .dosbox.old back to .dosbox . Probably don't need to do this, but it means nothing is overwritten. You don't have to worry about the dos directory.
Works a treat! And yes, nemo/.dosbox needs to be nuked (after backup if customized), or else the initial dosbox screen will be plain white, no text.

It's fast and so far as I've been able to determine, reliable. This is probably great for running games, but it's great for running other stuff, too. It really should be in OpenRepos or the Jolla Shop or both. (And they ought to give you a free upgrade to Sailfish 3, too.) What a good and useful utility.

Speaking of utilities, I've fallen in love with File Browser, too. At every turn I'm discovering more to love about SFOS. It's so good it's almost certain to fail.
dep

Atari Portfolio (yes, it still works and yes, I bought it new)
Libretto 110 CT (with docking station and all kinds of PCMCIA stuff)
And, now, a Gemini and, fortunately, a GPD Pocket

jovpov

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« Reply #23 on: September 26, 2018, 07:46:15 pm »
Quote from: vader
Quote from: depscribe
Out of curiosity, did you happen to notice the size of the Windows install? And another question, added later: Did touch work with it at all. the way Word 5.5 for DOS does?
Windows takes about 35M (around 20M if zipped). The mouse behaves exactly the same as word - the screen becomes a touchpad, with the double and tripple click actions. You can change the graphics resolution in the normal windows 3 way (run setup from the command line). I put it up to 800x600, any smaller and you can't read anything  

On another note, after a lot of searching, I found out how to make the overlays work correctly in dosbox. By this I mean that the volume bar is at the top, and the swipes to close/switch app are the same as any other app. I've attached version 0.3, and as usual I have gzipped it so it can be attached. Just gunzip it to install. I also rename my .dosbox directory to .dosbox.old, uninstall the old dosbox, reinstall the new, then delete .dosbox and rename .dosbox.old back to .dosbox . Probably don't need to do this, but it means nothing is overwritten. You don't have to worry about the dos directory.

Trying to install attached version on my Gemini but got error installing.. any clues where to look for log/reason for error?

vader

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« Reply #24 on: September 26, 2018, 08:53:07 pm »
Quote from: jovpov
Trying to install attached version on my Gemini but got error installing.. any clues where to look for log/reason for error?

Just checking, you gunzipped the attached file (because you can't attach rpm files here) first? You can use an app, or the terminal. That will give you an rpm file which you can install with file manager or the command line. Eg.

1) Download Dosbox_0.3_1.armv7hl.rpm.gz from this thread.
2) Run fingerTerm or whichever terminal program you use:
3) gunzip the downloaded file with:

     gunzip Dosbox_0.3_1.armv7hl.rpm.gz

4) This creates the file Dosbox_0.3_1.armv7hl.rpm
5) Either run file manager, find the rpm, and use the pulley menu to install it, or run:

    pkcon install-local Dosbox_0.3_1.armv7hl.rpm

This should install dosbox.

vader

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« Reply #25 on: September 26, 2018, 09:50:05 pm »
A few tips and tricks. The default key mapping (~/.dosbox/mapper-SVN.map) has the Fn keys mapped to:

FN+Alt+number (for F1 to F10)
FN+Alt+q for F11
FN+Alt+w for F12

In some games (eg old scumm games), you need to press and hold FN+Alt, then press '1', then release FN+Alt, and only last release '1'. This causes the popup menu to activate. I believe this is an F1 release rather than an F1 press. In things like doom, just pressing the FN+Alt+1 combination brings up the menu.

A : character (useful in DOS) is reached by FN+Shift+K
A ; character is the usual FN+K

This is due to how dosbox handles the shift character. I will probably change this for the gemini build when I finish the qml character mapper.

The performance of dosbox is good enough for games of the doom era (eg. dark forces, doom, heretic etc). Quake is a little slow, as is duke nukem 3d. You can lower the quality and get reasonable performance in those ones. The old scumm games run a treat (discworld, dott etc).

PS. I've got qemu running with SDL2 (ie not using vnc), just getting the rotation code all set up. Took ages to compile. Pretty slow though.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2018, 09:51:52 pm by vader »

jovpov

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« Reply #26 on: September 27, 2018, 04:02:35 am »
Quote from: vader
Quote from: jovpov
Trying to install attached version on my Gemini but got error installing.. any clues where to look for log/reason for error?

Just checking, you gunzipped the attached file (because you can't attach rpm files here) first? You can use an app, or the terminal. That will give you an rpm file which you can install with file manager or the command line. Eg.

1) Download Dosbox_0.3_1.armv7hl.rpm.gz from this thread.
2) Run fingerTerm or whichever terminal program you use:
3) gunzip the downloaded file with:

     gunzip Dosbox_0.3_1.armv7hl.rpm.gz

4) This creates the file Dosbox_0.3_1.armv7hl.rpm
5) Either run file manager, find the rpm, and use the pulley menu to install it, or run:

    pkcon install-local Dosbox_0.3_1.armv7hl.rpm

This should install dosbox.

The problem was in WebCat that downloded only 40k instead of 800kb of .gz file. Now I have unzipped it but after trying : pkcon install-local Dos...rpm see error:

Failed to obtain authentication (yes I have enabled third party packages)

SOLVED: the solution was to just run pkcon as root (devel-su).
then I had to leave root and run as regular user, it works!

next step is to find some dos files (luckily I have them on my RS97 console  DosNavigator and win3.11)
« Last Edit: September 27, 2018, 04:23:36 am by jovpov »

FrankS

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« Reply #27 on: September 30, 2018, 08:12:58 am »
Quote from: vader
Quote from: Meganerd
Hey Vader! I am definitely interested in this project. Out of curiousity I would like to run and old version of Windows.
Dosbox should be able to run windows 3.1 if you can find a copy  There are many howtos online. I should have the package ready by the end of the weekend. The hardest part will be working out which dependent libraries aren't installed by default, as I have installed a bucket load. The jolla store doesn't like SDL rotated apps as they mess with the GUI (volume bar goes vertical on the right hand side). I'll make rotation an option, but this will probably only be useful for geminis.

Good news is that I can now compile pretty much any SDL2 app and have fully working video and sound now that I worked out how to rotate the video and get sound working through pulse audio (yuck).

I still have win 3.1 3.5" floppy disks and a license paper. Have to try to use a 3.5" floppy disk drive over otg. ;-)

vader

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« Reply #28 on: October 05, 2018, 02:51:50 am »
Just a quick update - I've got the dynamic core working (I think), and it now makes duke3d quite playable. It is perhaps 5-10 times faster. You can even play quake now  I'll test it a bit to make sure everything still works, then package it up and post it.

vader

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« Reply #29 on: October 05, 2018, 08:20:55 am »
OK, here is the latest version. It runs significantly faster than the old one. If you have installed version 0.3, the easiest thing is to rename your ~/dos and ~/.dosbox to ~/dos.good and ~/.dosbox.good, then create dummy .dosbox and dos directories. Uninstall the old dosbox, then install the new one. Delete the new .dosbox and dos directories, and rename your .good directories back to .dosbox and dos. As usual, gunzip the rpm first