D3D Shaders don't work when I start up the yhkwong build through DBGL. Console reports it can't read the shader file. Strange

Maybe it's one of those files you need to copy to DOSROOT in order to work.

Neville wrote:

Maybe it's one of those files you need to copy to DOSROOT in order to work.

Yes, shaders, mt32 roms, and glide dll's need to be placed in "dosroot".

Correct, apparently the custom builds require those files to be available in the CWD (while I believe it should look for them in the DOSBox executable folder, like the official DOSBox does for its dlls and other supplementary files). Not much I can do about that.

Hi all,

I've made another GamePackArchive available for testing; a second collection of freeware, shareware and demo games as reviewed by Kris Asick from Pixelmusement in his webshow called Ancient DOS Games, episodes 47 to 86. It contains the following games:

Electranoid
Cyberdogs
C-Dogs
SkyRoads
SkyRoads Xmas Special
Kosmonaut
Telengard
MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat
Abuse
Scorched Earth
Space Adventure
Highway Hunter
Visual Star Trek
Catacomb
Crime Fighter
Excelsior Phase One: Lysandia (v2.0)
Ugh!
Star Wars: TIE Fighter
TechnoVenture
Animal Quest
Googol Math Games
Moraff's World

Most are shareware/demo versions. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

As usual, latest Ykhwong's SVN adds several new options you may want to add to DBGL:

1. Based on SVN r3780 2. Improved performance 3. Supports for Windows XP SP2 4. Added several commandline parameters - "-nolog": […]
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1. Based on SVN r3780
2. Improved performance
3. Supports for Windows XP SP2
4. Added several commandline parameters
- "-nolog": no file logging
- "-display2": secondary display (thanks to ripsaw8080)
Two modes are provided: -display2 "amber", -display2 "green"
It works in some software that supports dual display (e.g., Mah Jongg)
Emulating Monochrome/VGA Multi-Screen setup?
- "-disable_numlock_check": does not check numlock at startup (useful for directx driver)
- "-savedir (path)": sets save state directory to a custom folder (useful for frontends)
5. Fixed crash when restrating DOSBox in fullscreen
6. Fixed MUNT emulation
7. Set Fluidsynth gain to zero
8. Updated every libraries including SDL
9. Updated ADDKEY command (four core settings "normal", "simple", "dynamic", "full" with delay support)
10. Fixed OpenGlide emulation
11. Added "Send Key" to menu bar (Crtl-Esc / Alt-Tab / Ctrl-Alt-Del)
12. Removed external MSVCR/MSVCP runtime libraries
13. Added splash to [glide] section
14. Stablized save states (thanks to tikalat)
Re: Save States - Proof of concept
Fixed pallete issue.
15. Added DOSBox-X branch features (Thanks to TheGreatCodeholio)
- Accurate PS/2 keyboard emulation, support for scan code sets 1, 2, and 3, emulation and response to LED commands, reset commands, mode changes, and obscure commands
- Gravis Ultrasound panning register fixes
- PS/2 AUX port emulation.
- CGA snow emulation. If you set machine=cga and enable the option, video memory I/O is slowed down to CGA speeds and writes will trigger "snow", just like an actual CGA.
- Sound Blaster "Goldplay" support. (Disabled by default, You can change the setting in configuration file)
- ISA Plug & Play emulation.
- Serial mouse emulation.
- Higher memory limit to 512MB.
- Finer-grained memory sizes. (kb)
- Refresh rate control.

These new sections can be found in configuration file.
[dosbox]: memsizekb, memalias
[cpu]: forcerate, cgasnow, isapnpbios
[keyboard]: aux, auxdevice
[sblaster]: sbtype=sb16vibra
[dos]: int33, biosps2
[ide, primary], [ide, secondary], [ide, tertiary], [ide, quaternary]
16. Fixed some other bugs

would it be possible to allow multiple databases?

Sure, you can edit the settings.conf file to use another database. What are you trying to accomplish?

I wanted to add new entries to a temporary db, to try them out or make some themed game packs, without enlarging my main database that is big enough already, else I can't find the things I add.

Thanks btw, I did as you said.

It didn't work too well, actually, because dosbox versions and templates aren't shared. I also tried importing a game pack I created with a second installation, and:

1. it said captures could not be imported because the directory existed (it showed then a wrong screenshot, belonging to another game). I think this happened because sometimes I deleted profiles, whose ID was made available for imported games (but it isn't for newly created profiles), but the capture folder wasn't deleted. Maybe it should, or games imported from packs should behave like new profiles, that get the ID next to the highest one, and not the first available?

2. since the profile folder is the same, files like 1(2).conf and 2(2).conf were created. Luckily they didn't overwrite the old confs and all games were launched correctly.

Ok, that went as I expected it to.

code120 wrote:

...or games imported from packs should behave like new profiles, that get the ID next to the highest one, and not the first available?

That is exactly how it works, but since you were using a new (empty) database, the autoincrement counter was reset to profile ID 0.

Next time, I think you're better of with another DBGL installation, totally separate from the main one.

If you need to use the main DBGL installation (for instance so that you can use the DOSBox versions and templates), you could order the profile list by ID, and add your new games so that they are in the end of the list. Then, select those new games and press ctrl-F and [enter] to make a filter-tab containing just those new profiles.

ok thank you

hi, could it be possible to choose the 7z format instead of zip for the export function?

I would've implemented that feature, if it wasn't for the fact that 7zip encoding (in contrast to decoding, http://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/files/J7Zip/) does not seem available in a Java library at the present time.

Isn't there an alternative, like pointing to the 7zip executable inside DBGL and letting it launch it with command line options?

Also an import-only support would be better than nothing, I could decompress the zip and compress it again as 7z, it really makes a big difference (in one extreme case the zip was 120MB and the 7z 30MB for the same file of around 200MB)

Is it possible to export the complete archive (profile + game) including the iso file, when mounted in the profile?

Thank you in advance
Luca

code120 wrote:

Isn't there an alternative, like pointing to the 7zip executable inside DBGL and letting it launch it with command line options?

That's possible but would imply reduced platform independency, which I would like to prevent at any cost.

code120 wrote:

Also an import-only support would be better than nothing, I could decompress the zip and compress it again as 7z, it really makes a big difference (in one extreme case the zip was 120MB and the 7z 30MB for the same file of around 200MB)

True. I have the 'import-only support' working in my current test-build, so the functionality will be available soon. I'm currently working on some other stuff but that's not ready for prime-time yet, which is the reason for the delayed availability.

luke_70it wrote:

Is it possible to export the complete archive (profile + game) including the iso file, when mounted in the profile?

Sure, just make sure that you have the ISO stored in a subdirectory below the 'game directory'. Of course, you can imgmount that location just fine, and while exporting it will be stored in the gamepackarchive along with the other game files.

rcblanke wrote:

luke_70it wrote:

Is it possible to export the complete archive (profile + game) including the iso file, when mounted in the profile?

Sure, just make sure that you have the ISO stored in a subdirectory below the 'game directory'. Of course, you can imgmount that location just fine, and while exporting it will be stored in the gamepackarchive along with the other game files.

Ciao,
Thank you for your reply!
I put the iso directly in dosroot (not in a subdir of the game directory) and it didn't worked.
I will move the iso: thank you for the hint.

Luca

Thanks then. I'm wondering if it won't be much slower than zip even in decompression though. With zip it doesn't need to extract the whole archive to get something inside, with 7z it does (at least on win), so maybe it won't be that good if this will happen. Thanks anyway, whatever you'll decide eventually 😀

Hi all,

It's been a long time, but I've got another new test build (0.73f) ready for your pleasure with a major new feature: 'Add Game Wizard'. This dialog wizard allows the user to easily add a game to the list, by going through a series of steps.

The wizard will start asking for the game's title, and whether it needs to be installed first. In this example, I'm installing the game titled 'Epic':

Upon pressing 'next', DBGL will fetch meta-information from MobyGames but since multiple games are found when searching for 'epic', a popup is shown from which the user can choose the exact game:

Continuing, we get to specify the game's installer executable. I'm installing this game from disk images (5 .ima files) so I'm browsing inside DISK1.IMA for INSTALL.EXE to select that file. DBGL will find some other files to be related to the installation (disk 2 to 5) and add it to the mounts accordingly:

After pressing 'next', DOSBox is launched and the game installation is started. Please note that for this case to work properly, a special DOSBox build is required. Although DOSBox supports multiple cd-rom image mounting, it does not support multiple floppy image mounting out of the box.

After finishing the installation, DBGL comes into the foreground again and we have the option to patch the game. Leaving the fields blank skips game patching, which is what we do in this example:

Next, the user will have to choose the game's main executable and optionally a setup executable. DBGL will use some fuzzy logic to preset the most likely values like so:

When that's done, DBGL will ask where you want to move (a selection of) the installed game files to. The original disk images can also be moved in this step if the user prefers to do so:

Finally, the user can tweak some of the most important DOSBox settings (machine, core, cycles) and/or load one of the pre-configured DBGL templates:

After finishing the wizard, the game will be added to DBGL's profiles list, with its files nicely stored in a directory below the dosroot. The temporary location where the game was installed is cleaned away afterwards. Of course, the existing profile editor can be used to tweak more settings if necessary.

When adding a game that doesn't require installation (any more), most of the steps are bypassed; only the game executable has to be configured and the last step with the major DOSBox settings is shown.

As you might have noticed, these steps somewhat resemble the actions outlined in Minimax's "60 seconds guide".

I consider this implementation of the 'add game wizard' to be a very first draft. The steps in the wizard may very well change, and features might get added or removed. As always, suggestions and bug-reports are more than welcome.

So, to conclude, this new build has:

* The 'Add Game Wizard'
* support for 7-zip gamepackarchive importing. No exporting for reasons mentioned earlier, and limited to LZMA compression only. So, if you want to save space, you can recompress your existing gamepackarchives to 7-zip. (code120)
* implemented 'Start manually' (right-click menu), meaning that the profile will startup DOSBox as usual and the mounts and DOSBox settings are all activated, except that the actual game executable is not called. This might allow for more easy problem shooting, game patching, etc.
* Searchengine title lookup now using Levenshtein Distance for better pre-selection
* automatically set correct mount type (floppy or cdrom) when mounting a floppy or CD-Rom drive
* minor fix for default loadfix_value (0 instead of 64)
* refactored the existing import/export wizards somewhat
* updated SWT to 4.2

All the latest files

To upgrade, grab the dbgl.jar as usual.

Regards,
Ronald