So theres any version or similar thing of this for raspberry pi ?

Some Retro Arch(retropie?) versions include dosbox.. Anything packaged in this that runs in dosbox itself should be fine to move over. just need to have retroarch autolaunch dosbox.

There is a version of tinycore for raspberry pi, so it probably wouldn’t take a lot of work to implement but unfortunately I don’t own any versions of the raspberry pi to test with.

Would it be possible for you to make a DOSBox-X version of this?
That would bring the advantages of better (and mostly stable) Windows 98 support giving people a portable Windows 98 experience.
DOSBox-X should also have built in Voodoo support allowing Voodoo games to run better.

I would effectively be able to make a win98.bat with that trick that then mounts and loads my DOSBox-X compatible win98.img file.

Thanks so much for this! It's perfect for a project I've been wanting to do for a while.
Here are some issues I'm running into:

- I want to be able to bypass the WAD menu for zdoom and launch directly into a specific WAD (because eventually I'll be running everything from my own .bat menu), but it seems like command line arguments like -iwad and -file don't work here. I'd also like to be able to load .pk3 files if possible (for brutal doom, hocusdoom, adventures of square), and they don't show up in the current menu. Next time I have some spare time I might start poking around in zdoom.tcz but I don't have any experience with tinycore linux so I don't know if I'll get far.

- I'm having sound issues with a few games. Reader Rabbit 2 has no sound or music, but it works fine on my normal desktop dosbox install. There's no setup.exe or configuration beyond the in-game sound settings as far as I can tell. I tried to compare the sblaster configs to see if that was the issue. The strange thing is that when I type config -get "sblaster type" it says that the type configuration doesn't exist. Even after I set it to sb16, it doesn't exist when I try to get it. I don't know if this is related to the sound problems or not. I am also missing background music in a few games where the sound is working (chex quest 2 (running without zdoom), powerslave, Elder Scrolls: Arena).

EDIT: Looking into it a bit more, it turns out I was using dosbox 0.63 on my PC, which is why the configs weren't behaving the same (e.g. "sblaster type" was updated to "sblaster sbtype" by 0.74). So that part makes sense at least. I downloaded 0.74 for my PC and the sound in Reader Rabbit 2 still works there though. By messing with the configs it looks like RR2 uses MIDI sound, but dosbox distro's MIDI configs are identical to my PC dosbox so I'm not sure why there's still no sound.

EDIT 2: I managed to fix the Reader Rabbit 2 issue. It seems it was trying to use MIDI sound, but MIDI wasn't working for some reason. If I change the midi mpu401 config to "none", RR2 uses sound blaster instead and works as intended.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Pragmasaurus wrote on 2020-03-23, 14:37:

Thanks so much for this! It's perfect for a project I've been wanting to do for a while. Here are some issues I'm running into: […]
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Thanks so much for this! It's perfect for a project I've been wanting to do for a while.
Here are some issues I'm running into:

- I want to be able to bypass the WAD menu for zdoom and launch directly into a specific WAD (because eventually I'll be running everything from my own .bat menu), but it seems like command line arguments like -iwad and -file don't work here. I'd also like to be able to load .pk3 files if possible (for brutal doom, hocusdoom, adventures of square), and they don't show up in the current menu. Next time I have some spare time I might start poking around in zdoom.tcz but I don't have any experience with tinycore linux so I don't know if I'll get far.

- I'm having sound issues with a few games. Reader Rabbit 2 has no sound or music, but it works fine on my normal desktop dosbox install. There's no setup.exe or configuration beyond the in-game sound settings as far as I can tell. I tried to compare the sblaster configs to see if that was the issue. The strange thing is that when I type config -get "sblaster type" it says that the type configuration doesn't exist. Even after I set it to sb16, it doesn't exist when I try to get it. I don't know if this is related to the sound problems or not. I am also missing background music in a few games where the sound is working (chex quest 2 (running without zdoom), powerslave, Elder Scrolls: Arena).

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi,

I havent touched DosBox Distro in a little while now, but I've been stock piling compatible thin clients and hope to do some updating soon. I'll look at some the bugs you mentioned.

I think I only tested the officially support zDoom mods, I'll have to do some other testing but its going to get complicated when a mod requires another wad to work, since I'm only distributing shareware or freeware with DosBox distro.

The Chex Quest 2 one is odd because I thought I've tested with Doom (non-zdoom, just to see how performance was) and dont remember any sound/music missing. Never got into the other two games but I'll give them a shot.

-Ben

Hi,

I can suggest two optimizations:

- Linux kernel compiled with real-time configuration. After all DOS was such small OS that did nothing except for being a bridge to the BIOS. We could call it real-time. The problem for me is the latency when you click a key. With modern OSes that increased dramatically. There are articles about "Windows 10 input lag" for example.

- Start DOSBox directly after the kernel is loaded withiout the initd crap and bash. There are some hacks to start a process even from kernel space. This might squeeze some extra responsivness

The above suggestions exactly only doable in the case of DOSBox distro.

Just an update on my zdoom issues- I managed to get command lines working. It turns out that typing "zdoom" in DBD calls a batch file which has its own command line arguments. The first arg is a boolean for hosting/joining net play, and the second is the IP address to connect to. Theoretically you could edit this .bat (located at mydata.tgz/home/tc/.dosbox/dbutils) and zdoom.sh (located at mydata.tgz/home/tc/.local/bin) to pass the first argument in as the actual zdoom arguments you want to run. I'm a novice at shell and batch and didn't have time to troubleshoot a bunch of string manipulation, so I stuck with what seemed to work, which was to hard-code a bunch of command line sets and switched them based off of the presence of an temporary empty text file (similar to how the current system uses znet.txt and zip.txt).

Can confirm that brutal doom is working, with the command line "-iwad doom2.wad warp 1 1 -file brutal19.pk3".

I haven't been able to get total conversion wads like Adventures of Square or Hocus Doom working yet, but I'll keep looking into it. EDIT: Looks like we're only running zdoom 2.6, and most total conversion wads seem to require version 4 or higher.

There's another issue I've been trying to fix that is kind of interesting-

In all of the Linux-based apps (zdoom, sdlquake, zsnes) the mouse polling rate seems very low. When I try a fast click in any of these apps, it doesn't register. I have to hold down the mouse button for a half second in order for it to register. But inside dosbox games and apps, I can click as fast as I want and it always picks it up. I've tried 3 different mice with the same issue, so I'm beginning to suspect that it might be a setting in the OS that needs to be changed somewhere.

EDIT:
I came across another issue where Doom save files weren't persisting between boots.
It took me way too long to figure it out, so to save others some time:
You need to edit home/tc/.local/bin/zdoom.sh to copy both *.ZDS and *.zds since linux is case-sensitive for file extensions. The same issue might also exist for the other games that use save files.

Pragmasaurus wrote on 2020-04-06, 16:45:

There's another issue I've been trying to fix that is kind of interesting-

In all of the Linux-based apps (zdoom, sdlquake, zsnes) the mouse polling rate seems very low. When I try a fast click in any of these apps, it doesn't register. I have to hold down the mouse button for a half second in order for it to register. But inside dosbox games and apps, I can click as fast as I want and it always picks it up. I've tried 3 different mice with the same issue, so I'm beginning to suspect that it might be a setting in the OS that needs to be changed somewhere.

Interesting, I recall sometimes the 1st click got ignored because of the window switching - forcing the focus from dosbox to the other apps, but I guess I didnt play with it enough to notice a polling issue.

I've been having a great time with this portable platform and have been giving it to friends and family members. I'm running into an issue where two of the computers I used it on have no sound. I think the problem is in Linux, not Dosbox. Is there a way for me to change sound configurations? I'm not too familiar with Tiny Core.

You can try, you will need to ‘unlock’ DosBox Distro by:

Placing this file: http://tinycorelinux.net/9.x/x86/tcz/flwm_topside.tcz
in: sdb1/tce/optional

(Might not be 'sdb1', that was the internal storage on the thin clients I use)

Once the window manager is restored you will be able to alt-tab from DosBox and right click a blank space on desktop to access some options like terminal and other setup options.

At that point I’d head over to the tinycorelinux.net forums and start searching on setting up Alsa.

It’s possible another sound output has been detected and you just need to switch to that device (ex hdmi) but it’s also possible no sound device was detected at all.

Good luck.

Hey, cool project! One question, I am trying to mount cd images using mount command but it seems that I can't use relative path (i.e. ./CD/CD1.iso). I get message "directory ./CD/CD1.iso doesn't exists". Any idea why?

Use "imgmount" to mount images, not "mount".

jmarsh wrote on 2020-11-04, 18:56:

Use "imgmount" to mount images, not "mount".

indeed, still doesn't change the path issue...

Not 100% sure, some google results seems to indicated that DosBox under Linux doesn’t support relative path.

It does, but it's unclear what the poster expects them to be relative to; the current working dir on a mounted drive inside DOSBox, the dir DOSBox was launched from, the path to the DOSBox executable, the location of a config file that contains the imgmount commands...

The obvious mistake would be trying to mount an ISO from an emulated drive (already mounted using "mount") and using Unix path separators instead of DOS path separators.

jmarsh wrote on 2020-11-05, 02:48:

It does, but it's unclear what the poster expects them to be relative to; the current working dir on a mounted drive inside DOSBox, the dir DOSBox was launched from, the path to the DOSBox executable, the location of a config file that contains the imgmount commands...

The obvious mistake would be trying to mount an ISO from an emulated drive (already mounted using "mount") and using Unix path separators instead of DOS path separators.

I've already tried both, Unix and DOS path separator, none work. What I'm trying to understand is indeed what should the path relative to, good point. I am assuming that it is the current mounted drive but realize that it makes no sense.
The games are located under into a \dosbox\games folder located at the root of the usb key. The question is to understand to what Linux path it correspond in the distro. Does anybody know?

Put them somewhere already accessible inside DOSBox and just access them that way, e.g. put the "CD" folder under /dosbox and imgmount it using c:\CD\CD1.iso. Then you don't need to worry about what the linux path is.

jmarsh wrote on 2020-11-05, 08:48:

Put them somewhere already accessible inside DOSBox and just access them that way, e.g. put the "CD" folder under /dosbox and imgmount it using c:\CD\CD1.iso. Then you don't need to worry about what the linux path is.

Using absolute dos path worked indeed absolutely fine. Thank you!