[DOSBox] official thread

nemo93

DOSBox Staging 0.80.0 has landed a couple of days ago. Thanks as usual @mitu for ensuring Retropie's script has been updated accordingly (thanks!).

You can read the changelog but in a nutshell:

ReelMagic DOS games are now playable thanks to the efforts of Jon Dennis, Chris Guthrie, and Joseph Whittaker, with testing and feedback from Vogons users Uka, DonutKing, and Vetz
Mouse emulation has been improved and now supports up to six independent mice, enabling split-screen play in games like The Settlers and The Settlers II
More settings, including video, audio, and MIXER effects, can now be changed on the fly

Enjoy!

nemo93

DOSBox Staging 0.80.1 has been released with the usual bugfixes. Yet the biggest news is: new website for this fork. It just landed hence few things will be tweaked in the coming days. An overhaul of the doc should come as well.

I still consider it the best 'all rounder' fork available. Really nice performance (ie. Doom runs at 'full speed' on stock Pi4), same config file as Dosbox 'SVN' (eg. easy to make the switch) and clearly the best fork regarding audio given the many soundcards supported/emulated with great accuracy. Not as comfortable as a libretro 'core' (Pure, Core, etc) for sure yet it's worth a try. I'd like to mention also Dosbox-X which is fantastic fork as well for those wiling plenty of options.

@BuZz @mitu not sure it's the best place to ask yet would you be ok for Retropie to appear under the Downloads/Linux section of that new site? (Frankly I'd love to). We collectively spent a tremendous amount of time to ensure it works great on RPi devices and integrate well in your distro. I won't push any more PR if you agree :-)

Thanks.

ExarKunIv

@nemo93 I would love to include this on my RetroPie extras GitHub if I can.

I have not gotten around to messing around with it yet but I'm all for adding more things to it

mitu

@nemo93 said in [DOSbox] official thread:

@BuZz @mitu not sure it's the best place to ask yet would you be ok for Retropie to appear under the Downloads/Linux section of that new site?

Sure, why not ?

We collectively spent a tremendous amount of time to ensure it works great on RPi devices and integrate well in your distro. I won't push any more PR if you agree :-)

Thanks for all the testing, much appreciated ! PRs shouldn't be needed except on build issues (like the updates for 0.80 due to the meson upgrade), since the scriptmodule automatically installs the latest stable release (as opposed to Amiberry, where the version is pinned).

nemo93

@mitu @BuZz appreciated. A short desc will be added soon on site. Thanks for your patience and also all testing/checking/packaging (you certainly look after way more softs/emus than me).

@ExarKunIv not sure what you mean? DOSbox Staging is part of Retropie (Optional Packages) already. Let me know what I'm missing here please.

ExarKunIv

@nemo93 my bad, i have not updated my script in a long time, so nevermind then

ecto

@nemo93 Hi, I just read the whole MT32 Wikipedia list drama. As I don't know how to better contact you I'll do it here: the list was cloned to the Vogons Wiki, so you might want to link to that from the Dosbox Staging Wiki.
I often used the list and really still don't understand why it was removed from WP.

nemo93

@ecto thanks for that. I edited wiki with link to Vogons. I saw it yesterday so your timing is perfect. This decision by Wikipedia is really baffling to say the least.

retropi19

@nemo93 hello there

Is there a guide to install Windows 98 / ME in the Raspberry Pi 4???

I followed some guides before using dosbian but it crashes to the desktop on first boot with explorer crash and other misc errors

The only working dosbox was the dosbox-X

But the performance there was very very slow

I saw videos of dosbox-svn and dosbox-ece running very good Windows 98 but couldn't install them successfully i got the errors described above
I must do something wrong

Thanks

nemo93

@retropi19 as far as I know there's none. The reason is simple: DOSBox doesn't support officially anything after Windows 3.11. You're right DOSBox-X is the one to look after to achieve that task yet as you said performance-wise it won't be great (X does have a fine wiki with plenty of guides one of those is dedicated to Win98).

For Staging the actual stance is similar to DOSBox 'SVN': no official support (as stated on https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/wiki/Windows-9x). Some users are really committed to get it to work but they're using much more powerful systems than RPi's.

Don't set your expectations too high for the time being. Perhaps you could check box86/Wine instead? There's already a topic in that forum.

If anyone knows a better way feel free to share in order to keep me honest. Thanks.

ParadoxGBB

Hello all, apologies if this is a newbie question --- I'm revisiting some of the custom DosBox mappings I have for a few games and for my RetroFlag GPi case (the original on a RPi Zero 2W) the axis mapping is 4/5 not 0/1.

I must be missing something because I thought the syntax was axis id and 0 if -, versus 1 if +.

So I thought

key_up "key 82" "stick_0 axis 1 0"
key_left "key 80" "stick_0 axis 0 0"
key_down "key 81" "stick_0 axis 1 1"
key_right "key 79" "stick_0 axis 0 1"

Would translate to

key_up "key 82" "stick_0 axis 5 0"
key_left "key 80" "stick_0 axis 4 0"
key_down "key 81" "stick_0 axis 5 1"
key_right "key 79" "stick_0 axis 4 1"

But that's not working. Normally I'd just fire up the keymapper to test but for this device I don't have a pointing device to drive it.

Please help!

nemo93

@ParadoxGBB let me point you first to that wiki entry. What kind of pad/controller do you rely on please?

ParadoxGBB

@nemo93 Yup, that wiki doesn't go into the specific syntax of the axis entries, or at least I'm not seeing it.

The controller I'm targeting here is the one built into the case itself, it is similar in form factor to the original gameboy. I've mapped out all the buttons but not sure how to translate the dPad.

nemo93

@ParadoxGBB I'm using a simple Xbox One wireless controller hence this is the controller which appears on the wiki. I'd love to add more controllers bindings on that page if I could. I understand you're relying on some custom pad.

I was pointing you to that page and specifically to that section as it looks like a case of finding the references of your buttons on your system. What's the output of the following command?

$ jstest /dev/input/js0

Did you try with hat instead of axis as described in that wiki as well?

stick_0 hat 0 1 (D-pad Up)
stick_0 hat 0 4 (D-pad Down)
...

nemo93

@mitu @BuZz apologies for pinging you straight yet I'd need your feedback on the following please.

Staging wants to switch as soon as C++20 compilers are available on all supported platforms. Therefore we need to assess if that would be an option in the near term.

Question: can RetroPie support or host a specific gcc for that purpose (eg. gcc-13 when it's available)? I understand you do that for SDL2 already and I wonder if that would be too much work or if you'd have any concern for doing the same with compilers?

Thanks as always and good luck with the (many) PRs opened lately ;-)

BuZz

@nemo93 said in [DOSBox] official thread:

Question: can RetroPie support or host a specific gcc for that purpose (eg. gcc-13 when it's available)

That's not something I'd want to do.

If newer versions need a GCC that isn't available we would have to lock it at an older release.

retropi19

Hi there

I been using dosbox pure and trying to set the ram from the config file to 224mb as the developer said is the maximum ram you can put,but everytime it defaults to 16mb by it self after i run dosbox pure
The maximum i can put that it doesn't change it is 128mb,i setup windows 98 but the ram is not enough to test some games,how can i put 224 ram or more???

Thank you

nemo93

@retropi19 Hi! Thanks for posting. I'm afraid I have no experience with "Pure" hence I'm not the best person to be asked for assistance here. Yet I just want to share a few comments, just in case.

It looks like your RAM setting is being overriden which could point to "Pure" using its own default values instead. Are you sure you've configured "Pure" to rely on whatever global config file instead of default values? Typically on other Dosbox forks there's a global config file named after dosbox.conf or dosbox-staging.conf for instance. Simply edit the following line to change amount of RAM available.

[dosbox]
memsize = 8

I have to say that running any Win9x on a RPi might be too demanding for such low-spec device. It's also not officially supported by the many Dosbox forks (unsure about Pure though). As far as I'm aware of only Dosbox-X supports Win9x. You can even find great documentation on the wiki on how to install the OS (ie: Win98).

I've tried both Win95 and Win98 on Staging with middling results to say the least on my (stock) RPi4 and with the default 16MB of RAM. It was too slow yet it was a brief testing. Perhaps it's better to wait for RPi5 to be released or to check PCEM/Wine? There's a thread about it on that forum.

jamrom2

@retropi19 Hi. It wont run on DosBox-Pure. It's not really made to handle Win95/98 emu. It was made to use the better aspects of the Libretro core. You can try to change the aspects in the core menu, and then change the configuration not to save to a global. It will then create a config file for dosbox-pure that should not be over-written. But again, I don't think you'll get it to work, but certainly try it.

ecto

Hi @nemo93!
I'm somewhat following the Dosbox Staging development and I'm thrilled to see that there will be 3dfx support in the (near?) future.

Do you maybe have a feeling if that's something a Pi4 can handle? I haven't found that info in the Dosbox Staging wiki so far and I'm still hoping that this might me doable.

Btw. a really great and informative Wiki!!