I hope we are getting DOSBox Pure at some point.

retro81

@patomax nice collection and good analysis! Either using dosz or zip is fine, what I was referring to is about changing the location of the saves, which is far better than messing with the ES xml

Shaggy1

I wanted to thank everyone in this thread. Dosbox pure on retropie has changed my dos emulation experience tremendously. I have tested about 10 games in eXodos zip format and found complete compatibility. To sum up the customizations I have made based upon this thread:

Placed game archives in ~/RetroPie/roms/pc folder, renaming to .dosz instead of .zip
Updated libretro config to place saves in ~/.config/retroarch/dosbox-saves

Further:

Customized es_systems to refer to the .dosz extension.
Compiled a modified Skyscraper fork to recognize .dosz for “pc” screen scraper.

So far scraping is about 90% accurate when using the eXodos files.

This is so much better than the shell scripts needed for dosbox. I will never go back.

hooperre

Has anyone successfully set an auto-boot? I set it and it's gone the next time I open one.

retro81

@hooperre yes, it works fine for me, check permissions on the config files maybe

hooperre

@retro81 Are you aware of what config files are used? I don't mind doing them manually. I have tried both .dosz and .zip files, neither with success. Both are being used on a USB thumb, so I'm not sure if that's what's causing the problem.

patomax

@hooperre When you define an autoboot, a .zip file is created with the name of the game.save, it acts as the virtual disk and inside it places a text file called AUTOBOOT.DBP. it simply contains the name of the executable for example C: \ START.EXE

if this file is not being created it may be lack of permissions within the roms folder or wherever it is creating the gamename.save.zip file

hooperre

@patomax Thanks. Interesting. I reset my rom permissions last night, but it still isn't working unfortunately.

Edit: Confirmed it is an error running from a USB as it works fine when I copied to the SD card.

The answer is simple as creating a .zip file wherever the rom is stored named [GAME].save.zip containing an empty file titled AUTOBOOT.DBP, as @patomax alluded to, and the core will do the rest from there. Some of them I did need to add the actual file path eg. C:\WAR1.EXE or D:\NBA97\NBA.BAT manually, however, and that works fine as well. Works for .zip and .dosz filetypes.

jamrom2

I've been testing this all day... so far...

Converted a few games like Joe Montana Football, Desert Strike, A-10 Tank Killer, Syndicate and Knights of the Sky. Worked great and no issues. Sound, Joystick control, speed and video size/quality all great.
Tried Magic Carpet. Worked well, but seems a little slower than regular DosBox. No other issues. Works with mouse only, because it was a mouse only game (I think one of the first if I remember correctly)
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe asks for program disk #2 immediately follwoing the Lucasarts title screen. Never did this in DosBox. Not sure what to do with this as there is no other disk to do a virtual swap with.
Dark Forces works, but the joystick calibration sends the game into spin in circle mode. Tried everything to get out of it doing that, but there is no game config to reassign buttons. But.. the game works and that's 80% of the battle.
Red Baron - does well until asked for a disk, just dumps out with a fatal error. Wasn't an issue with the same file build in DosBox.

So without going further, multi-disk games seem to create a problem. Controls are good when the game matches what it's configured for, I tried changing the assignments in the core, but doesn't seem to have any effect on the game. And I get the xx.save.zip file in my \roms\pc folder for every game I run.

I'd say this is a really good head start and I really appreciate the work that's gone into it. It's a lot easier to just make a zip file and play, but it looks like it still needs more tweaking. Whatever is causing this to happen, seems to be a stark difference in the core's of each.

Keep plugging though. It's definitely refreshing to see DosBox getting the Retroarch treatment.

krzychu148

@shaggy1 Could you describe how to add the .dosz extension to Skyscraper ?

patomax

@krzychu148 It's easy, all you have to do is go to .../configs/all/skyscraper and add in the config.ini file.

[pc]
extensions="*.dosz"

krzychu148

@patomax Thank you very much for the response!

jamrom2

So after a ton of testing my DOS games... I reverted back to "core" DosBox. I think it has a lot to do with me running a Pi3b+

Sound issues on many games when using any features like overlays and forget about using shaders. Sound pops, cracks and skips.

Some games don't run as fast as they do in core, Aces over Europe is a good example, and other games have disk recognition issues like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.

Eventually, I'm going upgrade to a Pi4, probably sooner than later... but until then, I dropped back. I think this is a great port to Libretro, and my finding by no means should prevent anyone from doing it. I'm very happy to see it happen. I'll just hold off for now.

niculinux

By the end of 2020 we got it! As of now latest version is 0.11 relased on 23 feb 2021 but an interesting control preset is missing, that is to say numeric keypad emulation via gamepad, don't know if it might be possible but sone games offer only that uncommon controller system such as Ecstatica

Hope it will be implemented someday..

patomax

@jamrom2 I had some performance issues when connecting my Rpi3b + to a TV and using audio over HDMI, but when using audio through the headphone output, performance is not affected as much.

bberlin1

@xwons Help! I followed these directions but am now locked out of emulationstation! This is the error I'm getting:

TERM environment variable not set.
tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'boost::filesystem::filesystem_error'
what(): boost::filesystem::status: Permission denied: "/root/RetroPie/roms/pc"
Aborted
tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified

Any ideas what might be causing this to happen?

Note: in order to download the dosbox from binary, I needed to use the root login to access the .sh from putty.
I removed the retropie/roms/pc directory from root and put it in the /pi/retropie/roms folder.

Thanks!!

retro81

@bberlin1 hey, you shouldn’t have used root, I do 100% of my changes with the pi user. Try rolling back and adding the prefix sudo to any command for privileged access. Also run the reset roms directory permissions in the retropie config menu

bberlin1

@retro81 thanks for your reply, I figured it had something to do with the root login.

I'm accessing the config file using cyberduck via ssh, and it won't allow me to make edit files unless I am logged in through root. Is there a way to enable admin permission to the pi user using the cyberduck gui (so I don't have to use command lines)?

bberlin1

@retro81 UPDATE: I fixed it! Per your suggestion, went into the emulationstation.cfg file and found that the PC was pointing to root. Changed it to home/pi and now ES boots.

THANK YOU!

I'm still curious however-- if you have any insight into how to a) edit files from an ssh gui or b) access putty with my pi login, I would be very interested. I can only seem to do these things via the root login and would like to not have to run into these kinds of issues again.

bberlin1

@xwons Ok, followed directions to a T, now when I try running a game it sends back the error "no config found for system pc".

I noticed there was no retroarch.cfg file in the configs/pc folder so I created one, but still getting the same error.

Any ideas what's wrong? I tried opening games with both a .ZIP and .EXE extension.

retro81

@bberlin1 I use WinSCP to access the remote filesystem via SSH (with pi user) and it allows editing remote files on the fly - it also supports integration with PuTTY passing your credentials