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Bunch of questions on FreeDos (memory managers) (Users)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 28.06.2010, 07:26

> My favourite linux distro? To tell the truth i never even worked on a pc
> with linux. All systems i used begin with MS letters. But wait, now i use
> FreeDOS!

I know DOS386 always picks on me when I mention Vista or Linux, but seriously, some things don't have proper hardware support in DOS (ACPI, newer soundcards, file systems). If you ever install Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora, you can (from multiverse) download DOSEMU + FreeDOS, which in many ways (but not all) is better than Vista's NTVDM (fast but limited) or DOSBox (slow but good).

I'm not saying pure FreeDOS is bad, it's not. But some things will just work better with some virtualization going on in the background.

> > > Of course, first of all I began to launch my favourite games.
> > > So Duke3d (thats my favourite) runs without problems,
> >
> > Even with sound??? I'd be surprised. DOSBox is good for emulating sound
> > stuff, but overall it's fairly slow. Still good to have, though.
> No, there are no any sounds:-( . My netbook doesnt even have a "PC-speaker"
> which was my hope when i launched games from late 80s.

Newer soundcards aren't fully (or even partially, most of the time) compatible with old SB, so old DOS software won't work. PC speakers aren't always included on PCs anymore either. On this laptop here (search this forum for Wolf4SDL or Wolf4GW) it fakes it via real speaker, which bypasses headphones and is LOUD!!!!

> Dosbox can run a lot of old stuff, even copy protected, but duke3d, f.e.,
> in it is just unplayable. And thats on a hi-end machine (i dont mean my
> netbook:-) ).

Increase the cycles via Ctrl-F12 until it gets to a reasonable speed. Actually, I think 0.74 now runs most pmode stuff in dynamic core. You might also want to increase the default mem limit ("memsize" in dosbox.conf) to bigger than 16 MB (which is too low, IMHO, and causes some games to choke).

DOSBox indeed has very good sound emulation (SB, GUS, Adlib).

> Sounds not good. I hope sometime i will know whats these acpi, dpmi and
> similar animals are.
ACPI = power management (suspend, resume, etc.), successor to APM but way more complex, often buggy, sometimes not friendly to non-MS OSes, etc. In other words, big pain.

DPMI = DOS Protected Mode Interface (usually but not always 32-bit), first supported in Win 3.0, basically the modern version of VCPI, which was a superset of EMM386! It lets you run protected mode DOS software under the care of a bigger supervisor (EMM386, Windows, OS/2, Linux's DOSEMU, SCO Merge). Without DPMI, you have to use EMM386 (VCPI) or XMS or raw mode. Most so-called DOS extenders support all of these (e.g. anything by OpenWatcom or DJGPP).

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