dosbox, now with 100% less drama

Dark Chazz · Post by **Dark Chazz** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 6:59 am

is there a way to install a rom image and a vga rom image like bochs does into psp DOSBox ?

I know its a silly question but hey!

it would be cool if you improve the performance crazyc , warcraft 2 is near to full speed !

Wally · Post by **Wally** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 7:13 am

Murdock wrote:
crazyc wrote:
Wally4000 wrote:Just wondering if we'll see a speed improvement soon.
I'm not working on anything that will improve the performance right now.
That's VERY sad to hear ... why not? DosBox is sucha great piece of application. But why not improving the speed?

See this as a purley rethorical question since u haven't answered my previous ones, either ...

I think I'll just leave Dosbox aside for now ... I just hope u'll one day start caring about speed again.

It is his choice, he is the dev! If you don't like it then code it yourself ;)

I was just hoping we'd see a speed improvement soon but netherless ah well.

crazyc · Post by **crazyc** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 7:39 am

Wally4000 wrote: It is his choice, he is the dev! If you don't like it then code it yourself ;)

I was just hoping we'd see a speed improvement soon but netherless ah well.

You all seem to forget, the PSP is simply not a high performance platform. Even if dosbox were perfect, it would be hard pressed to emulate a low clocked pentium (which was 2 issue, the PSP is 1).

Wally · Post by **Wally** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:07 am

crazyc wrote:
Wally4000 wrote: It is his choice, he is the dev! If you don't like it then code it yourself ;)

I was just hoping we'd see a speed improvement soon but netherless ah well.
You all seem to forget, the PSP is simply not a high performance platform. Even if dosbox were perfect, it would be hard pressed to emulate a low clocked pentium (which was 2 issue, the PSP is 1).

Nah I understand totally. Its just the fact that supaplex isnt full speed yet :P and that runs fine on a 386

mgrayson · Post by **mgrayson** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:56 am

No luck using DOS. I imgmount'd and then booted DOS, but it just complains no fixed disks present.

Since I've got this thing building, is there anything you can recommend for me to fprintf somewhere that might illuminate this problem?

crazyc · Post by **crazyc** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 9:03 am

mgrayson wrote:No luck using DOS. I imgmount'd and then booted DOS, but it just complains no fixed disks present.

Since I've got this thing building, is there anything you can recommend for me to fprintf somewhere that might illuminate this problem?

Dosbox won't imgmount the filesystem on a disk that contains FAT32 (at least not yet, maybe I'll work on that), but pre-win95 osr2 DOS won't either.

mgrayson · Post by **mgrayson** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 9:52 am

crazyc wrote:Dosbox won't imgmount the filesystem on a disk that contains FAT32 (at least not yet, maybe I'll work on that), but pre-win95 osr2 DOS won't either.

Oh. What filesystem do you have on your memstick?

mgrayson · Post by **mgrayson** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 9:57 am

Before you answer that, I'm going to assume it's FAT16, and further ask: if I just use the PSP to format my memstick, will it create a FAT16 filesystem?

mgrayson · Post by **mgrayson** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:01 am

Actually, nevermind any of that, I've got a 1 Gb here with FAT16 already on it. I'll let you know how it goes.

mgrayson · Post by **mgrayson** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:28 am

Using your build in 1.5 compatibility mode I was able to mount and view contents on my 1 Gb. Hurray.

crazyc · Post by **crazyc** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:48 am

mgrayson wrote:Using your build in 1.5 compatibility mode I was able to mount and view contents on my 1 Gb. Hurray.

Hopefully, the patch above will fix it with your build too. I need to find out why it doesn't work right in 3.71 and see how difficult FAT32 support will be.

mgrayson · Post by **mgrayson** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:48 am

Does imgmounting of files no longer work? After I got the memstick itself mounting I tried to mount an image in the root directory (an image which works on regular dosbox and can be booted and then read normally in your version). It tells me it mounted successfully, but then it crashes when I try to view contents.

mgrayson · Post by **mgrayson** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:58 am

crazyc wrote:Hopefully, the patch above will fix it with your build too. I need to find out why it doesn't work right in 3.71 and see how difficult FAT32 support will be.

Rebuilding psptoolchain with your patch now. I'll let you know if that fixes my build as soon as I get it running.

mgrayson · Post by **mgrayson** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 11:33 am

Is there a way to imgmount msstor0: without it being read only?

mgrayson · Post by **mgrayson** » Wed Feb 27, 2008 1:11 pm

After building with the toolchain patch, I get a new error:

Code: Select all

Z&#58;\>imgmount c msstor0&#58; -t hdd -fs fat
Could not extract drive geometry from image.
User parameter -size bps,spc,hpc,cyl to specify the geometry.

I should probably mention that I have downloaded your patch just a couple of days ago, so presumably I have the automatic drive geometry stuff.

andrewwan1980 · Post by **andrewwan1980** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 10:26 pm

crazyc (or whoever wrote the Targus keyboard lib):

I just seen AirTouch keyboards:

http://www.blueunplugged.com/p.aspx?p=115413
http://www.productclash.com/clashes/cam ... board.html

(loads being sold in Trocadero, London, UK)

and was wondering whether you will support AirTouch keyboards also? With AirTouch we can fold it into our pockets, where Targus keyboards can't.

Also, do you have a USB keyboard compatibility list for DOSBox PSP?

jean · Post by **jean** » Fri Feb 29, 2008 10:49 pm

crazyc wrote:You all seem to forget, the PSP is simply not a high performance platform.

I do really regret to criticyze you, crazyc, because you seem to be a bright coder, but i completely disagree. You seem to forget that psp is one of the most powerful handeld in its size and weight category. Moreover, we still don't know how to exploit it completely. Someone said "There are not beautiful or ugly women, only more or less drunk men." Well, i say "there are no things like powerful or poor devices, only good or bad programmers". You seem to be a good one, so don't say things like this....i remember 10 years ago a swedish coding team made a 286 run a gouraud-shaded torus 30 fps without hw accelerations. Said so, i think i'm not able to code my own optimized dosbox from scratch, so i respect your choice, but... meditate people

c2woody · Post by **c2woody** » Fri Feb 29, 2008 11:05 pm

Comparing gouraud-shading of triangles with a full system emulator is pretty dumb. And telling people that they are not good programmers disqualifies you for the second time. Feel free to take some old PC (x86 to simplify the task) like a 200mhz one, and try to get some system emulation like bochs or dosbox running on that at acceptable speed. Have fun.

jean · Post by **jean** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 7:54 pm

c2woody wrote:Comparing gouraud-shading of triangles with a full system emulator is pretty dumb. And telling people that they are not good programmers disqualifies you for the second time. Feel free to take some old PC (x86 to simplify the task) like a 200mhz one, and try to get some system emulation like bochs or dosbox running on that at acceptable speed. Have fun.

WTF??? I told crazyc IS a GOOD programmer and that i respect his choice...i was only afraid of him saying that improving is pointless, because this could discourage other talented programmers to contribute!!!! Was my english wrong or this is another case in wich people answer before reading?? Disqualifies me for the second time?????????? Are we chindren in the scolar age??? Take a long walk etc.. etc...

c2woody · Post by **c2woody** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 5:13 am

Hehe. Congrats for the excessiveness of your questionmarks.

crazyc · Post by **crazyc** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 6:02 am

i was only afraid of him saying that improving is pointless, because this could discourage other talented programmers to contribute!

Notice I said "even if it was perfect." Right now it tops out in the fast 286 range (planar vga tricks, OPL enabled) to the slow 486 range (without audio, no vga tricks). There is definitely room for improvement. (audio decoded on media engine etc..).

jean · Post by **jean** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 9:24 pm

Uh...well, if you put it this way...thanks for punctualization, and sorry again, i'didn't mean to prosecute anyone. Good work

andrewwan1980 · Post by **andrewwan1980** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 2:23 am

crazyc wrote:
This line only works if doom2 is an exe and not another batch file. (haven't tried using CALL command)
I don't know if this works now or not. Was that with 0.60?
However, Turbo C++ 3.0 IDE crashes unpredictably in PSP DOSBox. I get messages like: Exit to error: CacheBlock overrun 2 written 4204 size 4096
This is an unfortunate problem with the recompiler, it cannot know beforehand if a recompiled section will overrun it's bounds. All I can do is reduce the number of x86 ops recompiled per block.

Hmm, Turbo C++ 3.0 hasn't crashed recently. crazyc did you fix this cacheblock overrun?

PROB1: Some of the Turbo C++ 3.0 example projects compile.. but they have PATHing problems (and no it's nothing to do with the Directories PATH because the default settings work in native PC DOSBox). PSP DosBox has problem finding LIB files... and compiled EXEs... and I double-checked the Directories PATH settings and they are valid.... crazyc any idea?

PROB2: I just tried latest DOSBox and the "INPUTMAP EXEC indark2 16 1" still doesn't work. I get

Syntaxe : indark2 <numero d'etage> <numero de salle>

I tried:
INPUTMAP EXEC "indark2 16 1"
INPUTMAP EXEC indark2
but they don't work..

----------
TIP1: I know there's no official manual for DOSBox. The closest was Murdocks. crazyc, in your first initial post of this thread can you at least mention that INPUTMAP is a exe in Z:\ and for newbies to take a look at Z:\ for more commands. Am not sure whether Z:\ is initially mapped to PATH.. but when I remap it to C:\TC\BIN then the prince2_psp.bat doesn't work because it's naive...

PS: what is the names of the shoulder buttons? lshoulder rshoulder?

andrewwan1980 · Post by **andrewwan1980** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 2:54 am

The only way we can get hi-speed DOS is if the OS (eg.freedos) was rewritten for PSP architecture or even a linux distro compiled for PSP... rather than running off emulators/VMs (bochs, etc).

I assume DOSBox is emulating MS-DOS, running ontop of some layer which causes it to be slow. It would be good to completely miss out the emulation/VM layer all together. Or is DOSBox is actually a standalone non-emulator OS? Why slow on PSP? Is it because it's overcumbered with all the sound, and bells and whistles?

freedos can be installed natively on IA32 machines... so was wondering "what if" freedos was ported to PSP? so we don't have to run the OS in some emulator.. it would be running natively on PSP....

what do you think guys?

jean · Post by **jean** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 3:13 am

Sorry, but i think you should go look how an emulator works...it's not just the software platform....i don't give a s**t on a "dir" command compiled for PSP... a game -or, let's say an APP- is a compiled (i.e. in binary form) list of operands and operators. A VM is an application that translates these codes in the codes of the machine it's running on. An app could do quite EVERYTHING (access a device through a memory mapped area, raise an interrupt, wait for an hardware interrupt,..............................) Even if dosbox is claimed not to be an x86 emulator but a platform x86 apps can run on, it HAVE to rely on an emulation layer we cannot eliminate.

DosBox devs, correct me if i'm wrong.

jean

crazyc · Post by **crazyc** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 9:10 am

andrewwan1980 wrote:Hmm, Turbo C++ 3.0 hasn't crashed recently. crazyc did you fix this cacheblock overrun?

I put a workaround in, but in certain circumstances, the problem will still happen.

andrewwan1980 wrote:PROB1: Some of the Turbo C++ 3.0 example projects compile.. but they have PATHing problems (and no it's nothing to do with the Directories PATH because the default settings work in native PC DOSBox). PSP DosBox has problem finding LIB files... and compiled EXEs... and I double-checked the Directories PATH settings and they are valid.... crazyc any idea?

Path handling should be exactly the same as in PC Dosbox. Have you tried it on your PC?

andrewwan1980 wrote:PROB2: I just tried latest DOSBox and the "INPUTMAP EXEC indark2 16 1" still doesn't work. I get

Syntaxe : indark2 <numero d'etage> <numero de salle>

I tried:
INPUTMAP EXEC "indark2 16 1"
INPUTMAP EXEC indark2
but they don't work..

I haven't had a chance to work on dosbox recently. I don't know when I'll have a chance to look at it.

andrewwan1980 wrote:----------
TIP1: I know there's no official manual for DOSBox. The closest was Murdocks. crazyc, in your first initial post of this thread can you at least mention that INPUTMAP is a exe in Z:\ and for newbies to take a look at Z:\ for more commands. Am not sure whether Z:\ is initially mapped to PATH.. but when I remap it to C:\TC\BIN then the prince2_psp.bat doesn't work because it's naive...

This is really part of how dosbox works on all platforms. All builtin commands are on Z:\.

andrewwan1980 wrote:PS: what is the names of the shoulder buttons? lshoulder rshoulder?

ltrigger / rtrigger

freedos can be installed natively on IA32 machines... so was wondering "what if" freedos was ported to PSP? so we don't have to run the OS in some emulator.. it would be running natively on PSP....

Actually dosbox does, in a way, work like this. System commands and os operations are done in mips native code, but without the x86 emulator, there isn't much that could be done with it.

andrewwan1980 · Post by **andrewwan1980** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 7:58 pm

crazyc wrote:
andrewwan1980 wrote:PROB1: Some of the Turbo C++ 3.0 example projects compile.. but they have PATHing problems (and no it's nothing to do with the Directories PATH because the default settings work in native PC DOSBox). PSP DosBox has problem finding LIB files... and compiled EXEs... and I double-checked the Directories PATH settings and they are valid.... crazyc any idea?
Path handling should be exactly the same as in PC Dosbox. Have you tried it on your PC?

Yeah, it works fine on default install/settings from PC DOSBox. Am wondering whether it's something to do with forward slashes and backslashes? - EDIT/UPDATE: nope! forward & backslashes didn't make a difference :(

How can we debug, compare between PC DOSBox and PSP DOSBox? Such as memory, variable dumping? I just don't understand why Turbo C++ 3.0 can't find certain files...in PSP but can in PC.. both have same detault settings.

ardatan · Post by **ardatan** » Wed Mar 26, 2008 4:10 am

crazyc,
I succesfully built Dosbox-psp. But when i try it on psp, it gives error(8002013c). What should I do?

edit:

because of that, i rebuilt dosbox-psp but when i try to create with this link;

Code: Select all

psp-gcc -L/usr/local/pspdev/psp/sdk/lib -o dosbox  dosbox.o cpu/libcpu.a debug/libdebug.a dos/libdos.a fpu/libfpu.a  hardware/libhardware.a gui/libgui.a ints/libints.a misc/libmisc.a shell/libshell.a -lm hardware/serialport/libserial.a p_sprint.o -lpspdebug -lpspgu -lpspctrl -lpspdisplay -lpspge -lpspsdk -lpsprtc -lpspaudio -lstdc++ -lpspirkeyb -lc -lpspnet -lpspnet_inet -lpsppower -lpsputility -lpspuser -lpspkernel -specs=/usr/local/pspdev/psp/sdk/lib/prxspecs -Wl,-T/usr/local/pspdev/psp/sdk/lib/linkfile.prx,-q && psp-fixup-imports.exe dosbox && pack-pbp EBOOT.PBP PARAM.SFO NULL NULL NULL NULL NULL dosbox.prx NULL

It gives error:

Code: Select all

/usr/local/pspdev/lib/gcc/psp/4.0.2/../../../../psp/lib/crt0_prx.o&#58; In function
`_main'&#58;
/tmp/pspdev/pspsdk/src/startup/crt0_prx.c&#58;91&#58; undefined reference to `main'
collect2&#58; ld returned 1 exit status

What should i do?

aTomIC · Post by **aTomIC** » Sat Apr 05, 2008 11:59 pm

CrazyC:
Do you have some news for us (status report)?

crazyc · Post by **crazyc** » Sun Apr 06, 2008 1:11 am

aTomIC wrote:CrazyC:
Do you have some news for us (status report)?

I've been rather busy, I don't know when I'll have time again to work on this.