Playing with the dos version in 2024... !!!

[Tux]

Yeah I check everything is working or at least can be compiled. This dos version is really hard to test nowdays. The good news is that it works quite well with dosbox-x, an extended version of dosbox, with cputype = ppro_slow, and memsize = 64 at least. The rdtsc emulation is broken, so you can't even access the rdtsc counter with the f11 key, but except that the rest seems to work alright.

I hope that nobody uses the dos version nowadays, except me because I am curious to see how it works now !

It would need a few improvements, like that sample support from the galaxian driver, for now all this is simply disabled. same thing for the galaga explosion... But oh well too much work, not enough use, I'll probably leave it as it is now, at least it works, even if not perfect.

The debug build of raine doesn't work in dosbox, it needs an optimized build otherwise it's just too slow !

That was fun seeing it running anyway !

[Tux]

And here's a screenshot of the result, gunbird2 running in a dosbox session :

It's extremely slow, 6 fps and non constant, it crashes in 8bpp for some unknown reason on the colour mapper, it requires more ram than I ever saw in a dos machine (287 Mb displayed here !), but it works !!! Well, it wouldn't work at all on an old machine because of the ram requirement anyway, but maybe it would be faster, this cpu emulation isn't really very efficient... But at least it's good to be able to optimize stuff ! (and it takes forever to load too !).

[Tux]

And here is the conclusion :

If someone wants to test this, I'll release the binary... a very last dos version, that was the least I could do !

The not maintained anymore is not totally true, I improved the message box in the allegro gui for this version, I wanted galaga to be able to display a message on a few lines and it was not supported in dos, now it is. But I won't do any major change on it despite its problems, it would be too crazy now... !

[pmc2]

for the history I'm willing to take this last final version

Edited January 10 by pmc2

[Tux]

Yeah I did it for that too, still a ton of respect for it even if it's outdated now.

[Tux]

4 hours ago, pmc2 said:

for the history I'm willing to take this last final version

Well I had disabled ips support in the dos version yesterday, but after thinking about it I added it today : there is almost nothing to do to add it, but without gui of course, the dos gui is crazy to program. But anyway it recognizes the ips directory and any file it contains, which means if you load a rom whose short name is a, and you have a file ips/a.ini containing a list of files to load from ips/a directory, it will do so. I just tested it with an ips I got for bublbobl, and it works perfectly, it's primitive, but it works ! At least it will be a decent version... !

I'll keep it a little longer to see if I think about something else...

[Tux]

Didn't think of anything, it can read command.dat, but not display it !

So it's enough, updated the download page, it appears below the 2 other binaries, 2.4 Mb, including history.dat and hiscore.dat, these 2 are handled.

http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

[Neville]

This is very interesting. I remember one of my first messages in this board was regarding the DOS version of RAINE, which I liked to play now and then under DOSBox.

Now I prefer to use PCem for those matters, and I set up a Celeron machine with Windows 98. If I have the time I'll see how this new build behaves under that environment during the next days.

[Tux]

I had a dosemu env which worked not too bad to run the dos version, but dosemu seems to have a lot of trouble to reach their 2.0 version and it's getting hard to make it work, plus it was running at the current speed of the cpu, not emulated, at least it was very fast !

I didn't know pcem, emulator for ibm pc and clones ? And it can even run the dos version ? Wow, I'll have to test it one day then !

[Tux]

21 hours ago, Neville said:

This is very interesting. I remember one of my first messages in this board was regarding the DOS version of RAINE, which I liked to play now and then under DOSBox.

Now I prefer to use PCem for those matters, and I set up a Celeron machine with Windows 98. If I have the time I'll see how this new build behaves under that environment during the next days.

I had a look at this PCem, it indeed looks interesting, but where is the documentation ? Since there is no interface, how do you want to use this without any documentation ?!!! Even in the forum there is no basic documentation, no default configuration file, nothing, it's quite extreme ! I found the github repository containing all the bioses but they are useless without a minimum set of documentation...

If you have a link on how to start using this thing, I am interested... !

Ok, understood, you need the windows version to get the interface, the guys who wrote this are heavily addicted to microsoft... ! But the good news is that it runs fine in wine, and so I can create the config file this way ! Crappy way to do things though... !

After testing on a pentium2-300 with pcem (splendid emulation of the machine this time, this emulator is really THE emulator for dos), gunbird2 runs perfectly with a solid 60 fps. I saw a zooming problem during the intro, specific to this dos version (the flying carpet man while he approaches), I don't know why, but at least it runs smoothly with a serious margin, even with sound (soundblaster 16, 22 Khz).

For reference, this sh2 runs at 57/2 MHz, but with almost all instructions taking only 1 cycle (risc), so I'd say it's equivalent to at least twice this frequency for a "normal" cpu. Which means good emulation, raine honor is safe ! I thought about trying some heavy optimizations on this one, I didn't want to do it first because the driver would loose in readability and I didn't think it would make a big difference. After this test I am sure I don't need to do it !

Thanks for the info on pcem though, not sure it will be useful soon because maintaining the dos version today would be crazy as I said, but it's good to know there is a way to test this properly.

For info the linux version sucks, no configuration manager which makes it useless alone, and when I try to run it with the config created in wine, it just crashes without any message. As I said these guys are heavily addicted to microsoft, but their program is good anyway (the windows version!)

The only advantage of dosbox is that you don't need to create a disk image, but the emulation is less precise for sure on this kind of thing, I could even select a mach 64 gx to have 2d acceleration and then run univbe on it using pcem, quite impressive, even if I was limited to 512x384 16bpp for this test, but it was enough (and the resolutions < 512x384 in 8bpp are all broken in vesa3 for some reason, it seems their emulation isn't totally perfect here). But all this is quite impressive compared to what we had so far !

edit : PCem being quite fascinating to use, I fixed the crash in 8bpp, and the black sprites in 16 bpp for the dos version, this was just that color depths other than 32bpp were badly handled, and 8bpp was crashing because of an overflow in the color map. It's likely that other 24bpp games have problems in 8bpp in dos then, maybe I'll check that later. About 60% cpu free during most the intro on a pentium2-300 in 8bpp, I'd say it runs quite well ! The colors look a little pale in 8bpp, it's normal, it's the effect of the color conversion to fit all this in a 256 colors palette, switch to 16 bpp if you want bright colors !

I didn't find a way to mount directly a vhd in linux yet, I found something on the net about that but it doesn't seem to work, so I work on the vdi used by virtualbox, and then convert it to vhd for PCem using some virtualbox tool, really sub-optimal, but even if that's quite a lot of steps, it's quick to do and manageable.

Oh well, I think I'll be able to stop here for now !

The proper way to mount a vhd in linux : https://devicetests.com/mount-virtual-hard-disk-ubuntu (method 1 works perfectly).

[Tux]

Updated the rained-0.96.6.7z archive on the site, the only changes inside are related to sh2 emulation explained in the previous post, date of the exe inside : 14th of January !