46 replies to this topic

[authoreyes]

Pickle,

I have noticed that while the touchscreen works fine in certain games, it still has issues in other, such as Gabriel Knight (one of my all time favorite games)

Also, excellent work! I can't believe how playable much of my dos youth is!

[mcobit]

Pickle,

I have noticed that while the touchscreen works fine in certain games, it still has issues in other, such as Gabriel Knight (one of my all time favorite games)

Also, excellent work! I can't believe how playable much of my dos youth is!

The first Gabriel Knight you can play in ScummVM.

Edit: OK, maybe I was a little bit too quick on this one. I only remembered, that it is based on the SCI Engine and the Sierra adventures were incooperated into scummvm, but actually it doesn't seem to be supported yet because the engineversion is too high. Sorry

Edited by mcobit, 17 November 2010 - 03:49 PM.

[Pickle]

ah yeah now i remember, thanks

great! I have just updated the error report, have a look at my post above pls.

Well for me the touchscreen and nubs work perfectly. For both games.

[otherguy66]

I have the same problem with the mouse cursor moving about when I click. It happens with the touchscreen, nubs or usb mouse.

I installed Dosbox in Stuckie's Ubuntu Jaunty image which I have running from an SD card, and it doesn't have the same problems.

[zapman]

I have the same problem with the mouse cursor moving about when I click. It happens with the touchscreen, nubs or usb mouse.

I installed Dosbox in Stuckie's Ubuntu Jaunty image which I have running from an SD card, and it doesn't have the same problems.

ah, nice to know I am not the only one...

[zapman]

I found out the cause of the problems with nub-input in dosbox. See this post in the appropriate thread.



I also came across a thought while playing around with the dosbox config: on the dosbox wiki it sais that the rendering part of the dosbox is a very cpu intensive part of the dos emulation. The logfile posted in dosBoxFE tells me that the svga_s3 mode is used which seems to be a (at least) high res capable mode. Do we lose any cpu time here because we are running a mode that we actually aren't really needing? There is also a vgaonly mode that was introduced with dosbox 0.73 (called just vga mode in older dosbox versions) that seems to be more suitable for our needs:

vgaonly (previously vga) is VGA (Video Graphics Array): IBM's graphics system introduced with the PS/2. True VGA supports 16 colors at 640x480 resolution, or 256 colors at 320x200 resolution (and not 256 colors at 640x480, even though many people think it does). VGA colors are chosen from a palette of 262,144 colors (not 16.7 million) because VGA uses 6 bits to specify each color, instead of the 8 that is the standard today [copied from http://www.dosbox.co...ki/Dosbox.conf]

The dosbox frontend doesn't allow to set this mode because it was plainly not available until recently. I tried to manually edit the config file and see if it makes a difference but the logfile doesn't say anything about the vga-mode as soon as I set 'vgaonly' instead of 'vga'. Now I'm puzzled if I did something wrong or if it plainly doesn't make any difference, performance wise...

Could someone else have a look as well pls?

[Esn]

I wrote a very simple guide to using DOSBox here, in case anyone finds it confusing:
http://pandorawiki.org/DOSBox

I tried Keen 4 with the default config in dboxfe (changed cycles to "max" to improve speed), and it seems to have some slowdowns even at 700Mhz.

Would it be possible, please, to set A, B, X and Y to the default DOS game action keys (Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Space)? It's really awkward to play anything at all, otherwise.

I actually did try to reassign the keys within DOSBox (see the wiki page), but it seems that the A/B/X/Y buttons are already assigned to something else. So that when I try to use the pogo stick in Keen4 by pressing "X", Keen also wants to run to the left at the same time.

Is it possible to delete those other functions for those buttons?

EDIT: Also, when I start up Jazz Jackrabbit CD, Jazz is always running to the left. Prometheus says that he solved it by "re-copying the files"... that's just weird... why would that work?

Edited by Esn, 25 January 2011 - 07:48 AM.

[Esn]

Well, I fixed some problems, but am having a bunch of others.

To assign proper key mappings, I found the mapper.txt file in pandora/appdata/dosbox/.dboxfe/ and edited it. That seems to be the easiest way (and the only way, now that the keymapper in dboxfe has stopped showing up for me, for some reason). If anyone wants to do the same (the only way to make this emulator useful, really):

key 278 is A
key 279 is B
key 280 is Y
key 281 is X
key 303 is L-shoulder
key 305 is R-shoulder

Now for the other problems...

This emulator is not fun to use even with EGA games from the early 1990s. Even games like Keen 4-6 and Bio Menace don't run fullspeed at 900Mhz, but have small but frequent skips in the gameplay and music. If there was a good auto-frameskip, they would be very playable, but there isn't (frameskip 1 doesn't improve matters). I'm sure there must be some bottleneck here. Maybe that vga-only setting that was mentioned above, or something else... anyone have suggestions?

In Star Control 2, the music in the intro doesn't sound right; one of the audio channels sounds like it's slow.

A lot of the game folders I copied over from my PC seem to be write-protected, which means I can't save games and a bunch of other problems. I have no idea how to undo this; the file managers on the Pandora (both the default and Xfe) won't let me. Xfe says: "chmod in [...] failed: operation not permitted".

[Prometheus]

^ Esn, I've run the Keen games with none of the issues you've described, at a lower clock speed than that (none of the Pandoras I've had could clock to 900MHz), and with no frameskip. I don't have my Pandora to hand right now, but have you tried tweaking the various doodads in DOSBoxFE? I know from experience that some of them can make quite a difference.

[Esn]

^ Esn, I've run the Keen games with none of the issues you've described, at a lower clock speed than that (none of the Pandoras I've had could clock to 900MHz), and with no frameskip. I don't have my Pandora to hand right now, but have you tried tweaking the various doodads in DOSBoxFE? I know from experience that some of them can make quite a difference.

Sure, I'd love to know what settings to change...any hints?

[Prometheus]

I'm trying to remember off of the top of my head (my Pandora's LCD cable snuffed it, so it's not here with me ), but wasn't there something about which core to use, and the number of cycles, and suchlike? I had to do some trial-and-error tweaking of those with a few games at one point, and those made a difference.

[slaanesh]

I love DosBox for the Pandora - my fave emulator.

I have found that mouse emulation using the nubs isn't quite right?

For example running Harpoon, the mouse seems have incorrect bounding box limits? ie. you can't access the entire screen with the mouse cursor.
My own port of DosBox 0.74 port on the Nanonote/A320, I can access then entire screen with my mouse pointer, however using the nubs on the Pandora I cannot.

[Esn]

If anyone would like an easy way to map keys, see my post here... basically, just download this mapper.txt file and replace the one in the pandora\appdata\dosbox\.dboxfe directory. You'll get:

A (key 278)=lctrl
B (key 279)=rshift
Y (key 280)=space
X (key 281)=lalt
L (key 303)=rshift
R (key 305)=lalt

Regarding speed, I found this tip from last July: "Replace DOS4GW with DOS/32A extender (Not working for some games...for example, later Sierra Games like Larry 7 or Gabriel Knight 2). Every little bit helps."

I'd love to try, but I have no idea how I'd do that. How do I use it as a replacement? Where do I put it? Ok, I found some instructions here, but since I don't have any games which have that file in the game folder, this looks like it's kinda complicated to do, all with command-line... I'm not great with command lines, I was a user of Norton Commander in the DOS days...

Also another thing, anyone know how I can get the ~ symbol in DOSBox?

Edited by Esn, 28 February 2011 - 12:18 PM.

[mrdremel]

^ Esn, I've run the Keen games with none of the issues you've described, at a lower clock speed than that (none of the Pandoras I've had could clock to 900MHz), and with no frameskip. I don't have my Pandora to hand right now, but have you tried tweaking the various doodads in DOSBoxFE? I know from experience that some of them can make quite a difference.

Sure, I'd love to know what settings to change...any hints?

Also, disable all of the hardware emulation you don't need for a game(Gravis Ultrasound for instance). Everything that has to be emulated eats away speed.

I can run Keen4, full speed at the stock 500 Mhz. Just disable everything you don't need. That's why it's so great to have the front-end with profiles.

[Esn]

Also, disable all of the hardware emulation you don't need for a game(Gravis Ultrasound for instance). Everything that has to be emulated eats away speed.

I can run Keen4, full speed at the stock 500 Mhz. Just disable everything you don't need. That's why it's so great to have the front-end with profiles.

Could you please upload your .conf file for Keen4? (you could even upload it directly to the Pandora wiki... the compatibility list could use some conf file links ) Is that 500Mhz in Xfce, or in Minimenu?

I did try disabling some things after finding the tutorial "How to Improve Dosbox Performance in Eight Simple Steps". I think that helped a bit... I also tried changing "vga" to "ega", but that seems to have made it slower.

By the way, Netkeen (new multiplayer Commander Keen, video of what it plays like over here) seems to work on the Pandora, if a bit slow sometimes.

P.S. Question: Does Gravis Ultrasound work, or do I need to download these drivers here? I notice that Star Control 2 is one of the games that supports it (supposed to have better sound quality...)

Edited by Esn, 02 March 2011 - 12:06 AM.