Computer Cores

[lunar trellis]

Damn, now CD audio in 486

It never rains but it pours

[hollow fog]

Yeeahhh ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

[novel sail]

oh SHIT

CD AUDIO

[granite umbra]

Sideline with cdda working so great 🙂

[tulip atlas]

CD AUdio in 486 wut?!?!

[lunar trellis]

Which games in top 300 get a benefit with CD audio added?

[hollow fog]

me happy , me cry

[tulip atlas]

False alarm? where is it?

[lunar trellis]

Check news section

[tulip atlas]

Cool

That means Pro Pinball Timeshock should work with music now.

[burnt timber]

Lovely, Ill have to try that with FX Fighter and Sideline today.

[tulip atlas]

Would AMiga CD32 already work if I load that CD32 bios I wonder.

[burnt timber]

Awesome.

[tulip atlas]

You can check the .cue files in the cd folder to see which have cd audio tracks. For example screamer seems to have cdda.

[hollow fog]

yeaahhh music in Quarantine 🙂

instantly better to play

[granite umbra]

until the first boss cd audio works great and no more cd music

[burnt timber]

Oh well, maybe it can be corrected with future updates

[granite umbra]

stage 2 cd audio music is back maybe it is like that

[burnt timber]

Im guessing the joystick/gamepad input issues have not been corrected yet so you are using keyboard?

[granite umbra]

yes keyboard

other game I have using multi tracks is Rema the truth but I didn't configure sound on Win31 I need to check that part

[burnt timber]

Im not familiar with that game

[granite umbra]

It is an adventure game

[hollow ice]

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, amazing arranged soundtrack imo

[fast kraken]

i think simon the sorcerer is one?

its like, really shockingly few though overall

there's like, a big chunk of games that had cd-audio versions but are actually just meh recordings of the MT32 or General Midi version, a big chunk of games use cd-audio but can't run on the core (quake, tombraider etc) and then finally there's a tiny number in the sweet spot of actually running on the core and not having a superior mt32 or gm version

its literally like 5-10 games

iirc me and flynn left the cd-audio options all in top300 incase this ever happened

should just work but obviously we had no way to test

maybe it was LOOM actually not simon the sorcerer

[visual nacelle]

warcraft 2 I think has it

[hollow fog]

7th guest , Quarantine, Warcraft 2, Need for Speed, the horde, Virtuoso

[hollow ice]

are you sure you aren’t talking about 3do?

[hollow fog]

nope 🙂

bug! , betrayal at kondor, carmaggedon, hexen, mechwarrior 2, powerslave, return to zork,

[undone anvil]

I think LOTR for DOS required redbook audio

[vestal ginkgo]

We did, no clue if they need love to actually work though. Here is the list https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aflynnsbit%2FTop300_updates+"cd+audio"+path%3A%2F^games\%2F%2F&type=code

[burnt timber]

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer/commit/f453529489aa6ac28b0710c5ba5d39ae2e732950

Looks like a y/c update

Probably just for the games that run in sub 640x480

[mighty barn]

Works great, haven’t heard that in years

[hollow ice]

Good to know, I planned to test after work!

[thick pendant]

I need to find some software to play CD+G

[fleet cave]

there's no support for cd+g

I might see if it is possible, but not quite yet

[thick pendant]

I have 3 of the like 12 CDs that support it...

Fleetwood Mac - behind the mask, CS&N - Live it up and Information Society

oh, maybe 4

[mighty barn]

Back when I had a Win98 PC I think this was the player that was around https://cavsusa.com/playscdg/

[thick pendant]

I know CD32 supports it

[low plank]

just tried Monkey Island 1, CD version, and while it works, isn't it much slower? it feels like it's playing at 1/2x speed

[fleet cave]

I'm trying to get sjgplay to work in the 486 core but the gui aspect of it is broken. I can't tell if that's due to the ide/cdrom implementation not being correct or if there are other issues in the core that break it

[low plank]

tested Wipeout and it's the same, low pitch and low speed, just compared with the same Wipeout running in Dosbox in a modern machine and it's clearly slower in ao486

[fleet cave]

'wipeout 1995'?

[low plank]

the only DOS Wipeout, yes, from 1995

[hollow fog]

I tried few games with cd music , works fine

[low plank]

after messing with it a bit and rebooting it several times now it seems to be playing at normal speed, strange, maybe I have an issue at HW level

I've also noticed it fails a lot mounting ATA devices and ISOs, so maybe it's me

[granite umbra]

it seems with the last release of main mister / ao486 core

ISO file are not readable

[vestal ginkgo]

my guess is the CD version shouldn't slow down the core, its currently set to drop to like 30Mhz with the caches off

[low plank]

no no, there was no slowdown in the core, it was just the audio playing at slower speed/pitch

[vestal ginkgo]

oh not from the top 300 then?

[low plank]

also I get the image in flames when mounting some isos with imgtry, and I've noticed that if I mount and unmount the iso from the OSD a few times it ends up detecting it

[hollow fog]

Yes , i converted my all isos to bin/cue 🙂

[low plank]

I'm using your Top 300, yes (thanks btw)

[low plank]

yeah, that's true, cue/bin like MI1 never fails

[vestal ginkgo]

then I think it is scripted to slow down the core for monkey island, we fought with it for freakin years

[granite umbra]

ok thank you for the confirmation
is there a tool for it ?

[vestal ginkgo]

you can see it on the first Jchoice pause. "Call sysctl sys 30mhz l1-"

[low plank]

so you think the issue is related to the core speed? maybe I should get a new DE-10 nano and RAM...

[hollow fog]

I just use anyburn program to convert files

[vestal ginkgo]

nothing wrong with your mister, its just a config setting. I'll try to make it where if you pick the CD version it keeps the AO486 core at full speed. If easy change I can do it, if its longer than that it is going to have to wait

yeah that fixes it

you have to REM out the sysctl line in the AUTORUN.BAT so the AO486 core runs at full speed when using the CD-AUDIO option

I can move it to only run if you are using the talkie version.

[hollow ice]

For some reason I remember ssf2t running better but maybe not.

[granite umbra]

I tried it and it hangs but the program shows disc duration and the led is green (not blinking)

[low plank]

ok, so if I start with 486SX I get half speed for CD-A, then I go to the OSD and set it to 486DX and it sounds correct (sysctl is REM'ed), I wonder why it doesn't get the correct speed from the beginning

[granite umbra]

thank you !

[vestal ginkgo]

hard to explain but the slow down for Monkey Island was intentional. There was a game breaking hang bug where you could just get stuck in the game if you didn't slow down the FPGA core. It will still be needed for sound blaster/MT-32 audio (and I think there is still situations where the game can hang, but way less often at 30Mhz and one of the caches turned off) I have no idea if those hang bugs will happen with CD-Audio.

[low plank]

yup, I'm familiar with that bug, I had lots of issues in the past trying to run it in a Pentium machine back in the day, so the speed config you set should definitely stay there

[vestal ginkgo]

yeah for the talkie version, no clue on the cd-audio version yet, I am currently playing the game with it running. 😄

[hollow ice]

@fleet cave thanks for the ide work. How familiar are you with the spec? I had attempted to fix a bug with openstep a while back where the SPT value was getting reset to 0, but didn’t have any luck.

[thick pendant]

The Dig has the same issue and it only uses SB

[fleet cave]

hmm, this sjgplay thing may not even be cdrom/ide related. it works fine without the GUI. you can start tracks playing, you can query the full TOC and you can even start a track and then use the 'wait' command and it properly exits when the current track is over

[median carbon]

does anyone happen to know any ao486 modelines for a 1600x1200 75hz computer monitor?

[void belfry]

CD Audio in Heroes of Might and Magic 2 stutters at certain actions (like opening Mage guild , Thieves' Guild, building construction menu in castles, opening chests and some in-game functions like save/exit). Otherwise seems fine

[void belfry]

FX Fighter has a nice soundtrack too 🙂

[hollow fog]

i tried Qurantine, Warcraft II, Virtuoso, 7th Guest , all good

[void belfry]

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_that_use_Red_Book_CD_audio

quite a list and a lot ofc would not work but still.., next on my tests would be Goblins 3 and Betrayal at Krondor

[void belfry]

that list is missing Sideline :)) nice tracks on this one too

[waxen brook]

It's so exciting that CD audio support is here for AO486 & Amiga! Thanks everyone for testing different stuff and reporting back findings, and @fleet cave, paulb-nl & Sorg for the work on this great addition 🙂

[fast kraken]

it is a really nice bit of polish for that core now its pretty much exactly like my real 486 back in the day

[low plank]

anybody knows if there is an easy way to edit the autorun.bat file from MyMenu in the Top 300 pack? is there like a key combination or something?

sometimes if a game crashes it shows the autorun.bat and the readme, and from there I can edit it, but I don't know how to get there

or maybe there is some documentation available?

[thick pendant]

you can always type alt-c then "edit autorun.bat"

[low plank]

I'll try that, but I guess what I'm asking is how to "enter" a folder instead of running the game

[thick pendant]

you can press f7(full screen) then f2

[low plank]

thanks!

(btw, I think you developed MyMenu, @thick pendant, so thank you!)

[thick pendant]

Oh, i think what you want is alt-f9

[low plank]

thanks, I will give it a try later, just making a backup of my microSD at the moment

[thick pendant]

alt-f9 to toggle auto-run then probably f7 and f2 to edit

[worthy zealot]

Ahh, amazing 🙂 With CD audio support for the Amiga and AO486 core that sure covers a lot of games I wanted to try with this feature on those systems and we should be close to seeing fully floppy support for the Amiga core since it has been tested, support that means reading even copy protected Amiga floppy disks on the MiSTer.

And so many other cores have gotten major improvements and been added to the MiSTer as well. I have not had my MiSTer hooked up for maybe a year now, but its certainly time to test much of the new stuff. I will start out with CD audio on the Amiga and AO486 core.

[burnt timber]

Very happy to see CD Audio in both of these cores, and grateful. I guess the next thing Id like to see is some better implementation of joystick/gamepad controls in ao486.

[worthy zealot]

I thought that was already possible in AO486? But I have not tried it, I always use keyboard controls and such, and then they can be mapped to a gamepad or something I guess.

[burnt timber]

Myself and others have run into a lot of trouble with various games. Sideline is an example off the top of my head

[void belfry]

Betrayal at Krondor CD version is not recognized on AO486 (it seems ok in PCEmu) 😦

[hollow fog]

Hmm i think i played betryal at krondor cd

I will check

[void belfry]

Never had the CD version, I use the back-ed up version from my original 486 HDD. And that was a floppy version, copied from a friend back then :))

[void belfry]

Under Win NT 4.0, if you're closing the integrated CD Player, music will still play on. When re-opening CD Player, it will just function as normal, resuming from current track
Under W95, closing the CD Player while playing, music will stop. When re-opening the CD Player, it won't recognize anymore the CD, unless restarting the OS.
I know, different CD drivers used as well in this equation 🙂
Took as benchmark the FX Fighter Gold CD, because of the soundtracks lol

CD Player's functions (stop/next/pause/etc) function as intended as far as i can see

[worthy zealot]

Nice 🙂

[burnt timber]

So FX Fighter CDDA music is working now I imagine?

[void belfry]

yup 😄 love it

[burnt timber]

Someone said Sideline was working, earlier. Exciting stuff, just need some controller fixes

[void belfry]

also winning "speeches" for characters work now, as they are also as tracks

Under DOS, closing Dos Navigator's integrated CD player while playing the music, it won't stop it, and when relaunched it will function normally

[hollow fog]

Alien Trilogy works ok with music

[low plank]

Alt+F9 doesn't seem to do anything on my side, maybe I need to enable something in the mymenu.ini?

[thick pendant]

what version?

[low plank]

good question, is the one bundled with the Top 300 pack from @vestal ginkgo, updated to v2.0.2, let me check the MyMenu version

[low plank]

$09CC

[thick pendant]

maybe I added that later

$09E0

[thick pendant]

we probably should update that

[low plank]

I see you upgraded to HexadecimalBond with the versioning numbers

[thick pendant]

I was running out of #'s

so, if you want the auto on by default DOAUTOSELECT=Y else N or T or F

but ALT-F9 should toggle

[worthy zealot]

I guess I will have to update my full CD collection. I used to prefer having them in ISO format, also helps make it easy to tell whether the game has CD tracks or not. Maybe I could figure out a way to add support for ISO again, but it can be a bit complicated, I already tried a bit with the PS1 core

Does MyMenu support playing CD music? Or do I have to find DOS Navigator or some other CD player for DOS?

[low plank]

they recommended yesterday in this chat to convert to cue/bin with anyburn, I was working on it right now (editing the batch files)

[copper slate]

what about chd

[low plank]

haven't tried it myself, but there are DOS tools to play CD-audio
http://www.fysnet.net/cdp.htm

[worthy zealot]

I do have tools for autoconverting CD images. I would just prefer not to have to, and to generally be able to use any CD format. But if its done like it is for PS1 and such, then that means having to make extra code that tells MiSTer main what tracks ISO files have. Which is not as simple as it might seem like it should be, because its needed in more than one place, at least last time I tried.

[worthy zealot]

good question. I will test that

[worthy zealot]

Nice, I will try a few of these 🙂

Hmm, there are several bin cue image types. Some of them store the music in MP3 format... would that work with this? I am guessing it wouldnt

Oh, right, there is also cue / iso. That should work, shouldnt it?

[fleet cave]

probably, assuming the cue reference the file correctly

also if you have an 'iso' that has audio tracks that's a raw dump pretending to be an iso

[worthy zealot]

Stone Keep, Little Big Adventure, HOMM2 and Heimdall2 all have CD audio. Pretty sure at least LBA should be able to run on AO486, and I think HOMM2 was DOS based?

[thick pendant]

Not currently, but something I may look into adding

[worthy zealot]

Oh, Settlers 2 Gold Edition has CD audio. Did not think it did, pretty sure it had music last time I tried it, but I might remember it wrong, and I guess it might also just have two versions. Maybe it was not the gold version I played

Destruction Derby... hmm, pretty sure if it runs, it does not run well, but since it has audio tracks I think I will try that again as well

[void belfry]

HOMM2 has issues with CD audio 😦

[worthy zealot]

I do think CHD should work right? I got this simple command that converts any ISO to CHD and the same works for cue bin I think:
for /r %%i in (*.iso) do chdman createcd -i "%%i" -o "%%~ni.chd"
By replacing iso with cue

It should make a CHD version of any ISO or CUE file in the same folder as the file in all subfolders of the folder it is run in

Oh... actually seems like all the CHD images will be made in the folder you run this, even if the image file is in a subfolder

Btw, on the Amiga core, has the driver maybe changed or do you still need to use scsi.device for CDs? The git readme has not been updated, but the little I tested so far I suspect maybe it did change? But it might also just have been the one CD image I tried was not one that could be seen as mounted when mounted

Does Magic Carpet run on AO486?

[thick pendant]

if i remember right, yes and no

[hollow fog]

I will check

[thick pendant]

like yes it runs, no its not enjoyable if I remember right

[worthy zealot]

Yeah, probably a bit like Syndicate Wars. It runs, but its just a bit below enjoyable framerates, but you can if you really want to

Oh, this might even be Magic Carpet 2. The first one did not have CD audio I think

[thick pendant]

"Intel 486DX 100 MHz Intel Pentium 75 MHz recommended"

[worthy zealot]

Is that Magic Carpet 1 or 2?

[hollow fog]

Nice cd music

[fleet cave]

nothing was fundamentally changed with the amiga driver. all that was added was the bits in main required for sending cdda data to the core, and the core was changed to mix that data into the audio stream

that's it

[worthy zealot]

Nice, good to know. I do think it might be a problem though when it comes to getting CD32 and CDTV games to run on the Amiga because they expect the CD.Device driver. The emulators and such that is. I will try to see how well I can work around it though.

[fleet cave]

I ran CD32 games with the utility included with IDEFix97

[worthy zealot]

But can it be used as a bootdisk and such?

[fleet cave]

no idea

[worthy zealot]

I do not think I got very far testing the IDEFix CD32 emulator. I will give that another go

[fleet cave]

I think when I initially installed idefix, I used the atapi device it detected

[thick pendant]

Ideally I think we want to get the CD32 bios to work, however I don't think the CD32 uses the Gayle interface for CDROM

[worthy zealot]

Oh yeah, I think I did something with that. Do not remember if I got it to work, but I tried a few things at least to get around that atapi driver

[fleet cave]

it uses akiko for cdrom

[worthy zealot]

I think maybe I actually got the atapi to work the same way scsi.device does, by just changing the CD device to what the scsi.device is given as the drive number

[thick pendant]

I suppose you could make a custom bios with remus

[worthy zealot]

I have tried that

I guess it might be possible if someone can customize drivers or something

but I could not find a way to do so

Oh wait, bios? Not kickrom?

[thick pendant]

yeah, kick

dunno why i was calling it "bios"

[fleet cave]

because you're a dirty PC lover

[thick pendant]

next I'll be calling Workbench "Windows"

[worthy zealot]

But yeah, making a custom rom I have had no luck with. Have been looking into it for a while, but I am a software developer, so bios stuff and such is on a much lower level of code than I am used to

[thick pendant]

I know I made a custom kickstart for 1.3 that supports HD, and a 3.14 one with 4 drive support with atapimagic

[worthy zealot]

Yeah, its very useful to have a 1.3 rom with IDE support 🙂

[thick pendant]

I mostly did it to get the Newtek demos to run somewhat correctly

those Newtek demos sold me on Amiga back in the day 🙂

[worthy zealot]

I needed it for gold box AD&D games

Their WHDLoad versions do not work very well. You can load the games fine, but when you have to save it will take ages and sometimes crash

So they are best run with the 1.3 ROM and WB 1.3

[hollow fog]

so far it works great! it is fast enough to play comfortably

[worthy zealot]

Nice 🙂

[worthy zealot]

Goblins 3 has CD audio it seems

One big audio track

[hollow fog]

i love 486 era 🙂

[vestal goblet]

Gobliiins 3 might be better to play in scummvm. The pathfinding was made a bit more sane in the reimplementation

[worthy zealot]

Yeah, but that probably goes for pretty much all adventure games I think

[vestal goblet]

in Sierra games you can use arrow keys and not rely on pathfinding at all, which is a nice fallback. but in Goblins games the primary interaction requires pathfinding and you end up pixel-hunting just to get the Goblin with the pitchfork out onto the tree branch

I set up my daughter's Kano PC with Gobliiins CD from GOG, which uses scummvm, after trying it in DOSbox. There were several times she was on the right track with the puzzle solution, but the pathfinding wonkiness made it seem like the game was disallowing the approach.

anyway, just a suggestion from someone who went through that specific set of games recently 😄

[thick pendant]

that does look better than I remember

I wonder if I tried it before the L2 cache was added...

[worthy zealot]

I have trouble getting AO486 to use drive D as the CD drive. Is there something about it having to be the second controller that is used for CDs?

Goblins 3 with CD audio 🙂

[rough edge]

If someone makes a PnP 1MB Kick for CD32 that would be great haha

The official one doesn't work

[worthy zealot]

I have tried, best I could do was to make a bootfloppy that would part of the Kickrom using... romfloppy or whatever the tool is called

But that was using a SquirrelCD32 I think, and it needed access to the CD images on the shared folder and I could not get it to mount the shared folder

[rough edge]

The CD... Images?

[worthy zealot]

Yes, for mounting. So I would have iso files in the shared folder that I could mount with squirrelCD32 with a special bootdisk I made for it

But those do not support CD audio of course, but that was not an option at the time anyway

I did do some attempts at using emulators that load CDs in the drive, but the compatibility was not as good as with SquirrelCD32 with what I tried

Problem with getting the emulators to work with the special CD setup that the MiSTer Minimig core uses

I am pretty sure its mainly about configuring those emulators better

[void belfry]

Fantasy General also has nice CD tracks 🙂

[fleet cave]

is there some special config needed for warcraft 2 in the core? it crashes for me

[hollow fog]

dos32a

🙂

[worthy zealot]

yeah, generally if the game uses DOS4GW assume you will need to use DOS32A with it. In 99% of the cases it will make it run better I think. Very few games run worse with it.

[worthy zealot]

Cannot get AO486 to assign D as the CD drive drive letter. I guess it might reserve that drive letter for the second IDE drive on the primary controller even if no disk is assigned to it?

[low plank]

I finally tested it and it works great, it's much easier now to edit the autorun.bat files, Alt+F9 and for each game I need to edit F7 -> F2, make the changes and Alt+X

[void belfry]

using the /L:D option works for me. I usually keep it as letter F, just quick tested for D

[worthy zealot]

I guess I will have to not use XCDROM then. I will try this, thanks 🙂

Ahh yes, playing CD audio on the Minimig core 🙂

Robocod 2

[hollow fog]

coffin 😄

[worthy zealot]

I mean, James Pond 2: Codename Robocod

Yeah 🙂

Takes a long time to boot, but changed it to use the RTG drivers for the MiSTer instead of Vampire

And changed its CD device to the MiSTer settings as well

[void belfry]

I use XCDROM driver as well. (it is loaded in config.sys). SHSUCDX is just a replacement for MSCDEX (as you see, this is loaded in autoexec.bat)

[burnt timber]

What games benefit from CDDA in the minimig core? CD32 Im guessing?

[thick pendant]

there is also a device driver called UDVD2.SYS that might be worth trying...

[hollow fog]

I tested a lot of Vampires , fun times 🙂

[worthy zealot]

I do think I have SHSUCDX in my autoexec somewhere, just not in the conf I mostly use. I will try to move it. Testing Amiga now though and have some N64 to test as well 🙂

[void belfry]

It's smaller than mscdex, one of reasons i use it. But I suppose the same "/L:[letter]" option can be used also with MSCDEX.

[worthy zealot]

yeah... and if somehow possible to get it to work then there is Defender of the Crown CDTV, with voices and more 🙂

[burnt timber]

I guess Ill have to try and investigate what CD32 games are worth playing and have CDDA

[worthy zealot]

I must say the games on CD32 are mainly existing games that got a CD32 port, but often with worse music I think. But Chuck Rock 2 is pretty good I think with its CD32 music. Same style as the original I think, but taking advantage of the CD quality audio

[sudden ice]

If I get General failure reading drive F in AO486, what do I do?

This is trying to launch top 300

[burnt timber]

Dark Seed/Pirates! Gold/Universe/Labyrinth of Time look like they might be worth spinning up to try

I think they are already in Amiga Vision. I assume CDDA just works now with the existing image

[worthy zealot]

Arrg... IdeFix CD32 emulator was playing the Chuck Rock 2 intro perfectly, but then something crashed with Coffin 😦

I will try another OS I think

[cedar isle]

I've been looking forward to college flashbacks running cthugha in ao486 with cd support. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)

[worthy zealot]

Ohh, nice 🙂 I will have to try that as well

[thick pendant]

You can also mouse click in the popup instead of f7

[void belfry]

Hmm... I actually like that DOS Navigator's CD player continues playing the CD audio after closing it. I can listen to music and do other stuff in DOS at the same time

[void belfry]

Shadow Warrior CD audio also works (and rocks 😄 )

[hollow fog]

nice!

last time I tried it, this game didn't work too fast 🙂

[void belfry]

works ok-ish, I'd say, maybe with some marginal improvements with VESA https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=46620#p46620

[hollow fog]

thanks for the info !

ao486:

• Fix: CD audio rate was depending on CPU clock.

[worthy zealot]

Nice 🙂

[void belfry]

time to update 😄 thanks @hollow fog

[granite umbra]

I remenber this game ! Is it working well ?

[void belfry]

Didn't play much, just the first map, but I'd say it's ok-ish to play (kinda same as Duke Nukem 3D i would guess ?)

I dunno how to measure the FPS on this one 😄

[granite umbra]

Thank you !

[sudden ice]

Any noticeable changes?

With latest release?

[hollow fog]

maybe HOMM2 works better now ?

unfortunately I don't have this game

[worthy zealot]

Pretty sure this game is just a bit slow on the MiSTer overall? I think it runs in SVGA

[hollow fog]

i think there were problems with music when the game slowed down

[worthy zealot]

I tested HOMM2 yesterday, with the CPU set to 90hz, and the music ran quite well I think, but the game was slow

[granite umbra]

For SideLine I didn't find the way to decrease cd music volume so difficult to hear some SFX sound even set to maximum volume

[worthy zealot]

Hmm, I guess I was only in the menu of HOMM2, so I guess it might be more noticeable when going in game

[void belfry]

Descent 2 skips tracks when playing, jumping from one to another after few seconds

but from this demanding game I didn't had much hopes anyway

[mortal hazel]

Tempest 2000 finally has music! Kind of... it seems to play the correct track, but only plays the first 2 seconds or so before repeating it over and over. This is for the DOS version.

[void belfry]

Lol, not a great game (and no, it doesn't have CD audio), but fun name and "story" still :D)) Controls are kinda janky tbh

has nice music though, and characters have digital speech as well

[burnt timber]

I've heard of this one actually

[void belfry]

from what i gathered, you need 2 wins to advance with every girl, each advancement gets you some picture on that calendar on the pole

[thick pendant]

what is that on her leg?

[void belfry]

mouse cursor. it shapes like a mic when on characters, like a hand on floor/interactive objects and arrow for upstairs

the interface is pretty much mouse driven, only the fights uses 2,4,6,8 for movement, Z,X for punch/kick

[thick pendant]

Ah, thought it was her lightsaber

[burnt timber]

This is a pretty good OPL2 OST

Comparatively anyway.

[void belfry]

yeah, i was pleasantly surprised by it. Well, the fighting itself as i said is far from ideal but not a bad idea for this kind of games

[void belfry]

This was first released for PC-98 and FM-Towns , then ported to MS-DOS

[burnt timber]

That explains the PC-98 graphics

[void belfry]

has some easter eggs as well, or semi-cheats

[burnt timber]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRQ57HZ0LiA

PC98 OPN seems to have better renditions

[void belfry]

ok, seems you can customize the controls, the envelope button, between "!" and the bar chick

[void belfry]

StarGunner has also CD audio tracks. They are not used in game however, it seems to be intended for audio CD use only. Otherwise, nice shooter game for DOS, good music background also.

Good ol' Apogee 🙂 ❤️

[void belfry]

Star General has also CD audio tracks. Never played this before, but from what I can tell, the CD audio works fine 🙂
It would require QEMM for the install program, but it would run on a HIRAM/Extended/EMM386 options (NOT QEMM, as it would crash to DOS)

[junior hemlock]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USQxZc9nmtE Does the Mister need pizza key emulation?

[thick pendant]

I have one of these, I put a faster CPU in it and a HD...

[junior hemlock]

Heh, nice!

[thick pendant]

the screen is really pretty horrible. you'd be much better off with almost any used laptop

[junior hemlock]

I bet!

[thick pendant]

but for $100 or whatever it sold for, you could not beat it

[junior hemlock]

Agreed

[void belfry]

crazy first large Internet use years 😄 Though most of those ideas are implemented today (back then the tech couldn't cope with the desired functionality), like ordering a pizza from smartphone/smart TV/probably even consoles if not already lol

same principle after all. Minimalistic app on an Internet connected device for whatever online stuff. And ofc, the device would require as little user's intervention as possible

Hmm... now that I think more on pizza (well, not for now as I just ate)... I bet that there are pizza websites that would be even accessible from a MiSTer core to place an order (not the online payment stuff, I wouldn't go that far).

My bet would be for Amiga's IBrowse, as it would also allow an external RasPi or whatever linux box as proxy/SSL offloader or AmiSSL (albeit much slower)

[junior hemlock]

Haha, that would be interesting

[void belfry]

Problem seems to be finding such site lol :)) A lot of them just moved the ordering to online platforms/services like Glovo or whatnot. I knew such a site (actually good restaurant in my area) who had a very minimalistic site, but it closed the website and moved.

[deft estuary]

Hi there all! On Ao486 last version, with fixed CDDA support, I've tried to run Rayman on Dos 6.22 but it doesn't boot, anyone has got to boot it, even with prev versions of the core?

[void belfry]

Rayman doesn't work. No matter the core version

[deft estuary]

ok thank you @void belfry

[void belfry]

i tried lol 🙂 each possible mem manager/UNIVBE/FPU software emulator to no avail

[deft estuary]

@void belfry in your opinion, what is it the feature the Rayman uses and the core doesn't implement correctly?

[void belfry]

I've no clue 🙂

for some games, the clue is kinda obvious from the error messages, be it for memory or missing FPU or missing whatever else. For Rayman, not that obvious as it doesn't boot. So probably more troubleshoot has to be done

[hollow fog]

Rayman is a very interesting case

[void belfry]

For example, some programs (this case is the VICE emulator for DOS) plainly asks for an FPU. Others would just throw some other errors. As I remember Rayman, I don't think it's the lack of FPU though, it's simple enough not to need that

In 99% of the cases of DOS software needing FPU, I could at least get it run with Q87 FPU emulator. Only one case (some german game if I recall didn't accept it, though it recognized it as a software FPU)

for games/DOS emulators "run" translates into "crawls" except FX Fighter :))

not sure if I've tried the other (Trident) bios with Rayman though I doubt there would be much difference

[deft estuary]

these are the specs from manual:

PC CD-ROM - Windows 95/98 compatible
IBM & 100% compatibles
486 33 minimum - Pentium recommended
DOS version 5.0 or higher
Double speed CD-ROM drive - Keyboard or Joypad
4 MB RAM minimum - 8 MB recommanded
Graphic card VLB card - 256 colours
Sound card: Sound Blaster & compatibles

maybe the problem is the Graphic card VLB card, @void belfry ?

[void belfry]

back then, I indeed had a VLB card with 1 meg vram (can't recall exactly what) on my DX/4 and for sure I got Rayman working. Now, if the issue is the implementation of the graphic card for ao486.. again, no clue 🙂

[hollow fog]

i tried everything

https://tenor.com/view/the-office-michael-scott-failed-gif-25797566

[vestal ginkgo]

throwing it out there, Rayman in my specific pack could just be broken, from the conversion of eXoDOS, so maybe just try a fresh install. eXo can sometimes do patches that might be more focused on dosbox.

I do remember the Letters screen lockup and never figured it out

[void belfry]

I always install them fresh

[vestal ginkgo]

oh and it did the same thing?

[void belfry]

yeah

[vestal ginkgo]

VLB does for sure work after that one person did all that work getting UNIVBE functioning. I am going to blame the DPMI bug as that is a fun one to blame with no real data to back it up

[hollow fog]

I'm using my dos installation and unfortunately I couldn't get Rayman to run

psx version is good too 😄

[void belfry]

admittedly, I only used DOS 7.1, but I doubt this would be the issue

[hollow fog]

i use 6.22

[void belfry]

that clears it 🙂

have you tried it with the other VGA card bios as well ?

[hollow fog]

https://tenor.com/view/nope-gif-23756243

[void belfry]

With QEMM, it would show something different than the letters/other chars as in other mem managers. But won't budge over that

[hollow fog]

yeah , same here

hangs , 1994-1995 is blinking

[void belfry]

yes. using dos32a also produces some beeps at beginning

we can rule out the other VGA bios (didn't had much hope anyway)

tested, same result

and for the sake of my mind, also tried another CD version

I can however confirm that the audio tracks are there and playable (here with Cubic player) 😄

which apparently freezes after a track is played...

not that the spectrum analyzer is actually reflecting the reality 😄

[dire solstice]

Qq will doom ever be able to run full speed?

[hollow fog]

in my opinion doom works very well

[void belfry]

and that freeze is only on Rayman image, testeed with DN's cd player and it does the same. Cubic player actually works ok (it would loop the track, not play the next as DN, but still it won't freeze the entire system)

maybe a double check with PCEm would throw some light, as I don't wanna rule out bad image(s) as well

[vestal ginkgo]

especially FastDoom, which I am not sure why you wouldn't use FastDoom at this point on the core. It is exponentially better

speaking of, didn't the FastDoom Dev add CD-Audio?

I forgot about that

yup, https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1130273#p1130273

[copper slate]

Is there a list of all computer cores that support mt32-pi? I tried looking and found these:

• ao486
• AtariST
• Minimig
• MSX1
• PC88
• X68000

[burnt timber]

Didnt know PC88 and MSX supported it

[copper slate]

ehhhh, I'll double check

[burnt timber]

Amiga did.. I thought

[fleet cave]

it does

[burnt timber]

X68000 for sure, my mt32pi has gotten the most use in that core

[thick pendant]

I assume that means USB MIDI too?

[fleet cave]

I dont' know, actually

[thick pendant]

for the MSX1 and PC88 i mean

I know I've used MIDI with ao486, AtariST, Minimig and X68000, but I'm not even aware of the PC88 and MSX supporting MIDI

I don't know whats up with my MiSTers but they are changing IP addesses like crazy lately...

[vestal ginkgo]

Mine still does the whole double ip thing, it gets a dhcp address and then less than 60 seconds it gets the sequential address. Like from .123 to .124 I have just lived with it. Hard wired only. Though it has been a good long while since I upgraded and just did yesterday. *shrug

[void belfry]

Found another app needing FPU, Flview (some image viewer, mouse driven etc, most probably got it from Flynnsbit's VHDs lol) it would "run" (slowly) with Q87 FPU emulator. While it looks nice for a DOS program, I'll stick to QuickView 🙂

[hollow fog]

I have never checked the fpu q87 emulator , I will play with it soon

I only tested the soft. fpu under minimig core

[void belfry]

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=6639

[hollow fog]

thanks!

[waxen brook]

Saw this comment on my YT from one of the folks who worked on the Monkey Island expansion stuff for Sea of Thieves on Xbox/PC recently. Cool to hear they're a MiSTer fan/user 🙂

[deft estuary]

excuse me @void belfry , how can we change video card bios in Ao486 MiSTer core?

[low plank]

I believe it's the "boot1.rom" file under /media/fat/games/AO486

[deft estuary]

thanks @low plank !

[low plank]

latest versions of the ao486 bios should be here:
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer/tree/master/releases

(at the bottom)

[deft estuary]

perfect! But how can I find alternative boot.rom ?

[low plank]

I don't know, I remember long ago we had a very crappy VGA card, and at a certain point it was replaced by a better one that supported the bios of a real world graphics card, but I'm not aware of any other, I'd love to know more about these alternative bioses

I wonder if the suggestion is to go back to the previous one

[deft estuary]

shure, thanks @low plank , maybe @void belfry can say more on this when he'll we be online...

[low plank]

I believe the new VGA replicates a Tseng Labs ET4000, and that's the "good" bios we should all be using, unless something changed and I didn't notice it because the update script took care of it

the ET4000 allows for more than 16 colours at 640x480 (=SVGA), before it was a pure VGA 320x240 256 colours, also being compatible with the ET4000 means some VESA support is there

[deft estuary]

it would be useful to know if we can use VGA bios downloaded from the web as for example S3 Virge Bios

[low plank]

the second post here points to another VGA bios, from Trident:
https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=2780
"There are other general graphics issues with scrolling or black screens which the Trident VGA Bios solves for but breaks other things."

I wonder if anybody has any information about this Trident bios

[deft estuary]

interesting, thanks a lot!

[low plank]

I'm finding something:
https://github.com/flynnsbit/scripts/blob/master/AO486_Games_Update_Pack/boot1-trident.rom.bin

[deft estuary]

very interesting! so the boot1.rom is the vga bios...

[void belfry]

boot1_opensource.rom from the bottom of the page is that one I was referring. Rename it as boot1.rom and it will present as Trident

But honestly, I didn't use it much, for comparison tests mostly

[vestal ginkgo]

yeah, the trident one is really only for a couple of games, there is a video mode that it can do that the ET4000 cannot so games like the incredible machines will wok with the trident one

[burnt timber]

Im curious as to what specal video modes it has

I've heard of mode X in standard VGA which is more or less MCGA I think

[tulip atlas]

Kid Chaos CD32 has more colors than on Amiga 1200, and it has CD Audio as well

CD32:

Amiga 1200:

The game rocks.

[tulip atlas]

I used the Idefix97 CD32 Emulator boot disc to boot the CD32 .chd on MiSTer

[deft estuary]

isn't possible to use other Video cards Bios simply downloading them from the Web?

[vestal ginkgo]

no, I only found 2 that worked out of all the bios files in PCem. The core is too customized

[worthy zealot]

I have been trying out CD32 games using the IDEFix CD32 bootdisk using the atapi.device driver and primary drive set to the CD drive. Microcosm runs very well, James Pond 2 has some toruble with fast audio that I could not get to work, Speedball 2 CD32 seems to work fully, Chaos Engine CD32 runs and has audio, but for me the screen was black, not sure why.

But more surprising to me is that it seems to support CDTV games quite well. I tried Lemmings CD32 and Defender of the Crown CD32 runs also, but for some reason without audio. CD or otherwise. I hope there is a way to fix that.

[vestal ginkgo]

just so I don't have to find it later. Redbook: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_that_use_Red_Book_CD_audio

[tulip atlas]

To fix Chaos Engine CD32, just set a checkmark for „No Fast Mem“ in the CD32 Emu window.

[fast kraken]

just noticed fastdoom supports audio cds now

[burnt timber]

Mario Teaches Typing? Sign me up

[earnest lynx]

Hey, it was the debut of Charles Martinet, so there's that...

[burnt timber]

Fastdoom seems to use PCM files for arranged music options. I found a rather good AST I think would be fun to try with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGK1dr-Ql0w

[vestal ginkgo]

That one stood out to me too! 😄

[earnest lynx]

Can't wait to experience MK3 at its best!

Seriously the best MK PC port besides 1

[burnt timber]

X-Wing, Tie Fighter, MK3, SSF2T, Powerslave, Earthworm Jim Games, FX Fighter Turbo, Alien Trilogy seem like good ones for CDDA on ao486

[copper slate]

Shadow Warrior and Quarantine!

[burnt timber]

Really need to find a FAT formatted bootable DOS vhd for ao486 around the 512mb size, Im having a lot of trouble trying to create one that works with ao486 even after watching a tutorial

[granite umbra]

You can create an empty VHd and format it with ao486

During Dos installation

[surreal marsh]

For minimig, are the emulated hard drives ide or scsi? The fact that trurning ide off disables them makes it seem like ide. However, HDToolBox shows them as scsi.

Also, is a standard 1.3 workbench and kickstart rom able to support ide, scsi, or neither?

[lyric breach]

I've been having some issues with the AO486 Top 300 set. I started with a fresh install from archive.org and then ran the updater. So the CD images are non-CHD. Getting a disc swapping error with certain titles post selection from the menu (not all). Is that expected?

[low plank]

I think I have the same issue, it happens with ISO images, not with cue/bin

what I did is convert all ISOs to cue/bin and edit the launch scripts replacing the extension

[void belfry]

1. First create the VHD file directly on MiSTer (either by F9 or SSHed on it)
   cd /media/fat/games/ao486/
   dd if=/dev/zero of=512M-DOS.vhd status=progress bs=1M count=512

2. You need to partition and format the new VHD.
   Either run the DOS setup from disks, it would ask for fdisk/format it.
   Either:
   Mount an already functioning VHD (my example DOS 7.1) as IDE 0-0
   Mount the newly created VHD as IDE 0-1 and reset

3. Run FDISK. First change the drive by pressing 5 then 2 (see sshot)

Then create a primary DOS partition (press 1, then Y to use all space)

4. Issue an "format D: /s" and you'll have the 512 megs DOS formatted (and bootable) VHD
   Next ofc you should copy the DOS/apps/whatever else folders etc

[low plank]

an alternative to this is to just create the VHD in Windows with "Disk Management" (might require a Pro version of Windows, I'm not sure)

then copy to the microSD and continue on @void belfry's step #2

also if you initialize the disk Rufus seems to be able to format it as FAT16

it seems to support preloading MS-DOS (I guess this is just the basics to boot)

these are the contents from Rufus

haven't tested it

[lyric breach]

Would using CHD files also fix the issues?

[low plank]

haven't tried, sorry

[void belfry]

Hmm, there is an issue and a step 5. after all :)) If the VHD is partitioned/formatted when it is mounted as secondary, you cannot set the active partition for it. So an extra step would be to boot from a floppy, run FDISK and use the second option "Set Active Partition". Then it would be fully bootable

[lyric breach]

Out of interest how did you edit the launcher script? From DOS I presume.

[low plank]

not sure if it's really worth the hassle, but @thick pendant pointed me to the latest version of MyMenu (you have to replace the .exe) that allows to disable autorun (with Alt-F9) and enter each game as a folder, then with F7 you make the BAT file show in full screen and with F2 you can edit it, make the changes and close with Alt+X
#1047332497492553799 message

sometimes the autorun.bat just calls another bat file like 1_Start.bat or run.bat, so from the main view you can browse the folders pressing F2 and then same as above

for converting ISO to CUE/BIN I followed @hollow fog's advice and I used Anyburn
#1047332497492553799 message

[coral coral]

Minimig implements the A600/1200 IDE controller

But AmigaOS normally accesses any HDD controller through scsi.device

[earnest lynx]

Am I missing something with cd audio in ao486? I've installed the drivers, changed my autoexec.bat and config.sys using the oak tech driver. No audio at all. Will the oak driver work?

[thick pendant]

mine seemed to just work with the udvd2.sys driver

[earnest lynx]

May the oak driver just doesn't work.

[thick pendant]

that is the driver included with freedos 1.3

[earnest lynx]

I'll have to give that one a try.

[thick pendant]

its freedos so i can put the bin here

i've not tried many games yet, just audio CDs

[vestal ginkgo]

Yea it seems the core broke ISO at some point

[thick pendant]

It would be really cool if i could build a HPS script that could rip CDs

[fast kraken]

from a usb cd drive?

[thick pendant]

because I can get external USB CD drives all day at the thrift stores for like $2 (if I don't already have a working one)

[earnest lynx]

Thank you! I was already one the road to throwing a CD on my mister and grabbing it manually XD

[fast kraken]

is iso mounting generally broken on ao486 or only the automatic mounting in top300?

[thick pendant]

Exactly, but I think it would need to be one of the big chonky ones with PSU and not the USB powered ones...

[fast kraken]

i have one that like uses two usb plugs, that might help

[thick pendant]

my experience the full size ones work better anyway

[thick pendant]

UDVD2 fix your issue with no sound?

[earnest lynx]

Working on it...

MiSTer is at my couch with a portable keyboard

[thick pendant]

one of these?

[earnest lynx]

I have one of those, but no

And udvd2 won't load. I'm using DOS 6, and mscdex. A different CD extension may be in order

Ugh, . I cannot get mscdex to recognize the driver. I give up for now 😆.

DOS is just a son of a gun...

[vestal ginkgo]

Looks like reading broke, I don’t think it’s anything specify to the top 300. Mount an iso, go try to DIR the iso and it gets the first line and hangs

No clue when it stopped working though, I’ve been out for like a year

For audio cds I had to make a mixed mode bin cue. First track was data, just a dir or something, then all the cd tracks. At least for my fastdoom test that worked . If I did a pure audio cd then fastdoom wouldn’t recognize

Then using the same cd drivers setup in the core for f: or D. I thought my issues were due to the fact that I forgot how to make an audio cd and not sure if I did it right with Nero

[thick pendant]

did you use a param like this? "/D:FDCD001" and the same one with mscdex?

[earnest lynx]

Yep.

[thick pendant]

i dunno, maybe udvd2 only works with freedos

[earnest lynx]

I used all sorts of different, matching names

[earnest lynx]

That's very possible.

Imma gather myself up, and try out freedos next time.

Looks neat.

[thick pendant]

I dunno, it says Platforms:DOS

or it could be your image

[earnest lynx]

It could be any number of things 😆. It's DOS.

[thick pendant]

I know FXFighter (CCD/IMG) works for me

[hollow ice]

Iso handling in mister has always been a bit wonky. The openstep install media, for example, has never worked. I had to convert it to chd 2 years ago.

[fleet cave]

the real reason is that the extension '.iso' is abused and those file are either true ISO-9660 format, or sometimes they are basically bin files etc

[waxen brook]

https://youtu.be/LVpbl8FhmaM

some good msx, amiga and x68000 recommendations in there. folks here probably know most of them by now though

[burnt timber]

I think Lionheart might be a little overhyped here lol. Curse of Issyos looks pretty interesting though.

Im pretty sure there is no Undeadline version on FM Towns, maybe he meant the X68000?

[fleet cave]

oh hmm, ISO being broken may be something I did, let me check

[waxen brook]

good catch. i think he was referring to the x68000 version

[burnt timber]

The hdf i have of that one is not working too great with the core, file loading issues trying to start levels. At least the floppy images work fine

[granite umbra]

The order of floppies on the hdf is not right for undeadline

[burnt timber]

Most of those just have the disk images being loaded from the image with a program. Maybe the image names could be fixed to be in correct order inside it

[granite umbra]

Yes it is not difficult to fix

[low plank]

I knew this couldn't be fixed until I've converted all my iso images to cue/bin and updated all the launch scripts 😁

[fleet cave]

your sacrifice is noted

[jolly kraken]

Probably a stupid question: I’m really wanting to get into some of the old dos games - most notably some of the old point and click games. For the accuracy, ease of use, and generally more authentic feel, I like using the MiSTer for my console gaming, but is there any advantage of using the ao486 core over e.g: a pi 4 with dosbox (or similar)? Looking into ao486 over the last day or so, it seems like a bit of a minefield in terms of what works well vs doesn’t

[fallow topaz]

In my opinion, for DOS gaming you are better off with any ultra small form factor PC, Win10 and the ExoDOS collection

[vestal ginkgo]

Thanks Zakk, KQ 7 ISO working again

[fallow topaz]

it is fun to run stuff on the MiSTer as well, but the 486 core has its own limitations

DOSBox allows for fine-tuning the speed and hardware setup, and the ExoDOS collection has done this for all its contents

for me personally, I enjoy running the games in fullscreen on a SVGA CRT. I created a 640x400 video mode with 70Hz, which results in the ultra-fine scanlines I remember from my DOS pc setup 30 years ago

Win10 cannot use the mode to show the interface, but Dosbox can switch into it for fullscreen

(another reason for me is that I can use all my midi synths with this setup and also easily emulate other pc architectures like X68000, PC88 and PC98)

[hollow ice]

That’s the beauty of the ao486 core, though…it is more like a real pc of the era… I still remember the frustration of getting a new game and praying it would run fine on my computer.

And then spending the first day playing with config sys, autoexec settings, and in the worst case bios settings to try to get it to work

[hollow fog]

I'm having a great time with ao486

I have already finished many games

After seeing videos from @waxen brook , I decided to buy a joystick , Thanks! 😆

It's definitely better to play with a joystick in xwing, tie fighter and wing commander

[waxen brook]

Nice! which one did you end up getting?

[hollow fog]

Logitech extreme 3d 🙂

[waxen brook]

sweet. same one I used then. I just unearthed a box from storage with a few older joysticks including its pedecessor

[thick pendant]

I have the old belt-driven sidewinder, but I think it uses a combo of gameport and serial for force-feedback

[low plank]

if you just want to play the games, DosBox, if you want the experience, messing with the OS install, drivers, tweaking the config.sys/autoexec.bat, I would go for something like 86box or PCem, ao486 is going to give you a lot of headaches, especially if you don't have experience with the PCs of that time, and the core is less compatible/accurate than software emulators

a good FPGA core would be great, having a balance between the ease of mounting ISOs and VHDs and the accurate VGA output to a real CRT monitor... but ao486 is not there, it cannot use a real BIOS, the memory mapping in the upper memory area is a mess, lacks joystick compatibility, lots of issues with protected mode and it's not very stable, causing corruption in the filesystem, if the IDE controller itself is not doing it already

[jolly kraken]

Thanks for the suggestions. I don’t mind doing the configuration etc (I have some familiarity with computers of that era, but not a huge amount), and I don’t mind installing one game at a time and doing it the “old fashioned way”, rather than having a console-ized launcher experience with thousands of games I’ll never play. I guess my main concern is around distinguishing between emulation bugs vs issues caused by bad configuration. I don’t have a windows computer at the moment, so that slightly limits my options, but I’ll take a look at dosbox, PCem/86box as they probably sound a bit more polished. Maybe a NUC is a good call here

[low plank]

I have a Pentium 3 1.4Ghz machine where I run DOS games with DosBox, under Windows 98 (yeah, it works), so anything modern with an x86 CPU will do great, for PCem you need much more power, especially if you want to emulate a Pentium MMX+ with a 3Dfx card

[umbral oar]

What’s the benefit of that over just running the games directly in DOS mode, or even just yeah running actual MS DOS on the machine? Is it mostly just for speed sensitive games?

Because yeah I have a 1ghz Coppermine machine and yeah I just boot MS DOS 6.22 from an SD when I want to play DOS games, although yeah speed sensitive games can be a headache

[low plank]

I used it for the most speed sensitive games, although I got a second machine for early 90s games and this Pentium 3 is for Win9X and early 3D-accelerated games, I tried to do all in one and I failed 😭

also Dosbox makes it very easy to handle optical media, Daemon Tools is nice but sometimes one needs to boot into real DOS mode and DOS CD emulators don't support CD-Audio

[thick pendant]

WIP

[worthy zealot]

I can highly recommend PCem. I you want all in one, then that is the way to go. It can emulate a full PC, from 8088 up to Pentium 2 with MMX, 3Dfx and so on and does so very well I would say. The games that require low latency input were generally from before Windows 9x I think, pretty sure how input were done changed since then? When it comes to point and click games, well, I would argue ScummVM has become the best way to play those if the focus is on playing them rather than some more authentic retro machine experience, because when it comes to the game itself it can run those games with as authentic audio and graphics as you want, by changing the settings a bit. DOSBox is great when it comes to setting up emulation in a pretty easy way, but PCem gives a fully experience and much more accuracy. F.ex. when testing the PCXT core we often use PCem for testing. It does also mean that PCem can take 30+ minutes to setup because it needs to have Windows installed, disks setup, ROM files found for motherboards, GPUs and so on.

But the MiSTer is nice and portable while supporting more than 100 systems at this point, which makes it very nice that a 486 and PCXT is two of the systems it supports quite well. Many talk about more advanced FPGAs to run even more advanced systems like the PS2, Pentium level PCs, Dreamcast, Gamecube and so on... but from what I understand the input latency is a different thing on such systems, and using FPGAs for those seem less relevant, and the number of people willing to invest in such a system would probably be a fraction of the MiSTer community.

[worthy zealot]

Very nice 🙂 I have not managed to find a working CD player for DOS yet, so I will have to try this out.

[low plank]

the thing I miss the most using PCem/86box is a real VGA output for my CRT monitor, but this is apparently very hard to overcome due to Windows

[worthy zealot]

true... not sure if maybe there would be some way to install a VGA GPU in a modern PC.

[low plank]

the problem is not the VGA output, it's to get the original resolutions, like 640x400, and the original refresh rates

[hollow fog]

I am aware that not everything works perfectly an ao486, but I am very satisfied , I feel like in the 90s 🙂

[worthy zealot]

seems this guy managed to get it to work? Mainly 70hz on a modern machine I think:
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/lky9w4/the_quest_for_pixel_perfect_dos_emulation/

[worthy zealot]

also one of the benefits of the MiSTer is that you get more of a original DOS experience without having to go through the more complicated setup of PCem.

[thick pendant]

I've found PCem does not work correctly for redbook audio.

like it gets the correct # of CD tracks, but reports the low track as 170

so under PCem I can't get it to play an audio CD using MyMenu or DOS Navigator...

[worthy zealot]

interesting. I have not tried experimenting with it much. I figured it would be something that just worked.

[low plank]

have you tried 86box? it's a fork of PCem

[thick pendant]

I have it set up but have not tried it yet... I was able to code the UI portion of the MyMenu CD Player on PCem, just had to do the final debugging on the MiSTer...

[hollow fog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b9TTurkH4c

[waxen brook]

Wonder how it will compare to the community works at https://df-21.net/ and https://theforceengine.github.io/

[uncut void]

Can anyone enlighten me about the zx spectrum core? Never had one. It boots only to a black screen, I am able to load snaps, but shouldn't there be a basic shell? I DL boot.rom from github and put it in games/Spectrum but that did not help.

[tawny egret]

on the 486 core, does anyone have issues with duke nukem 3d freezing? and does anyone know if the unofficial builds fix that?

[worthy zealot]

Are you using DOS32A as a DOS4GW replacement? If not that will probably cause problems for Duke3D. Otherwise it should run with some lag now and then, at least as long as you run it at 320x240... or maybe its 320x200, but 640x480 at least will be a problem for this core.

[fleet shale]

@vestal ginkgo havin some issues running with the larger image you have up on archive.org. the boot disk doesn't mount the second vhd. i don't know if it's because of my files living on a NAS or what

the 300 game vhd is fine, so i may just stick with that

[fleet shale]

yeah i'm just gonna do that

[void belfry]

https://www.cubic.org/player/download.html (if DN embedded one is not enough ) 🙂

apparently it is the only thing it can do correctly (ofc spectrum analyzer is bogus). It will crap out at mod/s3m/whatever else audio files but would work decent for CD audio

[tacit loom]

A little disappointed in seeing the footage.. looks like actual gameplay looks the exact same as the original. They only remastered the cut scenes. No RTX from the looks of it either like the doom rtx remix.

[thick pendant]

ALT-P brings up the CD Player (for now anyway)

Let me know how it works for you...

[worthy zealot]

Ohh, thanks 🙂 Will be testing some MiSTer stuff this weekend

[deft estuary]

tested with rayman.chd, it doesn't work

[thick pendant]

does it come up at all?

[deft estuary]

yes but when I click "play" it doesn't play and the program hangs

[thick pendant]

i guess i'll have to try that chd when i have access to my MiSTer

[deft estuary]

@thick pendant meanwhile, THANKS for my menu, is the best games/files manager that we we could hope to have!

[thick pendant]

I'll get it working for sure, eventually 🙂

The problem I seem to have with it now is that it won't work unless a cd is mounted before boot.

this is a little strange

[torn arch]

do we have a new cd driver now that is better?

since the other one doesn't read certain files on discs in windows

[vestal ginkgo]

What happens if you mount the CD into BOTH IDE 1-0 and 1-1

I am seeing weird things where the OS thinks that drive G is the primary and F is secondary, and it seems to be a behavior change sometime in the last year

some games look at G, when they never did before (note, the G and F are going to be specific to the Top 300 setup because of all the drive shanagans I did, so if you have your own image, the letters could be different, point is IDE 1-0 and IDE 1-1. Test and see if using the other mount point makes a difference

note also, I haven't tested mymenu above, at work

[void belfry]

Rayman CD has issues on playing the tracks (let alone the game), no matter the CD player used (tested with DN, Cubicplayer)

[thick pendant]

Interesting read on CD+G --> https://goughlui.com/2019/03/31/tech-flashback-the-cdgraphics-format-cdg/

[worthy zealot]

I got it to work. The timer is... strange. Every second seems to be shown as some arbitrary amount of seconds. Every minute ends up being more than an hour. Seconds are... somewhere between 20 seconds and 1 minutes I think.

Hmm, guess it crashed in some strange way. But probably in a MiSTer problem way rather than a MyMenu problem way. This reminds me I probably did not grab the AO486 update yet that should fix some timing issues when changing CPU speed. But the problem here is I cannot even open the mister menu, but I can see the clock keeps going and some of the menu colors keep blinking.

To get the menu to run I made an empty ini file for it, and then it said no files found. I guess next boot I should give it a path to my games folder.

But I got it to play track 2 on the Monkey Island CD. After track 2 it did this strange crash. Since I cannot open the menu and the core is still active in some way, I guess this might be an issue with MiSTer main. Its not the first time I have had my AO486 core crash from using audio CDs. Oh yeah, using ISO files directly can cause this as well. I should probably try to debug this and see if I can make some update suggestion to MiSTer Main.

The CD it plays for me is from drive 1-0. I tried running MyMenu from the shared folder, but that did not work, probably because it tries to access other files on the drive and such, so that caused the core to crash. But it ran fine when I copied it to my C drive.

The drivers I use for CD is XCDROM.SYS in config.sys and in autoexec.bat I load shsucdx.com and set the CD drive as drive D. I think maybe it could be a problem if I mount something in 0-1 that would then possibly conflict with drive D. When I got this to work I had mounted goblins 3 CD in CHD format in 0-1 and the Monkey Island CD is also in CHD format. Every track starts at 2:00 and it also tries to play the first track, which just results in no sound, but it keeps trying to play it, or at least the timer keeps going uo

Track 2 on the Monkey Island CD:

I will try updating the AO486 core

Yeah, it froze again when trying to go from track 2 to 3 after playing through track 2. Just skipping tracks works fine, and so does stopping tracks.

Hmm, updated AO486 and MiSTer Main to the latest nightly releases but still freezes in this strange way. I will try some other CDs. With CHD you cannot much tell what is inside, I think I will test some cue ones so I can see what type of audio it is and such. But I suspect it might be a general issue, but one with MiSTer Main I suspect. I will try to see if the same thing happens with the Minimig core when playing CDs

Tried Heimdall 2 and it does not crash. I suspect it might be something to do with whether the CD has gaps or not between tracks. Tried a cue version of the Monkey Island CD and it still crashes. But its the same version of the game, a dump I made myself, and then converted the cue to CHD.

The CD Player app for DOS seems to be able to see the tracks and get the correct timing of playing them and such. This is again Heimdall 2 I test with:

I am not sure what the error number means, maybe it has some documentation

Yeah, pregaps. I think those are causing the issue.

I will report this in MiSTer debug and see if someone might help with it

[thick pendant]

You need to set LFN=F in the MyMenu.INI or load DOSLFN. Here is an example INI, but you'll need to edit it to your specific purpose

[worthy zealot]

nice, thanks 🙂

[thick pendant]

I figured you had an INI from newer 300 or Shareware pack

[worthy zealot]

Yeah, somewhere. Was trying to do some quick tests. The 300 and shareware versions I have are pretty old by now and not sure if I even have them on the MiSTer

[torn arch]

Not sure I will have to try that, but with the current cd driver it seems fine with DOS, but in Windows like 50% or more of the games won't install. I think its because of long filenames, it will just say File Not Found during installation.

but maybe mounting it in both drives will help

i spent weeks testing alot of windows games and less than half would even install in windows

[tulip atlas]

On Amiga, is the PWM sound setting more accurate than Normal?

I noticed mine is still set to Normal, probably from before PWM was a thing.

[coral coral]

Yes, in theory.. it models the PWM DAC of a real Amiga. I believe the A1200 PWM option runs at a higher frequency, which in theory should result in a more transparent audio quality, but on MiSTer it sounds really harsh. Maybe the frequency interferes with the main audio sampler.

The A500 PWM options sounds quite nice though. Adds some character to the sound…

[tulip atlas]

Good to know, thanks.

[blazing axle]

Can anyone help me with my settings so I can display X6800 to my PVM

I cant get it to work

[fleet cave]

huh, looks like that 'reported error: 3' thing in that cdplayer is actually a driver issue

goes away if you use oakcdrom.sys

still no idea why sjgplay refuses to work

[umbral oar]

There was some discussion about this yesterday here: #dev-talk message

It almost definitely won’t be possible on your PVM though, I’m going to assume like most it only does 15khz sync

maybe could use a regular VGA PC monitor with some kind of scaler shenanigans, otherwise need a multi-sync monitor capable of 15, 24 and 31khz

[thick pendant]

I think that is because in Windows you should not load a 16bit CD ROM driver (config.sys) (and corresponding MSCDEX). Windows should load its own (32bit) driver which supports the "Joliet" file system which has more sane filename restrictions... Anyway, that is my recollection...

[fleet cave]

I put a main mister binary in test builds. if people could test cd audio on ao486/amiga with it that would be appreciated. should fix some observed weirdness

#test-builds message

[hollow fog]

Thanks Zakk!

[torn arch]

is there a driver we can install to fix that?

you are right though, that is the problem.

[void belfry]

ahem... 🙂 unfortunately NT is not quite ok with most games, for other reasons

and no, the driver NT uses cannot be used on W95/98 platforms

[slate maple]

Nice, does this mean we can play CD32 games now?

[void belfry]

Apparently Rayman CD audio tracks play well now, tested with DN's cd player and Cubic Player

[vestal goblet]

omfgz Cubic player. That takes me wayyyyy back

[thick pendant]

I wonder how its getting the data to drive those visuals

for CD audio i mean

[wheat folio]

I can’t get Cubic Player to work on my real machine 😦

[thick pendant]

RAYMAN (mine is BIN/CUE) CD audio seems to work now with MyMenu using the MiSTer BIN form Zakk. The time seem crazy, which I'll look at and try and fix. Did not have any time this weekend because I got some new/used PC stuff that needed testing...

[thick pendant]

Yeah, the time is pretty screwed up... i'll see what I did to mess that up...

probably something like big endian vs little

[void belfry]

any relevant error ? I don't have anymore a real machine to test it 😦

[opal void]

https://github.com/onnokort/semu-c64

I remember having a discussion about trying to get UNIX running on MSX

this popped up today on /. 🙂

[burnt timber]

What, you Linux people are too good for Basic? huff, huff

[thick pendant]

Oh that is just Linux running on an emulator. nothing to see here

[opal void]

yeah they haven't tested it on real C64 yet

honestly trying to run UNIX on real MSX hardware was so infuriating

but that's because I need to find a way to get my Carnivore2's firmware updated to behave better

[burnt timber]

You can run nix on it. But can you run Doom on it?

[opal void]

https://www.msx.org/forum/msx-talk/development/doom-on-screen-12

lol

[burnt timber]

Gross! :D

[thick pendant]

I mean that RISC-V emulator running on a emulator. I was not even criticizing the fact that its running on an emulator.... well. hard to explain - like that dumb ass movie inception.

So taken alone. There is a RISC-V emulator running on commodore 64. neat

that emulator can run some sort of Linux - also neat

[burnt timber]

A matryoshka doll of nested uselessness

[opal void]

https://tenor.com/view/inception-deeper-go-deeper-we-need-to-go-deeper-leonardo-di-caprio-gif-16756828

[wheat folio]

It just hard locks. Haven’t spent a he time to troubleshoot.

[void belfry]

LUnix rulez 😛

[void belfry]

in two flavors 🙂 one mentioned by @opal void and a port for SymbOS as well

[void belfry]

Also tested the latest version 0.22 (https://github.com/ytmytm/c64-lng/releases/tag/rel_0.22) , works fine on C64 core except the serial connectivity 😦

[void belfry]

Small how-to for making/running a D64 image for latest LUnix

1. Get the corresponding platform zip from the github release page and unzip them to a convenient location.
2. Copy them to a D64 file:
   --my method:
   -get VICE C64 emulator (bonus point for being portable as well)
   -create and format an empty D64 image using c1541 utility form VICE:
   c1541.exe -format LUNIX,01 d64 Lunix_v022_C64.d64
   -copy over each of the extracted files from point 1:
   c1541.exe -attach Lunix_v022_C64.d64 -write core.c64
   c1541.exe -attach Lunix_v022_C64.d64 -write apps.c64
   and so on
3. Copy them to your MiSTer
4. Start C64 core, mount the D64 image you created and issue a LOAD"name",8/RUN for EACH of the .C64 files we copied earlier
   Those .C64/.C128 files are self extracting archives, hence the need for this one-time operation.
5. Load LUnix using LOAD "loader",8,1 program.

[thick pendant]

Fixed the time and a few more things....

[opal void]

how did you stream the screen output to OBS?

[thick pendant]

My A1200 MiSTer has a analog IO board, so I drive a 23" Dell LCD monitor (an its a real gem as it does 15Khz) with the VGA. The HDMI goes into an Elgato HD50pro

The Elgato has a pass-through HDMI out, so you could also go that route

[thick pendant]

OBS runs on a e5-2697v2 with titan x pascal GPU

[opal void]

https://tenor.com/view/cold-yoshi-abandoned-yoshi-gif-22803951

[waxen brook]

can anyone share methods to access the unique keys on x68000 to enable SC-55/MT-33 MIDÍ and other display output modes?

some folks have said they use virtual keyboard for this, but if I'm using a self-loading standalone HDF, how would that work?

[burnt timber]

The remapped key I found worked for most of them was scroll lock

I didnt have to run a virtual keyboard

[thick pendant]

The CPU fan does not normally even turn on 😛

[copper slate]

That’s adorable

[thick pendant]

I have a fake fireplace heater like that.

[waxen brook]

I'll give that a try, thanks!

[fleet cave]

@thick pendant was the cd timer thing in mymenu a you bug or is the cdrom controller sending crap that looks weird?

[worthy zealot]

Nice 🙂

[worthy zealot]

Pretty sure it was the app, because I used another CD Player app and it seemed to have the correct timings.

[thick pendant]

I am using this CDAudio unit from SWAG (SourceWare Archive Group). Anyway it had this function Function Time(M, S, F: Byte): String; { Redbook > 'mm:ss:ff' } which I figured did what I wanted, but it seems like was either not using it properly or its just plain broken, but after looking at the code I'm not sure what the intention was, so I rewrote it.

the stuff coming back from int 0x2fh, 0x1510h looks fine...

[void belfry]

https://www.indieretronews.com/2023/08/adoom-brand-new-port-update-of-classic.html

lol, to be expected glitches, but quite nice it even something like this runs

music is awesome though

those glitches were for having CPU speed higher than normal 1x, at normal speed it runs perfect 😄

latest test ATR image here : https://forums.atariage.com/topic/352886-doom-alert/?do=findComment&comment=5305734

[fleet cave]

I see some stuff on the forum about having to reboot ao486 to see cdrom drives, or having to reboot to get cd audio working? Can someone actually reproduce this and tell me what steps you are using and which game/image?

[fleet shale]

stupid question but how do you unmount a image in ao486

[wheat folio]

I think you press delete or backspace on it in the menu?

Disclaimer: I’ve not used ao486 in over a year.

[fast kraken]

its back space

or hold A and press B on a pad

or it might be hold B and press A

[thick pendant]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9uWSdkvkvg

[fleet cave]

unrelated but that mister font is killing me

is that using the main I posted a few days ago?

[thick pendant]

ya

same exact behavior with MyMenu

[fast kraken]

is it just a matter of waiting longer? i remember it takes a second or two to mount one when its called from imgmnt

we had to code in a delay before we tried to do anything with the cd

[thick pendant]

perhaps

[fleet cave]

I think he waited long enough there. although there is some stuff that's been in that ide code forever that tries to simulated drive open->empty->drive close->ready

and the only way that can be 'simulated' with cdrom drives is to return proper statuses when they do commands

[fast kraken]

that did look like a plenty long wait yeah

[fleet cave]

so if you don't do 'enough' commands it doesn't transition correctly

[thick pendant]

i can try and wait longer

also if you eject a CD, it keeps playing

[fast kraken]

heh

[fleet cave]

eject from the menu or eject from the OS/app?

[thick pendant]

from the OSD

[fast kraken]

btw Zakk have i mentioned recently how awesome it is to have this stuff in AO486 now? thanks for all you've done

[thick pendant]

you'd think it might possibly crash the app or whatever, but keeping playing normally is a head scratcher

oh, i put in the CD a few minutes ago... should i try now?

I'm using UDVD2.SYS and SHSUCDX.EXE, so maybe that has something to do with it

ok, still nothing... and that was over 5 minutes

[fleet cave]

probably not, but I'll check. I'm on oak+real mscdex but I'll check other drivers

[thick pendant]

can't believe you don't like my font 😛

[fleet cave]

had to pause to read anything!

[thick pendant]

it was at first hard for me to read, but now a year or more later, hardly even notice 🙂

part of the issue is youtube is not done converting the video and its in 360p

[fast kraken]

is that the descent font?

[thick pendant]

I wrote a program a while back to convert TTF fonts to MiSTer. its good at making really unreadable fonts. maybe its one of those. let me check

nope called "MilkyTracker_DX-FUTUR.pf"

@fleet cave Also, I've only tried with a a few disk images, but always the same result.

[fleet cave]

I think it has something to do with how main flags an ide drive as a 'cdrom'. I can only reproduce it if I mount cds into the IDE1-1

well, I didn't try 0-1, but it always worked on 1-0 for me

[thick pendant]

yeah, 1-1 works for me first try with DN and MyMenu

I guess I could post that in the thread

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=77393#p77393

so maybe that help out kathleen too

[fleet cave]

let me figure out why that is tho. be nice if it wasn't weird like that

did this break with the cd audio update or is this more a case of 'no one noticed until now'?

[thick pendant]

I'd bet 'no one noticed until now' 🙂

I do remember real DOS CD-ROM drives would sometimes work (and sometimes not) with connected to secondary with no primary attached...

but in this case, I had a 1-0 mounted

[fleet cave]

core menu: hardware -> ide 1-1 cd hot-swap: yes

I bet it's not set to yes for you

[chilly rain]

oh god i remember this now...

the first hardware fix i had to do in a computer lol, we bought it from a store that didn't connect em up right

can't remember which game it was though

[thick pendant]

I laugh when people are like "ao486 is so unstable and flaky it does X,Y,Z...".

[fleet cave]

they don't remember hating their 386, that's why they say that

[thick pendant]

or their Packard Bell 486sx with M-Wave modem/soundcard

[thick pendant]

Or they are to young to have experienced a 386/486...

[thick pendant]

Anyway, thanks for that. I was either never aware of that setting or I simply forgot it existed. But I should have figured that one out.

[umbral oar]

my first PC was a Pentium MMX with win95 - playing around with ao486 is pretty fun though

[chilly rain]

i never had a 386, jokes on you, it says 486 in the title, so there!

[fleet cave]

I didn’t even remember that hotswap setting existed and had to read code before I was like ‘ohhhh yeah’

[silver hamlet]

486 Core is pure fun, especially with an rtr image with every thing installed. Shame that the core is already so big. Same core with an voodoo card will run some games smoother.

[thick pendant]

I'd think most game that support Voodoo are also going to want a FPU, I don't believe 3DFX voodoo on a 486sx was ever a thing,,,

Voodoo was late 96 and 486sx was late 91

[rough edge]

To be fair the 486SX took a while to penetrate the market

[thick pendant]

I only remember using Voodoo with pentium CPUs

[teal flower]

1080p P96 smooth as butter, all the bells n whistlels running very nicely.... I'll putting midi software through its paces soon and may be looking for beta testers, those with MT32 and outboard gear etc..

Amiga, if you couldn't tell, os minimig core 🙂

A quick question, (I may need top take a poll on FB) do most of you run 16:9 monitors/tvs or are you 4:3 pople?#

As I can make multiple configs iof there's a demand or evenm a need.

[copper slate]

Why does it look so cool

[maiden sigil]

has there been any attempt to port 486ao core to analogue pocket?

[woven lava]

both for me - but 16:9 is more common in my experience

[woven lava]

won't fit... the core barely fits the 110K LE of the DE10

[maiden sigil]

ah

[teal flower]

Because I have both skills, and style 😄

[copper slate]

Amen, brother!

[woven lava]

now if anybody wants to port the Apple II core, there's plenty of room for that!

[burnt timber]

Free Apple IIGS to any dev making a core. Just putting that out there.

[woven lava]

check with Alan if he wants another one

[maiden sigil]

tandy?

[teal flower]

Thanks for the feedback 👍

At some point 4:3 might be an configuration option too, as I've seen others butcher my setupa us if Jason and his Chainsaw came over and had it.

gotta cover all bases

[teal flower]

720 icon work, mostly complete yay 🙂

[thick pendant]

love the Icons

you must be running a lot of workbench hax 🙂

[sleek escarp]

Anyone have any luck with ys 1 and/or 2 on x68k? I converted some dims to d88 and the first time I booted it up it was prefect, but subsequently getting more and more graphical corruption. Hard powering off the mister seems to make no improvement

Googling around it seems like 1 and 2 might have some sever copy protection so wonder if that’s what’s going on

I’m so confused about the different versions of ys on the x68000. There seems to be a version that looks like the original, and then there’s the 1991 remake that takes advantage of what the x68k can do. But the files I have have the remake labeled as Ys 2? No idea what’s going on here

I’m… not sue how this fits in. I’m guessing the one that looks older is the remake that just came out, and the one that looks significantly different is the one that came out in 1991? https://www.dualshockers.com/ys-1-2-port-x68000-2021-falcom-40th-anniversary/

[vestal goblet]

Gorgeous!

[teal flower]

No a ton at all, but a handy few, it makes no odds to chipram really and is stable.

[timid harbor]

I've been trying to get the AO486 core set up so I can play star trek - a final unity ( along with a lot of other dos games), but have been running into some...issues. One of which is when installing it it complains that there is no math coprocessor is there a specific CPU to select that would resolve this or is there a better way to setup the core so this is emulated?

I've install dos 6.22 and the RTC module if that makes any difference

The other issue I've been having are when I try to use the top 300 premade VHD, but I think that's correlated the iso issues that are known about and being worked on currently

[thick pendant]

ao486 has no FPU, so You can try and run a FPU emulator TSR but chances are that the experience is going to be compromised if it works at all.

[thick pendant]

some of the hax like FBlit/FText can reduce chipram usage...

[burnt timber]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE6HJSuvCTw&t=39s

[thick pendant]

My uncle had a NEC-APC3 he used for his business.

He asked me to install a ISA modem card, and I opened it up and I'm like WTF, why are there 2 8086 CPU's and this is not a ISA bus...

[burnt timber]

Interesting, I've never seen one of those

[thick pendant]

I'm like well... guess you'll need to go with external modem...

[void belfry]

I can confirm Star Trek - A final Unity works on ao486. It would need ofc the Q87 FPU emulator and DOS32A. The main executable is just a wrapper, the real main executable that needs to be patched with DOS32a is sttng.ovl

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=6639 - updated my list of working stuff with Q87

[teal flower]

Yes they are active and installed, they do a great job of both speeding up frawing as well as saving chipram

drawing*

[timid harbor]

What is dos 32a?

[hollow fog]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS/32

[tawny egret]

does anyone know was there another dos games list besides the 300 dos games?

[timid harbor]

fascinating, is there a guide for manually adding games to the top 300 vhd and troubleshooting tricks? There's a lot I clearly don't know

[hollow fog]

Unfortunately I never used top 300

I preferred to install the system myself

[timid harbor]

Hmm... been trying to figure out that Q87 FPU emulator, there's a couple of links to it in the misterfpga thread linked above, one of which is in russian and not making much sense when translated. After unpacking the zip my Q87 file is supposed to be 159,137 bytes but my file is nowhere near that large 🤔

[burnt timber]

The trick is finding a version that is cracked/registered and doesnt time out after 30 mins or so

In terms of running it, you just add it to autoexec.bat

[timid harbor]

okay, I wasn't sure how coy I needed to be when discussing that here, lol

[burnt timber]

As long as you dont link to anything thats "shady" you shouldnt get in trouble

[void belfry]

or patch it yourself, those russian instructions reffers to exactly which bytes needs to be changed , you need an packer/unpacker and a hex editor

[burnt timber]

I can whip up a bootable VHD of this if anyone is interested.

[timid harbor]

yes, I'm trying to follow the instructions to edit the file myself. I have a couple different hex editors but the part that is getting me is he's showing two bytes to change at each address, but each address is only one byte

[void belfry]

or that :))

[timid harbor]

well there is that, I'm trying to use this to learn more about dos emulation as a trial by fire sort of thing, lol

[burnt timber]

Works for me. If anyone else expresses interest Ill make it, since you are just learning I wont for now

[timid harbor]

I have my own dos 6.22 setup I did, it's fussing about not seeing my CD-ROM drive after I updated to the latest MiSTer file to fix the iso issues going on

[void belfry]

first you need to unpack the exe. then patch the first 4 bytes from that list. Pack it back (pklite was used iirc) and that's it. (Packing back is optional to reduce size)

[timid harbor]

the Top 300 vhd is equally on the fritz, but one step at a time 🙂

[burnt timber]

At this point I've decided to just create small individual autobooting VHDs for the games I want, since there are maybe about 20 of them total I want to play in 2023. The menus for the multigame VHDs require keyboard generally and the joy2key style solutions are more trouble than they are worth

[timid harbor]

an interesting solution. Do you have to manually mounting them or do you set it up through individual AO486 cores?

[burnt timber]

The VHDs I make just have the OS and the game, and are set with the correct memory manager and Q87 if needed, then autoboot the game from the autoexec.bat file

So I load the game I want in the OSD in the primary slot and reset

Saves a lot of space, the top 300 and year by year images are very large

[timid harbor]

https://tenor.com/view/indeed-tealc-stargate-gif-4496552

[burnt timber]

https://tenor.com/view/logical-flawlessly-logical-spock-star-trek-the-original-series-gif-23575428

[void belfry]

I used top 300 as inspiration, now I am using my own 2 GB (don't need more than that, as I only select what I wanna play). Ofc, my setup can seem messy at first time, but I know each and every game I install what it needs and just boot on that particular scheme:

[timid harbor]

I was considering setting up my computer cores kind of like the arcade. One AO486 named after the game I want to play with all the settings correctly done so it just boots straight into the game

or at least group similar games together (like some edutainment games from back in the day)

[void belfry]

For most games you can go for the max settings (CPU , mem, L1/L2 cache and so on). A very few (don't really remember now) would need to slow the CPU, disable some L1/L2. The best example (admittedly not a game lol) is OS/2 , which needs L1 off

[burnt timber]

Probably good to mention some games dont work well, or stably with any settings

[void belfry]

yeah, most of those needing FPU would not work reliable even with Q87, except FX Fighter and now STTNG

[timid harbor]

when you unpacked the Q87 file did you do it on a modern PC or from within your 486 core?

[burnt timber]

One Must Fall 2097 crashes often. It's impossible to calibrate or use a gamepad/joystick correctly with Sideline. Etc etc

[timid harbor]

oh man I used to love One Must Fall

[void belfry]

all done in pure MSDOS unde ao486. Check DM in a few 🙂

[timid harbor]

thanks 🙂

[burnt timber]

It's an excellent game, really. Probably the best PC fighting game of that time

[void belfry]

any error messages ? for OMF

[burnt timber]

The crashes seem to happen in the regular mode rather than tournament mode mostly. I dont recall the exact error

[void belfry]

like this ?

try replacing dos4gw with dos32a (rename the dos32a, as the OMF doesn't have it embedded and it use it externally)

[burnt timber]

Okay, I will do so. Thank you

[void belfry]

seems to work so far, played (mostly lost lol) few rounds, no issues

[burnt timber]

https://youtu.be/89CE9rLXrfo?si=rizxeRHDp1ssbsTa

This one actually does run on the PC88 core on MiSTer

[sleek escarp]

Isn’t that a pc-98 game?

[burnt timber]

It is not

[sleek escarp]

My bad, my brain conflated that with Rusty for some weird reason

[formal whale]

I just found out that the PC-88 and PC-98 were released only a year apart and co-existed for many years after... 🤯

[timid harbor]

When creating a VHD for Dos, has anyone found a way to partition it in windows other than using the AOMEI program? Something about that just fills me with "We're filling your computer with behind the scenes crap" vibe

I want to say I tried to format it in Dos on the mister, but when I mounted it in windows afterwards I wasn't able to browse it 🤔 and was told I needed to format it

[thick pendant]

You need to create the VHD with "Disk management" format it with fdisk/format on MiSTer, then it will be able to be read with both.

[timid harbor]

I swear I tried that, but my mind is in a fog with this sinus infection, lol

[waxen brook]

"Why the Japanese PC Failed", video by Asianometry:
#share-media message

[modern urchin]

huh i need to figure out how to read the disks for x68k Ys. IIRC it did have copy protection but I don't think I ever learned any details beyond that

[burnt timber]

Are these undumped?

[timid harbor]

I tried to find a 5.25" floppy to USB solution for modern PC, lots of research later, you're a LOT better off finding something working on ebay or going to a retro PC convention (or sending them to someone who has everything already)

I found a couple of devices but they've been "out of stock" for a couple years now so...

and they worked by having og hardware and lots of dip switches to select what type of 5.25 drive you had

[novel sail]

You can just use kryoflux no?

Like $100, usually in stock

Or there’s the open source one, greaseweazle

[timid harbor]

oh neat, the last time I tried to get the kyroflux one it was always out of stock. I guess it's been... huh... 5 years. Well there's a number for me to think about

anyways

with the latest mister unstable core and the 486 test build, is anyone else having the issue where your core doesn't detect the hard drives when you do a reset and apply hard drives? That instead you have to save the config and load the core fresh?

[sleek escarp]

fwiw, the 2021 version of Ys 1 that I converted is the only one that has obvious issues at boot. The 1991 version of Ys 1 and the 2021 version of Ys 2 seem fine at least in the opening. Hard to tell if it's the dump or the core.

[modern urchin]

I have no idea. Still trying to cobble together a floppy-imaging solution for my x68k disks

(the Beep ones are all recent releases, the others are from the previous century AFAIK )

[lunar trellis]

@long tinsel may be able to help, I think he has dumped x68000 before

[granite umbra]

@fleet cave with this commit https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/commit/2d67bfcb88043b0b846f925b333954208bf06594
The cd is not recognized with the driver SHSUCDX 3.07 on DOS

[fleet cave]

works ok here

which ide controller+slot is the drive in?

[granite umbra]

screenshot

If I rollback to last release of mister main it is ok and CD driver is installed correctly

[fleet cave]

is this on initial core load or on 'reset and apply hdd'?

[granite umbra]

initial core load if I reset the vhd is not reconised

[fleet cave]

what cdrom driver are you using?

[granite umbra]

On autoexec.bat I have :
LOADHIGH C:\Drivers\SHCDX307\SHSUCDX.com /D:MSCD000
On config.sys I have:
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:MSCD000

[deft estuary]

same here

(I had latest unstable to test N64)

[timid harbor]

I see the same behavior

[storm maple]

same here with the not recognized on reset and apply, this is with the current stable ao486 and the latest mister unstable

[long tinsel]

I work on a dumping effort. We create flux dumps for archive, and for analysis.

If floppies have protection, the cores or emulators would need to emulate the flux dumps to run protected images.

http://mijet.eludevisibility.org/Preservation/

Or what is done in emulation in xm6 is have smaller images that address the weak bits or raw sectors so that the emulator can respond as a floppy controller would with unformatted sectors or weak bits

[sterile ether]

same here at reset boot failed

[void belfry]

OS/5 (found of it from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaTelXsXNRU) on XT core 🙂 Works fine afaik, I begin to like it lol

[worthy zealot]

I tested the pregab update, and it seems to work 🙂 No crashing of MiSTer Main anymore

[deft estuary]

what update?

[worthy zealot]

from two days ago in unstable builds

[hollow fog]

same here , latest unstable mister main 20230904

[fleet cave]

plz try the main I just posted in test builds

#test-builds message

[hollow fog]

❤️

Works now! thank You

[granite umbra]

Thanks I will test tomorrow 🙂

[burnt timber]

What a nice dev, fixing the things

[timid harbor]

And yet so cruel, releasing it when I won't be home for hours!

[thick pendant]

I've always thought the VB for DOS product (specifically the UI) was pretty neat. Would have been even better if had did M$FT did a 32bit version...

[granite umbra]

@fleet cave The mister on #test-builds fixed both issues on my side. Thank you 🙂

[timid harbor]

The only issue I'm noticing at this point is that .cue files appear to have issues

when I was testing the top 300 games vhd, it could mount the cue file but failed reading it

my isos I mounted worked without issue

[worthy zealot]

wow, that is an impressive OS. Reminds me of the rather new C64OS. Except this looks better, C64OS is still being developed though.

[thick pendant]

its a visual basic for DOS program, not an OS 🙂

[fleet cave]

more details please. like names of a few games that don't work

[timid harbor]

sure, Indiana and the Fate of Atlantis is one

descent works, but it's an ISO, not a .cue

Alone in the Dark is another one that uses a .cue file and it doesn't work

specifically it gives me an "Error: CD Not Found"

it automounts the .cue file to the IDE 1-0 slot but going to the appropriate drive in the dos prompt returns a "General failure reading drive F" message

[hollow fog]

hmm .cue works fine here

[timid harbor]

I have hot swap enabled for ide 1-0 and 1-1

I'm running yesterday's test-build for MiSTER

and the latest AO486 unstable

my autoexec.bat is using shsucdx.com for the cd rom drive with the options /D:IDE-CD /L:F /V /C (The default for Flynn's boot drive)

looks like updating to today's unstable nightly build brings back the issue where swapping hard drives results in no boot drives being detected

[fleet cave]

yeah, those changes aren't merged into main yet

[timid harbor]

ah

I could try using the oakcdrom.sys instead of shsucdx

[fleet cave]

I'm using xcdrom and shsucdx and indiana and the fate of atlantis works for me

[timid harbor]

that is extremely frustrating 🤣

All I've done at this point is download zip of the top 300, extracted it and put it on my mister

[fleet cave]

hmm, let me look at the top 300 cd images ,maybe they are different than what I have

[timid harbor]

There's an AO486 update top 300 pack update script flynn wrote that I'm gonna run as well to make sure I'm not working off some buggy archive version

[fleet cave]

any chance you can post the contents of the indiana jones cue file here?

[timid harbor]

I can try 🙂

actually one oddity, I went to the fodler it should have been in and instead of a .cue file I see a .ba1 file

[fleet cave]

aren't all the cd images in a special 'cd' directory?

[timid harbor]

oh. I clearly wasn't paying enough attention. I was reading that as change directory

but yes the command it executes is CALL imgtry ide10 D "/cd/indy4/atalantis.chd" "/cd/indy4/atlantis.cue"

wait does that mean it's trying to mount a .cue file that it expects to find in my AO486 cd directory?

i.e. a directory outside the actual vhd?

[fleet cave]

yes

all the cd images are in /media/fat/games/ao486/cd

[timid harbor]

https://tenor.com/view/darmok-star-trek-tng-sokath-tamarian-gif-7233115231112332304

and since I have not put ANY of those .cues it mounts, let me check my notes here, nothing and then predictably fails

oh my goodness, I just looked at the zip and noticed how full the CD directory is.

I P.E.B.C.A.K.ed that problem HARD

thanks for setting me straight

[fleet cave]

lol. glad we sorted that bug out!

[timid harbor]

so in an hour I'll be done doing a mass copy, to test it but I have no reason to think it will fail now

Second question I've been wondering the past couple of days, is it possible to have multiple AO486 cores with different configurations?

I tried copying my AO486.rbf file and renaming it, but I've noticed that if I make a change in one of the .rbfs it is also made in the other. Which to me says I don't understand what the rbf file is actually doing here

[fleet cave]

the configs are based on an internal 'core name' in the actual core.

you probably want to use something like mgl files if you want separate configs

https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/advanced/mgl/

specifically, the 'setname' field which makes it save all the config files with that name instead of the internal one

[timid harbor]

thanks

[void belfry]

yeah, as @thick pendant mentioned, it's not a standalone OS, it's a pre-Win 3.11 GUI for DOS made in VB for DOS (quite amazing what you can do with it). Ofc, on ao486 it flies, but it's quite nice to see it running on XT. Seems like a good match 🙂

[worthy zealot]

How is it capable of running on XT when its said to require a 286? Or does it really just require the 512kb of RAM?

[void belfry]

Think it's more of the RAM requirements...

Anyway, XT core has more than enough for it 🙂

[timid harbor]

well I am both relieved and so pissed at myself that the only issue I was having with the ao486 top 300 game pack was I hadn't copied any of the cds into the cd directory 🤦‍♂️🤣

[worthy zealot]

well, technically the C64OS is probably also more of a GUI... not sure. But I would still call it an OS the same way Win 3.11 is called an OS, although I do guess it would have more right to be called an OS since it has so many more features.

[thick pendant]

Windows 3.11 has an API for writing applications. Also Windows 3.11 has 32bit network and disk access...

I don't know about C64OS, but OS/5 seems more like just a app to me

[void belfry]

OS/5 runs on top of DOS 5.0+, so yeah, it is an app. But for sure I could see its appeal on a low x86 PC. It is way more snappy than Windoz 1.x-3.11 for sure. Limited, ofc, as it is. Imho, it for sure could be expanded in a even nicer GUI for DOS systems

Also a nice alternative was back then DR-DOS + ViewMAX 🙂 here the JP version because why not 😛

or GeoWorks, also nicey

I distinctly remember when I got this demo OS on a real floppy 25+smth years ago (downloaded at school as I didn't had modem at home, and ofc had two or 3 copies actually) and being amazed while it booted on my DX/4 😄

[thick pendant]

I remember when PC GeoWorks came out... definitely thought it was cool back then on my 286. I had a "beefy" 286 25mhz with 8MB RAM....

QNX was also pretty neat

that looks like QNX to me

[void belfry]

yeap, it's QNX

the famous 1 floppy OS 😄

[thick pendant]

I think the I-OPENER I bought originally had a locked-down version of QNX on it.

[void belfry]

nicey 🙂

[sudden ice]

Anyone knows why I’m getting this on AO486 core?

Tagging @thick pendant

[thick pendant]

means that it thinks your drive F: is not formatted or something

[sudden ice]

I’m using top 300

0-0 is BOOT-DOS98

[thick pendant]

do you have the secondard drive mounted?

[sudden ice]

0-1 Top 300 DOS

[thick pendant]

and you can read E:?

[sudden ice]

Now I get something else

Hmmm no bacj to that same message

[sudden ice]

How do I do this?

It’s in D

[thick pendant]

type E:

[sudden ice]

Yeah

Now it says E

[thick pendant]

type DIR

[sudden ice]

Yup

I get a list

[thick pendant]

its it has the games directory?

[sudden ice]

It has many things

[thick pendant]

type DIR GAMES

[sudden ice]

Yup they are there

[thick pendant]

what arre you doing when you get this error?

[sudden ice]

Just resetting and apply hdd

I see the hour glass and that

But then shows error message

I guess I need to redownload top 300 pack again

[thick pendant]

I'm not sure... I don't have my MiSTer (or 300 pack) available but I thought E: was for the games and C: was boot and D: was for the CDROM...

It seems like others were reporting a similar issue that the MiSTer bin that Zakk posted above addressed... maybe try that first

"fix for ao486 disks not found on core reset. fix for some (one?) cdrom driver not workin"

probably not it, but worth a shot

[sudden ice]

Yeah I’ll check

Thanks for helping 🙂

[thick pendant]

Seems that F: is CDROM

so maybe that fix will work.

[sudden ice]

Oh ok

Yup worked!

[final zephyr]

Has anyone looked at feasibility of an SGI Indy core?

[umbral oar]

you're thinking because it's a bigger n64 essentially?

but that's probably the problem, the n64 core is going to barely fit with less memory, and a reduced CPU clock speed with data cache to try and make up the difference

[final zephyr]

SGI indy is older than the N64