VOGONS


First post, by thedoctor45

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I have read somewhere that it is possible to make dosbox correctly recognize large drive images that use more than 512 MB of disk space.

This is my experience with disk images so far:

DOSBox is incorrectly reporting the size of the disk, that may be due to either a DOSBox bug or a problem with MS-DOS. I don't know exactly which one, but I've found that hard disk images with a size of over 512 MB (or a cylinder count of over 1000) tend to be problematic. They'll work, but you'll only be able to use a portion.

Im trying to install Win98 atm but am unable to properly use an image with more than 1000 cylinders.

Does anyone know how to bypass that problem?

Reply 1 of 14, by robertmo

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get hal's build and use its imgmake

Reply 3 of 14, by thedoctor45

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you're talking about Megabuild 5?

That one won't compile on OSX out of the box.

Would Bochs bximage work too?

I was using a 0.73 build for formatting the images - you mean 0.74 will not have difficulties?

Reply 4 of 14, by thedoctor45

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I'm using 0.74 now but no matter what I try fdisk reports my 2 GB disk as 388 MB.

fdisk.png

Are there any other optons for creating a new partition?

Reply 5 of 14, by robertmo

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they are already formated

Reply 6 of 14, by h-a-l-9000

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And use the bat file that is created along with the image or the parameters therein to mount it.

1+1=10

Reply 7 of 14, by Dominus

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try a virtualizer (vmware or virtualbox) and run Windows inside that, then use h-a-l's MB 😀

@Dosfreak, I'm pretty sure that it is about the 3dfx chip emulation thread 😀

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Reply 8 of 14, by thedoctor45

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Dominus wrote:

try a virtualizer (vmware or virtualbox) and run Windows inside that, then use h-a-l's MB 😀

@Dosfreak, I'm pretty sure that it is about the 3dfx chip emulation thread 😀

Well I am using Parallels and VMWare, but DOSBox boots the OS faster and the fact that DOSBox can easily be wrapped inside of an app bunde allows me to make it standalone.

VMWare and Parallels are huge apps that take longer to start and are not that simple to execute - All I want is a quickly accessible Win9x environment. That's about the only reason why I'm fiddling with this.

The Voodoo emulation is nice and kinda works but doesn't deliver a playable performance on my setup atm - not in pure DOS and certainly not in any Win9x environment.

Reply 9 of 14, by Dominus

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You misunderstood me, use the virtualizer only for accessing hal's megabuild to use the Imgmake function and setting the image up and then use the image in the actual version 😉

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
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DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper

Reply 10 of 14, by thedoctor45

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oops, my bad 😜

PS: Anyway, it worked and I now have a Win98 guest booting through DOSBox on OSX but it´s not stable - as soon as I try to access the C Drive with explorer.exe it crashes and I have to quit the app.

Is this a common problem or related to the OSX build?
If anyone here is as crazy as me and has gotten a Win98 installation properly working in DOSBox tell me how you did it 🤣...

Reply 11 of 14, by thedoctor45

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I did some comparisons between the 0.74 OSX build and the 0.74 win32 build and it seems that the Windows build runs Win98 far more stable than the OSX version.

Reply 12 of 14, by ppgrainbow

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thedoctor45, official releases of DOSBox do not support hard disk images larger than 512 MB (504 MB actual, due to the 1,024 cylinder count limit). H-A-L-9000's IMGMAKE utility has support for hard disks of up to 2 GB. Hard disk images created with IMGMAKE and between 504 MB to 2 GB can be read under DOSBox 0.74, but cannot be recreated with FDISK.

You can recompile DOSBox and include a fix that can eliminate the 512 MB hard disk limit, but it will require quite a bit of work. 😀

Furthermore, Windows 95 and Windows 98 were never made to be 100% stable under DOSBox and because developers do not wish to spend the resources fixing the bugs in one of these two operating systems.

Reply 13 of 14, by OSH

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Images up to 2gb are detected by DOSBox 0.74 just fine.

And what with larger images? They aren't detected? I've made 4,5 GB image, and DOSBOX recognizes it, but only partially. It is visible, but I can't copy anything on it.

Reply 14 of 14, by h-a-l-9000

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fseek supports only 2GB

1+1=10