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Disable Disk Cache for enhanced realism

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First post, by RodCastler

Posted on 2018-10-30, 12:56

RodCastler Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 1
Joined: 2018-10-30, 12:49

I hooked up an old AT hard drive to my PC via a USB dongle in the hopes of being able to hear the seek sounds of the drive while in Dosbox.

Since Dosbox caches the drive on startup, whenever I induce disk activity there is little to none interaction with the drive, hence no sounds coming from it (unless of course I copy files from one partition to another), but not when loading games or windows 3.1 for instance.

Is there any way to disable disk cache in order to emulate the real experience with the HDD?

Thank you

Reply 1 of 2, by leileilol

Posted on 2018-10-30, 13:25

leileilol Offline

Rank l33t++

Rank: l33t++
Posts: 11774
Joined: 2006-12-16, 18:03

All I can think of is having a hard drive image (With a FAT16 partition - important for more noise!) ON that drive and booting MS-DOS 6.x from it

Reply 2 of 2, by DosFreak

Posted on 2018-10-30, 13:29

DosFreak Offline

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Rank: l33t++
Posts: 12964
Joined: 2002-06-30, 16:35
Location: Milliways

What you want can't be done unless you figure out how to tell the OS not to cache.

IIRC, In Windows on the drive itself in devmgr.msc you can disable write cache but for read you'll have to use a utility to empty the file cache.

I think leileilol is working on something like that for pcem for the emulated hardware.

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