VOGONS


First post, by Dominus

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As in another thread mentioned I got WfW 3.11 to work with latest Dosbox sources. I got one problem though, if I mount my floppy drive before starting Windows the a:\ drive is not selectable inside of Windows (I can execute stuff on floppy by directly entering the path instead of browsing to the exes).
That's the one curiosity.

The other one is that I try to install an old Windows game I bought ages ago http://www.sdispace.com/inspace.htm. This game won't let the joystick work in XP so I tried Wfw 3.11 (since I bought it when I still used this old Windows).
Unfortunately the installer makes some check on the floppy disc before installing to decide wether to install the full version or just the demo. This check is not passed through Dosbox it seems since it only wants to install the demo and not the full version. In Windows XP it correctly recognizes the original floppy (I do have to make direct copies of the original floppy though since the installer also sets something weird on the floppy to make sure you can't install the full game on another computer - stupid copy protection).

so... is there any future fix for more advance floppy access planned? Or will you be able to mount images as floppy some day?

Note: WFW 3.11 works quite good now. I was able to just play back an old Windows backup with the Norton Desktop already completely setup.

Reply 1 of 8, by Qbix

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floppy acces is indeed puzzling
I tried to figure it out many times.

if you don't have a floppy mounted => it shows a floppy
if you mount it it isn't shown.

you could try to mount a diskimage as floppy.

but it's tricky the detection routines make little sense.

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How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 2 of 8, by Dominus

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At least it is reassuring that it is not just me but also confirmed by the "higher powers" 😀
Imgmount won't let me mount the image (I guess you meant that or does mount also support images?).
Oh well, as always it's not very important and I'll just have to live with it 😀

Reply 3 of 8, by Dominus

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ok, managed to read the readme again and found that imgmount also works like mount with the -t switch. Somehow I remembered it only working for disk images and isos...
Anyway with the mounted image same windows behavior (not "seeing" the floppy) and the setup program will crash.
In the dosbox console some "seek to [number] with type 0 (absolute value [number]) messages pop up. Are you interested in these?

Reply 4 of 8, by Dominus

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Another Update on my worthless Quest to get that damn game running in full glory 😀
I tested some "real" PC Emulators (Bochs and VmWare 5.0) and found them both inferior to Dosbox actually.
Bochs wouldn't run the Windows (that runs on Dosbox) at all. VmWare does but takes longer too boot and its SoundBlaster implementation is lacking and not as good as Dosbox'. Display driver is non existant so, you have to be content with the default vga driver at 16 colors. The only good thing about Dosbox is that its floppy detection works better and of course the hard drive is working better as well but that is to be expected from it. Installing Inner Space worked on this and when I installed from an image of my actual floppy disk it still worked flawlessly and let me install the registered game (and not just the demo version).

On Dosbox I tried botting from a hard drive image but on that one I couldn't run that pre-installed WfW 3.11 at all. Seemed like an expanded memory problem.

My guess why the installation of the game in normal Dosbox fails is either not complete floppy detection or/and hard drive "emulation" as it seems the game wants to write some information to the boot sector of both the floppy and the hard drive.
I taggled almost all weekend with this game and an Hex-Editor but in the end just had to give up. I could find just fine what it wrote to the floppy but could not find where it stored the stuff on my hard drive when I installed it on my actual system. Damn game!

Reply 5 of 8, by Qbix

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well if you want to use a diskimage for wfw3.11 you have to disable both xms and ems in dosbox.conf.
then windows 3.11 should work from an diskimage.

The floppy stuff is indeed odd. Can;t you just mount it as C or so ?

Water flows down the stream
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Reply 6 of 8, by Dominus

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Now I'll be ...
disabling both xms/ems did the trick for the image Windows. On the image Windows the floppy image worked fine without crashing. And the game could make a valid install. Strangely enough...
(I wonder, though, why no "normally" mounted drives stay after the boot, only the imgmounted).

Now just imgmounting this disk image and not booting from it but just starting Windows from it, made the game not valid again. But then I had the distinct feeling that it didn't work too well, giving me not every file on the image, as opposed to when I boot from it.

Reply 7 of 8, by Qbix

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yeah I agree to that as well.
i sometimes experience differences in the disk images when only mounted compared to booted from.

Water flows down the stream
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Reply 8 of 8, by wd

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> I wonder, though, why no "normally" mounted drives stay after the boot, only the imgmounted

Dosbox has only dos-level support for mounted drives, no
low-level support like int13 as you need when an other
dos (msdos on an image) wants to access the drive.

wd