MrKsoft wrote:
-As others have mentioned, adding the max speed option to the speed menu would be useful. Probably just an artifact of the low-powered Atom, but it seems like almost every game has audio stutter if Max is not used.
Yep, I plan to add this and maybe some txt in SetSpeed.bat to encourage people to try it. I hesitate to set MAX by default because I've also seen it cause issues.
MrKsoft wrote:
-Would editing the distro's autoexec.bat be possible? I thought of automounting my external drive on boot, but as far as I can tell the file isn't easily editable without removing the DOM and mounting it on another computer. This could also be useful if people want to set PATH variables.
-Being able to restart Dosbox with different user configurations could be nice (some games really want machine=vgaonly for example)
Well I was trying to avoid this direct editing of the config... the autoexec.bat calls startup.bat. There's almost nothing you can't add to to startup.bat instead... including updating PATH. Have you tested to see if machine type could be changed in realtime, with config command? You might be right that it has to be set in config, I never tested.
MrKsoft wrote:
-I was not a fan of the text-to-speech voice for the distro menus. Can that be toggled on/off?
Well, dndmenu was really just meant to showcase what DOSBox Distro can do, I expected users would want to create their own menu rather than use it longterm. Sure I could add a toggle.
MrKsoft wrote:
-I tried setting this up as I would a normal DOS machine and ran into some issues with the Spectra file manager, namely that the mouse didn't register clicks most of the time. I think this is a Dosbox issue and not the distro, but I can't remember...
I'll see if anyone else reports this, It's possible one of my scripts that switches focus between linux windows and dosbox is interfering. I know EDuke32 drops mouse clicks, not related to anything else, just another quirk of Eduke32.
MrKsoft wrote:
-If Dosbox ECE is possible it would be pretty useful. In particular, the integer scaling option would help make this look better on more monitors. I was testing with a 1280x1024 monitor and obviously everything was a bit unevenly stretched. This would also allow people with better hardware to switch to Nuked OPL3 which sounds a LOT better.
-Also, just to report, the PS/2 keyboard port does work with your distro. I know you said you weren't sure if it would.
In general, a lot of the limitations I ran into are related to the thin client hardware itself and not exactly distro flaws. Dosbox has really outgrown Atom CPUs. I will probably try this out on something a bit beefier like my Intel NUC and see how it goes.
Yeah, I'll see what I can do with ECE. I'm still learning Linux as a I go, I havent compiled anything from source. Everything included so far is either a tinycore extension or I found a pre-compiled binary that worked. My test systems are beefier than a n270. Dell no3d/Wyse 3030 works great if anyone was looking for a stronger thin client. Honestly I'm not too disappointed with the atom's. They seem to do a decent job of handling what a fast 486 would but it's a little sad that they arent much better than a raspberry pi. Thanks for all the feedback.
Check out DOSBox Distro:
https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]
a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.
Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!