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First post, by Van Zan

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Hi,

I was starting to research the idea of using VPC for dos games when I came across this post by DOSFreak:

http://forum.connectix.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php … t=000579#000000

I was hoping to use VPC to get Star Trek JR and Final Unity running better than they run on my XP machine (actually ST:JR has no sound and Final Unity doesnt run at all).

Are these "Real Mode" (???) games that would run in DosBox?

Also is VPC at all effective as a means of playing old Dos games? Umm real noobie question this, but to use DOS as an OS with VPC...where can I get "DOS" as an OS? Is it free to download somewhere or is still commercial?

Thanks! Any help much appreciated!

Last edited by Van Zan on 2003-02-07, 17:16. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 15, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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Originally posted by Van Zan I was hoping to use VPC to get Star Trek JR and Final Unity running better than they run on my XP machine (actually ST:JR has no sound and Final Unity doesnt run at all).

The number of games that run well in VPC (that normally don't run well in 2000/XP) are few and far-between. So if game emulation is your primary planned use, you should probably pass on it...

Are these "Real Mode" (???) games that would run in DosBox?

Nope. Both require a 486 as the bare-minimum. Neither are candidates for DosBox for a good, long while.

Also is VPC at all effective as a means of playing old Dos games

No, not really.

? Umm real noobie question this, but to use DOS as an OS with VPC...where can I get "DOS" as an OS? Is it free to download somewhere or is still commercial?

VPC includes PC-DOS 2000, which is basically an updated version of DOS (not included in the demo). Microsoft's DOS isn't freely available, but probably not hard to find.

I picked up DOS 5 and the DOS 6 (for $1 and $2 respectively) at a local "Half-Price Books" used-books bookstore. You can also get one of the freely available DOS replacements that are being worked on out there. FreeDOS is popular and has added features copied over from "Unix-based" Operating Systems.
http://www.freedos.org/

If you have a CD-writer, you can use their ISO file to create a self-booting FreeDOS CD.

I was able to emulate the Mac version of "Star Trek: 25th Anniversary" pretty easily, so I imagine "Judgement Rites" should work easily as well. The hardest part would be finding the Mac version of JR
showthread.php?threadid=492

Reply 2 of 15, by Van Zan

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Thanks...I had never heard of Mac emulation or Basilisk before.

Maybe FreeDOS would be an easier alternative.

Does it run solely off the CD without the need for installing on my hd and dual booting? And would this run ST:JR and most other old DOS games ok?

Thanks!

Reply 4 of 15, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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Originally posted by Van Zan Does it run solely off the CD without the need for installing on my hd and dual booting?

Even titles that run directly off the CD will need to place at least some kind of startup on your hard drive for the game to work. Not sure how much ST actually places on the hard drive.

And would this run ST:JR and most other old DOS games ok?

I'm assuming you mean FreeDOS. Yes they should work. Just be aware that alternate OS's basic functions will work the same way as DOS, but the command structure will probably be different. IE: You still have the MEM command in FreeDOS, but the parameters are all different form those in DOS.

Note that this also means you can't just use DOS 6 or 7 batch files and expect them to work (you would have to modify them for FreeDOS).

Reply 5 of 15, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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Originally posted by HunterZ ...but that was the floppy version so maybe that's the difference.

The floppy version seems to have a much higher success rate. Results vary on the CD version. Put "Star Trek 25th" in the quick search box for a quick history...

Reply 6 of 15, by Van Zan

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"Originally posted by Van Zan Does it run solely off the CD without the need for installing on my hd and dual booting?"

Errmm no I mean FreeDOS...does it need to be installed onto my hard drive? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick completely......

Reply 7 of 15, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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Originally posted by Van Zan Errmm no I mean FreeDOS...does it need to be installed onto my hard drive?

*heh* Well, there aren't many usable OS's that don't need to be installed to work, so I didn't figure your were referring to FreeDOS. It does have a self-booting function in the ISO, so yes, you can start it without installation. Just don't expect much functionality that way.

If you are not going to install, then you are better off just using a BootDisk from somewhere like www.bootdisk.com. Remember that these will not be able to see NTFS partitions, only FAT or FAT32 partitions.

BTW, I tried GK (Windows version) in Virtual PC. It ran adequately, but the MIDI music wasn't very good.

Reply 8 of 15, by Harekiet

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If you really wanna do it good, you should install some general midi emulation software in your vpc'ed windows.
The standard adlib emulation in vpc is quite horrible. Too bad it doesn't support forwarding of midi data to the host sound system.

Reply 9 of 15, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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Originally posted by Harekiet If you really wanna do it good, you should install some general midi emulation software in your vpc'ed...

True, but I really don't need to run it in VPC, so I'm not too concerned. Besides, the audio performance in VPC is rather poor. Doesn't take much to overwhelm it.

Too bad it doesn't support forwarding of midi data to the host sound system.

That's one nice thing about Bochs. Too bad Bochs is such a massive pain in general.

Reply 10 of 15, by Sandman

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HunterZ wrote:

Strange, I got ST:25th running fine under VDMSound in WinXP, but that was the floppy version so maybe that's the difference.

Yes, the CD version has lots of wav audio with actor dialog and sound effects, whereas the floppy is just midi (I think it's just midi). I have both versions. (Without the actor dialog, I'm not too interested.)

Using VDMSound in WinXP, the midi audio seems to work correctly, but the wav audio is abscent.

I tiried using DOSBox, and both midi and wav played there, but it was choppy, just like in XP's emulator. I couild get the wav to sound a little better by slowing down DOSBox (CTRL-F11), but then the midi and game play slowed down too much.

I tried MoSlo ealy on, but I couldn't even get the game to play using it.

Reply 11 of 15, by Sandman

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After spending about 12 hours, I've finally figured out how to get this game to work with Windows XP.

+ Copy the whole TREKCD dirctory from the CD onto your hard drive.

+ Excute the SETUP.EXE and tell it you have a Soundblaster soundcard (not sure it matter which one -- try SoundblasterPro).

+ Right click on the STARTREK.EXE file, select the Memory tab, set the "Expanded (EMS) Memory" to something 1024 or over.

+ Start up DosBox (I have version 0.63).

+ In DosBox, "mount c c:\" to map to your C Drive (or whatever drive you copied the game onto).

+ Change to the new mapped drive, navigate to the TREKCD folder, and start the game by typing in STARTREK.

+ The sound will probably be skipping. Adjust this by hitting Ctrl-F8 as many times as you need to ("Increase frameskip", whatever that means). This fixes the audio. (YAHOO!) I adjusted it to the setting "10," which appears to be the number it maxes out at. (You see the number in the original DoxBox window.)

As far as I can tell, I'm the first one to post this fix on the Internet. Pretty amazing.

Reply 12 of 15, by DosFreak

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+ Right click on the STARTREK.EXE file, select the Memory tab, set the "Expanded (EMS) Memory" to something 1024 or over.

This has nothing to do with DosBox, only do that if you want to run the game under XP's NTVDM. Totally unecessary for DosBox.

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Make your games work offline

Reply 13 of 15, by gulikoza

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25th anniversary seems to be working pretty well in dosbox for me. 10K cycles, dynamic core, frameskip 1 and even with hq2x and mt32 (game does not support general midi) my cpu usage is about 50%.

Reply 14 of 15, by HunterZ

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gulikoza: Is that the CD or floppy version you're using? Apparently they're totally different beasts. Unfortunately I don't have the CD-ROM version to test with.

Sandman: Frame skipping means that DOSBox will skip drawing that many frames of animation for every frame that it does draw. The higher the frameskip, the choppier the animation. I'm surprised that you find it playable at a setting higher than 1 or 2.

A better option is to tweak the core, cycles, output and other options in the config file.

How fast is your CPU?