RetroOS is pretty good at dynamic switching between emulation and native, you can switch between running games and the sound suspends and resumes properly. RetroOS keeps track of the state of the sound blaster, just like vga and materializes it into plain data and vice versa. Hopping between native vga and emulated vga is how games can display in windowed mode (OSD), same mechanism for audio. So it should all be hot swappable, modulo bugs or oversights.

I fixed Tyrian, it uses a obscure detection path that wasnt properly implemented. The hang is IF=0 caused by non-dpmi spec use of cli/popf, I added "TYRIAN.EXE repair" to loadfix config to indicate that retroos learns how to repair it.

gsos wrote on Yesterday, 05:18:

I fixed Tyrian, it uses a obscure detection path that wasnt properly implemented. The hang is IF=0 caused by non-dpmi spec use of cli/popf, I added "TYRIAN.EXE repair" to loadfix config to indicate that retroos learns how to repair it.

Can confirm the hanging issue when entering a level has been fixed.
Additionally, emulated SB via HDA now works with Tyrian.

The version I tried yesterday still doesn't boot on UniPCemu. The last it logs to E9 and screen is a few CPUID indexes being unsupported. After that I just see 0x20 interrupts from the (A)PIC, probably IRQ0.

I'm not able to get unipcemu running on my side. It just doesn't get into booting bios. I threw an AI at it, it found

It's not able to emulate more 85k instructions per second, so maybe its not hanging but just taking hours to emulate bios post. Due to a call to SDL_GetPowerInfo every APM tick (I dont understand why emulator needs that) which apparently on my macine is really slow. After down clocking the frequency of that call, it reaches 13m instructions per second which is much more reasonable.

The screenshot below is what i see

Has anyone checked the spin-offs of the original DOS Navigator?

So far I've been able to get DOS Navigator OSP 6.4.0 (Real Mode) working.
Can be found here: https://dnosp.su/e_index.php
I'm also able to make this the default in CONFIG.SYS (START directive) to make RetroOS use this on startup.

The older, real-mode version of Necromancer's DOS Navigator (NDN) 2.02 also works.
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20030803191522/ht … ives/ndn202.rar
Original download links on this page seems long dead and you'll need to pass those links to Internet Archive to get them.

No success with newer (DPMI32) versions of NDN at the moment, including the 3.0 builds by Muxe (Archive link, original site dead).
I haven't tested the DPMI version of DNOSP but I'm considering that optional since the real-mode version already worked.

And neither Windows nor OS/2 versions of the DN/2 from DNOSP worked, complaining about "Bad command or file name 'DN.EXE'" when launched.
DN/2 also has a DPMI32 version but I'm afraid it would be the same as the DPMI32 versions of NDN.

I was more interested in the Version 2.10 Beta 2 that, according to what I read here
https://ndn.sourceforge.net/new.htm

can use the MC/NC style menus instead of the hideous DN ones.

+ It's now possible to use included (Dos Navigator-like menu style [ndn.mnu] files) and Norton Commander-like menu style [nc.mnu] files
To use included "ndn.mnu" : insert line - {menufile="ndn.mnu"}
To use included "nc.mnu" : insert line - {ncmenufile="nc.mnu"}

Such files seem not included in the last downloadable version (2.11 beta 8 )

https://ndn.sourceforge.net <---just paste the links in archive.org to get the files

I wasn't able to find the 2.10 beta 2 anywhere,

If someone else has better luck

gsos wrote on Today, 02:50:

I'm not able to get unipcemu running on my side. It just doesn't get into booting bios. I threw an AI at it, it found

It's not able to emulate more 85k instructions per second, so maybe its not hanging but just taking hours to emulate bios post. Due to a call to SDL_GetPowerInfo every APM tick (I dont understand why emulator needs that) which apparently on my macine is really slow. After down clocking the frequency of that call, it reaches 13m instructions per second which is much more reasonable.

The screenshot below is what i see

Those functions are called at a 32kHz timer (Intel 82347) that tries to implement a power supply on the motherboard, with it being implemented as the i430fx/i440fx chip on the PCS (also handling the emulator poweroff (termination) by BIOS APM, which is performed as observed from the APM outputs to it's I/O ports. Not 100% sure what chip is really there though (it's not documented anywhere)).