Life's been heck lately outside of retro-technology.....working third shift, still getting my hours right going back to day shift....so my sleeping patterns are screwed....leading me to late night/early morning experiments, last nights experiments....after a 30 minute round trip drive to fix a printer (on call)....HX DOS Extender! And I feel I am now starting to get the hang of it. I'm using version 2.17. The computer - 486DX4 laptop - aka NEC Versa M/75. Maybe this will be an informative post..
For Win32 I've picked a handful of apps to mess with: Civilization II that just happened to already be on the hard disk, I put very old copies of Exult and Scummvm on there, and the Postal demo. I also have Post Apocalyptic Petra and Quake to mess with as well - and a gaggle of Win16 apps.
Let's start with Win16 since that's the one I'm struggling with the most. Still have not been able to get around the NE stub app problem of it saying "This program requires Microsoft Windows" when running those with dpmild16....however i may be able to run Windows 3.1 in standard mode on FreeDOS and use the modified DOSX that came with...so if too much trouble, maybe I'll use that. So yeah, not much movement there. Tried MS Arcade Pack apps, a bunch of random downloaded 3.1x games like Debris and so on.
Now DPMILD32 though - man, were making waves.
The first problem was getting the right Windows resources. I'm just running these dpmis from c:\fdos\bin directly - just makes things easier and saves me an environment variable. I started by copying a bunch of files (several msvcrt.dll type files, mssi.dll or something like that, Kernel32, and a bunch of others), then when those were having trouble working, I downloaded others. Only to give up and download HX 2.17 from Sourceforge via Links (which was upgraded to 2.26 this week as well) and use that as it came with special versions of the needed files - only then did we start getting somewhere.
The next issue was getting the programs to work, doing more reading of text files found me figuring out I needed to setup UniVBE - which I have version 6 of. Okay, no prob, already have that on tap. Brought up UniVBE.....
Now here's the fun thing about using a early-mid 90's PC with an Active Matrix 800x600 screen only capable of 4096 maximum colors - getting UniVBE to play ball with said LCD. So now started the somewhat unnerving process of seeing your LCD panel fire up, work, then turn stark white like someone poured milk between the LCD layers.....CIV 2 was trying to start, Exult was trying, and I think Scummvm was working but just forcing the poor thing to display outside it's limits of color depth. Same thing with Quake. Petra worked somewhat, with what I could only describe as being my versa M/75 trying to emulate a VR headset with 2 simultaneous instances of the same screen on each side, with a "nuclear puke" color palette. I then figured out that most of these were actually dumping me back the DOS prompt as I could faintly see the directory behind the milk pour of white pixels gone overdrive - my DOS prompt with the path, especially if I messed with mode co40 and mode co80 a few times or CLS.
So then of course - my logic took over - there must be some kind of *.cfg/*.ini/*.con file I can edit that tells this thing what to do. I can't think that something that has a GUI helper would not have some kind of configuration - and sure enough, I found it - HXGUIHLP.INI - popped that puppy open in edit....and after some tweaking of settings, Mr. 65545 stopped dumping milk in my screen for changing from a VESA graphics mode back to 80x25 column text. Turns out the setting was save=1 - changed it to save=0 and that worked.
So where were at now with each application?
CIV2 - starts up, loads the HX GUI, then dumps me back out, no errors
Exult - same as Civ2
ScummVM - Actually loads, still does the milky thing IIRC, I think this one is just throwing up too high a color depth so it might bet worth plugging into an external monitor to see what's going on as it appears to be working.
Quake - same as Exult and Civ2
Petra - still Nuclear Puke
Postal - now this one looks really promising. Postal loads up into the HX GUI but it seems the command line is popping up behind it to whine that there's no audio device.
Other games/software I want to get going under DOS: Sim Tower, Diablo, Beachhead2000, Microsoft Golf 3.0....and I'm determined to get Exult working because Ultima VII and Serpent's Isle do not work in FreeDOS - Jemmx, Himemx, and EMM386 all wreak havoc on both the memory count reported by freecom.c and probably the Voodoo DPMI that Origin Systems used. Which brings me to another crazy experiment I plan to try.....
Since these are WINDOWS apps, and the M/75 has a Windows Sound System chip on it......Im getting a few ideas. It could possibly be possible to get Windows Sound System working under DOS using HX - or at least, the SoundBlaster emulation part of it. See, Windows 3.1x uses Windows Sound System software in conjunction with EMM386.EXE to trap the ports and WSSXLAT.EXE to translate to SoundBlaster for the software - and Windows 9x has this kind of functionality baked into it for these cards - so now I'm thinking, if I can be using mscvrt.dll and kernel32.dll withHX and getting Postal to darn near run, what's stopping me from getting WSS SB Emulation running in DOS - and furthermore - if Exult or Scummvm work (if I can get the resolutions right) - it may even be possible to virtualize MiDi using something like timidity. Just some thoughts.
Granted, I'll probably hit some roadblock that will make all this impossible, but the fun is learning that the hard way for me.