Haha, SBEMU has us digging them out hey? Force a wide laptop display to 4:3? (Asus Eee PC 701)

Fingers crossed for some solutions 😀

Did any netbooks come with non widescreen ratios?

Pierre32 wrote on 2023-03-11, 10:39:

Haha, SBEMU has us digging them out hey? Force a wide laptop display to 4:3? (Asus Eee PC 701)

Fingers crossed for some solutions 😀

Lol, similar topics started within minutes, what are the chances 😀 Yep, lets hope someone will figure something out, I think I can live without hardware volume adjustment, but correct / semi-correct aspect ratio would be nice.

kolderman wrote on 2023-03-11, 10:40:

Did any netbooks come with non widescreen ratios?

The netbooks I'm talking about, the ones that started with EEE 701, were all widescreen 800x480 / 1024x600 (afaik).

Well it's not going to solve everything, you'll still have to put up with all the same issues you'll usually have to deal with on physical hardware and real DOS.
The most obvious are:
CpuSpd - A Hardware Based CPU Speed Control Utility for DOS/Win9X Retro Gaming
DOS/32 https://sourceforge.net/projects/dos32a/
VESA drivers
Broken VESA support NVIDIA Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal VESA Bios Bug (workaround found)
NOLFBLIM (updated NOLFB) - Enables VSYNC for DOS Games
Memory management, multiple configs based on what you want to do
Memory restriction
Oproms eating up memory so will need to disable hardware or exclude ranges
May need to add or remove hardware as needed to support whatever game
File transfer via network:
https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/
https://github.com/danmons/retronas
USB drivers https://bretjohnson.us/
etc

/EDIT fixed wrong link

sledge wrote on 2023-03-11, 10:46:

kolderman wrote on 2023-03-11, 10:40:

Did any netbooks come with non widescreen ratios?

The netbooks I'm talking about, the ones that started with EEE 701, were all widescreen 800x480 / 1024x600 (afaik).

Later there were 1366x768 ones as well. I have two Toshiba netbooks (NB520 and NB550D) that were originally 1024x600 but I upgraded them both with 1366x768 panels when 1024x600 became impractical due to "modern" UI in Windows 8 and 10.

Interestingly, NB550D (but not NB520) works fine with as much as 8 GB RAM. Weren't netbooks supposed to support no more than 2 GB RAM, per Microsoft's licensing aggreements? 😀

Is there any USB gamepad/joystick which works in DOS like Gravis gamepad?

sangokushi wrote on 2023-03-11, 13:50:

Is there any USB gamepad/joystick which works in DOS like Gravis gamepad?

The first thing to worry is your USB device support in DOS. There are no drivers for controller in DOS, games accessed joysticks and gamepads directly which is not the way modern USB stuff works.

Afaik there are drivers like this which might work with certain controllers, but I wouldn't hold my hopes too high:
https://bretjohnson.us/

Many atom netbooks use P4 chipsets or close cousins so checking for workarounds and utils to deal with P4 hardware may be helpful.

What I found with using netbooks for DOSbox a lot a couple of years back (Mainly for ultra portability when I was out of town kicking my heels somewhere) was that they gave me a crick in the neck from crouching down and peering into the small screen for longer than half an hour. I then began to bring a small keyboard with me and stand the netbook on something at face height. However, that will require USB keyboard support for native DOS.

Further experimenting with stuff - I'm struggling to find a suitable MOD player:

1) Cubic Player / Open Cubic Player - music plays, but screen is jumping up&down in all graphics modes
2) XTC Play - no sound card detected
3) MOD Master v2.3 - MODs plays ok, but support fot other formats (S3M, XM) is lacking
4) MOD Master XT - no stereo (when stereo is set frequency drops to 0), but otherwise best of the bunch
5) EDIT: ModPlay - sound card detected, but no sound

Are there any other choices?

I always used to use this one, but haven't tested it for timing issues on much faster CPUs https://awe.com/mark/dev/modplay.html

addendum to previous comment. Via Epia etc netbooks are more likely in the Pentium III chipset realm.

Thanks for the tip, unfortunately ModPlay doesn't work either, sound card is detected, but playback is silent. Guess I'll stick with Cubic Player, after all, screen jumping can be considered as advanced visualisation effect 😀)

I have a Asus Eee PC1005AH and a similar Acer.... however no hdd in them momentarily ... (may try this over SDcard). Btw the best dos laptop/netbook I had was the 300mhz japaneze Lifebook B142.. (R.I.P subnotebook 🙁 ... so sad.)

I may dig out my Acer Aspire One for this.

Ooooh.... Now I'm interested in this for some reason. I'm going to have to keep my eyes out for an eeepc 701 or 702 with the 480p screen. That sounds interesting.

I have been away from the community for a while and totally missed SBEMU. Sounds awesome! I have a couple of machines that would would be helped with this. For instance I have a Compaq laptop (can't remember the model ATM) with the AMD k6-2+ in it but no dos sound driver. Perfect match perhaps?

It only appeared like last week but created a lot of enthusiasm. Unlocks a lot of systems for DOS audio.