Good info, I loved that game. Maybe try using the Setspeed.bat from command line and increasing cpu cycles a bit? My 38000 default might have been a tad conservative.

That did the trick! I tried using setspeed to bump up cpu cycles but didn't notice any differences. However I did a: config -set "cpu cycles=max" and it is a night and day difference. No issues at all with setting everything to max and the cut scenes play just fine.

Good to hear! I was trying to find a fixed count that was similar to "max". I'll probably leave the default at 38000, but add MAX as an option to SetSpeed.bat.

Ugggg... I just checked tracking and it says mine was delivered on Tuesday... but I don't have it. I wonder what the driver did with it. I'll have to look around when I get home. Hope somebody didn't steal it.

cyclone3d wrote:

Ugggg... I just checked tracking and it says mine was delivered on Tuesday... but I don't have it. I wonder what the driver did with it. I'll have to look around when I get home. Hope somebody didn't steal it.

That sucks, you were the 1st to respond too. If it was stolen, I'd be amused to see that unboxing. Maybe the Thief will develop an appreciation for retrogaming. Lets give it a few days, see what happens. I might be able to scrounge up another one.

BinaryDemon wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

Ugggg... I just checked tracking and it says mine was delivered on Tuesday... but I don't have it. I wonder what the driver did with it. I'll have to look around when I get home. Hope somebody didn't steal it.

That sucks, you were the 1st to respond too. If it was stolen, I'd be amused to see that unboxing. Maybe the Thief will develop an appreciation for retrogaming. Lets give it a few days, see what happens. I might be able to scrounge up another one.

Called my wife and had her look around. The driver stuck it in a not normal place and she found it. Yay! I might have time to hook it up this evening or tomorrow.

I know I'm late to the game but I would be interested in participating! Is the DOSbox included based on the official version or one of the community modifications?

Rhuwyn, you got the last one. It’s running stardard DOSbox 0.74. Though based on feedback here, I’ll see if I can get Linux version of DOSBox ECE running.

BinaryDemon wrote:

Good info, I loved that game. Maybe try using the Setspeed.bat from command line and increasing cpu cycles a bit? My 38000 default might have been a tad conservative.

Strangely (although they warn this can happen), leaving it at the default meant the Future Crew demo "Panic" was a stuttering, super-slow mess. Setting it to emulate a 386-33 suddenly made it start running just perfectly (at least it's started looking that way). Came back to this room to get my headphones to listen while it plays. I decided to try the emulated 386 when I set it for the maximum speed option and it got even worse.

I’m confused is 386-33 and option in a Panic? Maybe try max cycles too?

Unrelated, if anyone puts Win3.1 on theirs I’d be interested to hear how usable it is.

Got a chance to try things out. This is off to a great start!

-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.
-Mounting an external USB hard drive for additional storage was pretty painless, but I think another useful addition would be a helper for mounting CD-ROM images. I made an "iso" folder on my external outside of the mounted DOS directory I created, and I can use imgmount to mount those images via /mnt/sdb2/iso/IMAGE.ISO for instance, but I have to remember exactly what the file name was, whether it's a BIN/CUE or ISO, etc. If you could view what was in some kind of ISOs directory, it would be helpful.
-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)
-I was not a fan of the text-to-speech voice for the distro menus. Can that be toggled on/off?
-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...
-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.

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.

BinaryDemon wrote:

I’m confused is 386-33 and option in a Panic? Maybe try max cycles too?

If I use the DOSBox default speed setting (setspeed /? reports that I'm running at the default 38000 cycles) it takes nearly 17 seconds for the "F" of "Future Crew" at the very start to leave the screen; with setspeed at 7800 cycles it's about 4.5 seconds and the sound is a lot better. At 77000 cycles (theoretical P100, option 7 in setspeed) it takes 25 seconds for that F to leave the screen.

Odd I wonder if that means 38000 cycles is too much. ( I mean more than the atom can handle ). I'll test some custom values with Future Crew, if I get a chance and determine the optimal speed. The problem is it probably varies from program to program.

I'm actually working on optimizing some of the DOSBOX code. I am working with 0.74-2.

Still in the mapping out the files to see where I want to start at. I did the same thing years ago and then lost the code because all I got from people was "why aren't you releasing a complied binary" instead of them swapping out the files and compiling themselves.

Anyway, this should help quite a bit, especially on lower power systems. Last time I did this I only optimized a few files and was able to use about 20% less CPU cycles to get the same performance in DOSBOX.

I'll have to take a look at the code for this distro to see if it is going to be as simple as swapping out some of the source files or if there is going to be more involved since it is running on Linux.

Planning on trying to get my thin client set up tonight but still have some other work to do before I have room.

cyclone3d wrote:

I'm actually working on optimizing some of the DOSBOX code. I am working with 0.74-2. […]
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I'm actually working on optimizing some of the DOSBOX code. I am working with 0.74-2.

Still in the mapping out the files to see where I want to start at. I did the same thing years ago and then lost the code because all I got from people was "why aren't you releasing a complied binary" instead of them swapping out the files and compiling themselves.

Anyway, this should help quite a bit, especially on lower power systems. Last time I did this I only optimized a few files and was able to use about 20% less CPU cycles to get the same performance in DOSBOX.

I'll have to take a look at the code for this distro to see if it is going to be as simple as swapping out some of the source files or if there is going to be more involved since it is running on Linux.

Planning on trying to get my thin client set up tonight but still have some other work to do before I have room.

I'm just using the community provided tinycore extenstion. Do you know if there is any improvement standard 0.74 vs DOSBox ECE?, since there seems to be a lot of push to use that instead.

0.74 is quite out of date. Use 0.74-2 or a newish SVN instead, or go with ECE if you like YP's patch choice.

You could wrap it into your own extension. I haven't built packages with Tinycore (I have with other embedded platforms), but I suspect it's not terribly difficult.
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=18682.0

Got my hardware in today! It has been unboxed but I have yet to play around with it yet. Looking forward to seeing what can be done with this. So far it looks amazing! I will report back after I finish some other retro projects.

So, Ive finally gotten over the flu and got my unit plugged in and turned on.

I want to preface this by saying the following. I hate dealing with software. And I know fuckall about linux. I also don't use dosbox often. So that will color my experience greatly.

The thin client hardware is really neat! I've never had a system quite like this, and it is a nice little box.

Initial impression, good. But any usb hard drives, cd drives, floppies I had did not appear as an option under the "mount" command. So that kneecapped me and I stopped for now.

BinaryDemon wrote:

Odd I wonder if that means 38000 cycles is too much. ( I mean more than the atom can handle ). I'll test some custom values with Future Crew, if I get a chance and determine the optimal speed. The problem is it probably varies from program to program.

Granted, Panic and the other FC demos are particularly hard to run on emulators, but I did notice on other FC demos that going very high was a recipe for disaster. Running Panic too LOW, I got an "Out of CPU time" message from Panic (tried option 1 in setspeed).