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First post, by old_pc_f@n

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Have you heard guys about this project by M-HT? -- https://github.com/M-HT/SR It looks like an interesting approach...

Reply 1 of 7, by rkurbatov

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Don't see much use of it tbh. More like 'I can do it' approach.

There is DOSBox exisiting already where you can concentrate your effort on emulation of a particular hardware that is not supported yet and any fix/improvement becomes available for any DOS game you want to run. While recompilation will be required for any new game and any new fix. Like it's amount of effort to create a translation layer similar to DOSBox with all possible hardware multiplied by amount of games you want to recompile. A lot of drawbacks.

And what's the benefit? Native port gives access to the host platform possibilities. What can DOS game use in LInux? What does native ARM code gives to it? Speed or memory are not a problem anymore for ANY DOS game.

486: ECS UM486 VLB, 256kb cache, i486 DX2/66, 8MB RAM, Trident TGUI9440AGi VLB 1MB, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, FDD 3.5, ZIP 100 ATA
PII: Asus P2B, Pentium II 400MHz, 512MB RAM, Trident 9750 AGP 4MB, Voodoo2 SLI, MonsterSound MX300

Reply 2 of 7, by Pierre32

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rkurbatov wrote on 2022-02-10, 23:46:

Don't see much use of it tbh. More like 'I can do it' approach.

I used to play around with these ports on the Pandora handheld. Games like Albion, X-Com and Warcraft were not viable on these systems in DOSBox. M-HT (who is a member here I believe) has been at this for quite a long time - Albion was first released for the GP2X in 2007: https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/albion.37096/

The Pandora also got a static recompile of Starcraft by Notaz: https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/starcraft.73844/

Reply 3 of 7, by M-HT

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@rkurbatov
The original goal was to get Albion running on GP2X where the DOSBox speed is very low.
Since it was successful, I added support for running X-COM 1,2 and Warcraft on GP2X.
Later I ported the games to Pandora which is much faster than GP2X, but the DOSBox speed is still not high.

These games run without problems in DOSBox and with the exception of Albion this project doesn't really add anything extra except some convenience, that's why I'm not releasing any binaries for X-COM 1,2 and Warcraft (the games are supported, so anyone can create the binaries themselves).
With Albion a I added an option to render the 3D parts in higher resolutions, which is something you don't get in DOSBox, that's why the project is useful for Albion even now, with much faster machines.

For the windows games, the situation is similar.
The goal for Septerra Core was to run it on Pandora, which wasn't possible when I started to work on it. And there are also benefits for PCs.

And for Battle Isle 3, the last time I checked (which was a long time ago) there were problems with running the game on Linux using Wine, that's why I added support for the Game. It uses Winelib on Linux, but the problematic things were implemented using Linux libraries.

Reply 4 of 7, by rkurbatov

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That's interesting and I appreciate your efforts. We just prefer different approaches: you bring old stuff to new reality and I (and lot of people here) try to bring some new reality to the old stuff 😀

486: ECS UM486 VLB, 256kb cache, i486 DX2/66, 8MB RAM, Trident TGUI9440AGi VLB 1MB, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, FDD 3.5, ZIP 100 ATA
PII: Asus P2B, Pentium II 400MHz, 512MB RAM, Trident 9750 AGP 4MB, Voodoo2 SLI, MonsterSound MX300

Reply 5 of 7, by old_pc_f@n

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M-HT wrote on 2022-02-11, 10:15:

These games run without problems in DOSBox and with the exception of Albion this project doesn't really add anything extra except some convenience

Yeah, DOSBox is such an awesome project! Is there any difference when it comes to input/video/audio latency between recompiling with SR into native executables and using an emulator?

- Archived article about emulator latency

Reply 6 of 7, by M-HT

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old_pc_f@n wrote on 2022-02-11, 11:26:

Is there any difference when it comes to input/video/audio latency between recompiling with SR into native executables and using an emulator?

I don't think so.

Reply 7 of 7, by old_pc_f@n

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M-HT wrote on 2022-02-12, 10:15:
old_pc_f@n wrote on 2022-02-11, 11:26:

Is there any difference when it comes to input/video/audio latency between recompiling with SR into native executables and using an emulator?

I don't think so.

But shouldn't there be less "layers" in the case of your approach, less things to take care of for the computer, thus allowing a game to run more "directly"? I also do wonder how SR would potentially fare against emulation in terms of performance when used with some late resource-heavy DOS game (for instance, hidden-gem FPS Pył).

Oh, and by the way, your fellow countryman gabonator is also working on bringing DOS games to modern operating systems (and they are experimenting with Mac, iOS, HTML5 support among other things): https://github.com/gabonator/Education/tree/m … 2021/CicoParser