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First post, by JJXB

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I'm trying to configure a Deskpro 386 config for the moment but i'm running into 3 issues:
1. built in VGA bios isn't working at all and i can't track down a generic VGA bios that will work in it's place (in the meantime i'm using a ET4000 bios which is displaying things).
2. i'm trying to confirm the deskpro bioses aren't corrupted (ODD U13 CRC is 791A1C78, EVEN U11 CRC is A9734A87, CRC's taken from 7zip) or wrongly named (i named the odd/even files as listed here). because otherwise trying to get hold of U15 if "U13" here isn't actually U15 has been near impossible.
3. when i try DOS 3.3 of any sort it instantly reboots.

are some of these issues in trying to source either bios roms and/or disk images or is this me being dumb?

also: is there any way to speed up the memory count on booting? I'm primarily setting this up not for my PC in the end but for my vita. but until i can even get this booting and running okay on PC, i can't do anything on vita.

EDIT 1: i've been working on things. turns out i needed an earlier compaq diag disk but the readability of some disks is still questionable at the moment, even with a dos 6.22 boot disk that i know works in Virtualbox and PCem. and trying both ibm and cirrus logic VGA bioses fails. do i need to track down a compaq vga bios?

Reply 1 of 9, by superfury

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JJXB wrote on 2021-10-23, 21:11:
I'm trying to configure a Deskpro 386 config for the moment but i'm running into 3 issues: 1. built in VGA bios isn't working at […]
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I'm trying to configure a Deskpro 386 config for the moment but i'm running into 3 issues:
1. built in VGA bios isn't working at all and i can't track down a generic VGA bios that will work in it's place (in the meantime i'm using a ET4000 bios which is displaying things).
2. i'm trying to confirm the deskpro bioses aren't corrupted (ODD U13 CRC is 791A1C78, EVEN U11 CRC is A9734A87, CRC's taken from 7zip) or wrongly named (i named the odd/even files as listed here). because otherwise trying to get hold of U15 if "U13" here isn't actually U15 has been near impossible.
3. when i try DOS 3.3 of any sort it instantly reboots.

are some of these issues in trying to source either bios roms and/or disk images or is this me being dumb?

also: is there any way to speed up the memory count on booting? I'm primarily setting this up not for my PC in the end but for my vita. but until i can even get this booting and running okay on PC, i can't do anything on vita.

EDIT 1: i've been working on things. turns out i needed an earlier compaq diag disk but the readability of some disks is still questionable at the moment, even with a dos 6.22 boot disk that i know works in Virtualbox and PCem. and trying both ibm and cirrus logic VGA bioses fails. do i need to track down a compaq vga bios?

The IBM VGA BIOS should work combined with the U13/U15 ROMS, named BIOSROM.U13.BIN and BIOSROM.U15.BIN . The respective (S)VGA BIOS(EGA/VGA/ET3000/ET4000/'ET4000/W32') is required for all videocards except the CGA and MDA cards(which are handled by the motherboard BIOS itself).
The U13 ROM contains the text "ATOS" (without quotes).
DOS 3.3 should be working correctly, at least with correctly used BIOS ROMs (and it set to use the BIOSROM.u* and OPTROM.*).

Author of the UniPCemu emulator.
UniPCemu Git repository
UniPCemu for Android, Windows, PSP, Vita and Switch on itch.io

Reply 2 of 9, by JJXB

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are there any good tells for the U15 rom and IBM VGA bios? attached is what the currently set IBM VGA bios displays on boot.

and a bit of feedback on what i have managed to look at with the vita version:
1. no VGA/CGA/MDA/EGA display of any sort even when set to ET4000 (the rom files are in ux:0/Data/superfury/UniPCEmu/Rom as instructed).
2. config saving takes a long time giving the impression that UniPCEmu has locked up (3.65 Enso on a Vita 2000 with an SD2Vita and fast samsung 128gb SD card) making it a pain to try and configure and test if i can even boot anything on there. it even takes a long while to init the actual config on startup sometimes.
3. Checking the log file after launching says it failed to capture sound (Unable to open audio record device: no capture support) so i'm unsure if that's causing a lack of sound
4. memorylimit.txt isn't applying when i tell it to rescan available memory (file in ux:0/Data/superfury/UniPCEmu).

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Reply 3 of 9, by superfury

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JJXB wrote on 2021-10-25, 12:38:
are there any good tells for the U15 rom and IBM VGA bios? attached is what the currently set IBM VGA bios displays on boot. […]
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are there any good tells for the U15 rom and IBM VGA bios? attached is what the currently set IBM VGA bios displays on boot.

and a bit of feedback on what i have managed to look at with the vita version:
1. no VGA/CGA/MDA/EGA display of any sort even when set to ET4000 (the rom files are in ux:0/Data/superfury/UniPCEmu/Rom as instructed).
2. config saving takes a long time giving the impression that UniPCEmu has locked up (3.65 Enso on a Vita 2000 with an SD2Vita and fast samsung 128gb SD card) making it a pain to try and configure and test if i can even boot anything on there. it even takes a long while to init the actual config on startup sometimes.
3. Checking the log file after launching says it failed to capture sound (Unable to open audio record device: no capture support) so i'm unsure if that's causing a lack of sound
4. memorylimit.txt isn't applying when i tell it to rescan available memory (file in ux:0/Data/superfury/UniPCEmu).

The ROMs are supposed to be at "ux0:/data/Superfury/UniPCemu/ROM" . I don't know if the Vita paths are case-sensitive like Android/Linux, so you can try that. If anything goes wrong when loading (for motherboard BIOS ROMs), it's logged in the logs directory within the file "emu.log".
The VGA ROM is "VGAROM.BIN" within said folder.

Author of the UniPCemu emulator.
UniPCemu Git repository
UniPCemu for Android, Windows, PSP, Vita and Switch on itch.io

Reply 4 of 9, by JJXB

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i did put it in the uppercase ROM folder on the vita but i accidentally left it in lowercase in the post.

and i know what the filenames are meant to be, i've been going over the wiki just to try and make sure i'm not screwing it up. but the issue is that my ibm vga rom (named as VGAROM.BIN) in the windows version of UniPCEmu is showing what was in the screenshot. am i using an invalid vga rom despite sourcing multiple sources for the ibm vga rom? and the same question with my u15 rom. is there any reliable checksums for the vga and u15 roms or something i can compare against to make sure my roms aren't the issue?

The issues with the vita version have been config save/load times, lack of text display and memorylimit.txt not applying. but the lack of text display may be related to the vga rom issue i'm having? once i can get the ibm vga rom sorted at least i might be able to test if that fixes the vita side afterwards.

Reply 5 of 9, by superfury

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JJXB wrote on 2021-10-25, 19:19:

i did put it in the uppercase ROM folder on the vita but i accidentally left it in lowercase in the post.

and i know what the filenames are meant to be, i've been going over the wiki just to try and make sure i'm not screwing it up. but the issue is that my ibm vga rom (named as VGAROM.BIN) in the windows version of UniPCEmu is showing what was in the screenshot. am i using an invalid vga rom despite sourcing multiple sources for the ibm vga rom? and the same question with my u15 rom. is there any reliable checksums for the vga and u15 roms or something i can compare against to make sure my roms aren't the issue?

The issues with the vita version have been config save/load times, lack of text display and memorylimit.txt not applying. but the lack of text display may be related to the vga rom issue i'm having? once i can get the ibm vga rom sorted at least i might be able to test if that fixes the vita side afterwards.

Hmmm... It seems like only the EGA and VGA are affected by that issue. All other video cards seem to POST properly (including the Tseng video cards)...
Edit: Identified an issue: are you using the VGA ROM from minuszerodegrees.net? That one has a 8KB zero fill at the start that needs to be removed for it to POST(that's noted in it's comments).

Author of the UniPCemu emulator.
UniPCemu Git repository
UniPCemu for Android, Windows, PSP, Vita and Switch on itch.io

Reply 6 of 9, by JJXB

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yeah, looks like you were right about the vga bios since i'm now getting text with the vga bios (stupid me for missing that note). still running a bit slow (Ryzen 9 3900X) but somehow trying to set things up has got a lot further. now i'm at the point where fdisk is telling me there's no fixed disks present despite having XTIDE configured to see my HDD's. is this a compaq setup issue?

Reply 7 of 9, by superfury

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JJXB wrote on 2021-10-27, 12:39:

yeah, looks like you were right about the vga bios since i'm now getting text with the vga bios (stupid me for missing that note). still running a bit slow (Ryzen 9 3900X) but somehow trying to set things up has got a lot further. now i'm at the point where fdisk is telling me there's no fixed disks present despite having XTIDE configured to see my HDD's. is this a compaq setup issue?

You'll need to setup the Compaq BIOS (for example using gsetup) to not use any hard drives.
Then, boot from a MS-DOS floppy disk with the XT-IDE files on it and flash the 386 XT-IDE BIOS after auto-configuring it(that's explained in the XT-IDE section at the manual: https://bitbucket.org/superfury/unipcemu/wiki/Disk%20images XT-IDE Universal BIOS Configurator part).

Last edited by superfury on 2021-10-29, 13:41. Edited 1 time in total.

Author of the UniPCemu emulator.
UniPCemu Git repository
UniPCemu for Android, Windows, PSP, Vita and Switch on itch.io

Reply 8 of 9, by JJXB

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well, while i did follow your tutorials before even posting this thread, only now does the XTIDE stuff want to work. and fdisk is even seeing the HDD images.

now, how do i stop it from being so slow on both my PC and vita? i'm guessing that the vita's hardware is going to be limited in capability but a ryzen 9 3900X shouldn't be going so slow (highest speed i can get is 72% on a 386 with my ryzen at 1000 cycles, on default it runs at 16%). i'm going to try reducing the emulated cpu's though

Reply 9 of 9, by superfury

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Well, like mentioned in the other threads, currenty the two most heavy processes are the CPU emulation(~40%) and video card(~20%) at 3MIPS speed(default). Those are mostly the cause of it not being able to reach full speed (mostly the pixels pushed per second with accurate timing and the CPU memory reads for prefetching(~9% as far as I remember), and a bit of the paging unit (~4% when used by software. It's at O(1) speed in the latest commits)). I already optimized them quite a lot(aligned reads should be relatively fast), but it's difficult without affecting accuracy(like to not bug out or crash on unaligned addresses).

Edit: Just added the information about the removal of the motherboard BIOS hard drives from the Compaq BIOS when using the XT-IDE BIOS ROM to the XT-IDE documentation.

Author of the UniPCemu emulator.
UniPCemu Git repository
UniPCemu for Android, Windows, PSP, Vita and Switch on itch.io