VOGONS


First post, by Elia1995

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Hello, I installed OS/2 on the Pentium 2 build, but it seems that only few DOS games are working properly, most of them are crashing with a DosRaiseException error, of which I can't find any info online.

Now, for those who know OS/2, executables come with a lot of properties that I can change in order to make them run DOS differently, but I can't find anything online on which settings I should alter for Duke Nukem 2, Shadow Warrior, Bio Menace and a lot other games, to not make them crash anymore!

Ironically, Windows 3.11 games seem to be working just fine, I even got full 256 colors support and sound working, it's only DOS games that are giving me so many tribulations...

I just noticed that for some reason, DOS games' setups aren't saving the changes I make on them, but when I inspect the folders, they're not read only 🤔

I'm a super noob at OS/2, but I like it and wanted to try it

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 1 of 15, by Disruptor

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Elia1995 wrote on 2022-05-18, 08:24:

Ironically, Windows 3.11 games seem to be working just fine, I even got full 256 colors support and sound working, it's only DOS games that are giving me so many tribulations...

This is because OS/2 has a very good Win16 integration, called Win-OS/2.

Reply 2 of 15, by Elia1995

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Disruptor wrote on 2022-05-18, 08:58:
Elia1995 wrote on 2022-05-18, 08:24:

Ironically, Windows 3.11 games seem to be working just fine, I even got full 256 colors support and sound working, it's only DOS games that are giving me so many tribulations...

This is because OS/2 has a very good Win16 integration, called Win-OS/2.

That's awesome, so if I can't get the DOS games fixed, I can use it exclusively for Win 3.11 applications!
I have no knowledge of actual OS/2 games or apps

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 4 of 15, by Elia1995

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I'm using a Creative Labs 3D Blaster 3DFX Voodoo Banshee 16MB AGP GPU

I couldn't find any drivers specific for OS/2 or anything below Windows 95, so I went with Generic VGA and everything worked fine, including higher resolutions and colors under Win 3.11 games

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 6 of 15, by JSO

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With a compatible (supported from OS/2 with drivers) SVGA card and sound card OS/2 is awesome! Better than DOS!

I've tested OS/2 Warp 4 on my i486Dx2 build with S3 Vision 968 VLB and SB AWE64 GOLD and it was a great experience.

You can try the 4.52 version with patches and the proper drivers or ArcaOS, the modern OS/2.

DOS IS THE POWER OF OUR CHILDHOOD MEMORIES!

Reply 8 of 15, by davidrg

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I'm not an OS/2 expert at all though I've played with versions 1.3/2.0/2.1/3/4 as part of my quest to network all the things. I was kind of amazed when I first installed OS/2 2.0 last year that it was older than Windows 95 - can certainly see where Microsoft got some of their ideas for Windows 95 from! I'd been interested to know if it would be any good for DOS games at all on a sufficiently powerful machine as that might give me an excuse to leave OS/2 running on something.

According to this old usenet post Duke Nukem should work. Doesn't say what version but based on the date (April 1998) it would have been Warp 4, the final consumer version of OS/2. In 1993 Bio Menace apparently had a bug that affected DR-DOS and OS/2 where the game would crash when you killed the first monster. No idea if it was later fixed but there are is a workaround for OS/2 2.0. Duke Nukem 3D apparently has some sound issue on OS/2 which probably affects Shadow Warrior too.

Win16 stuff should all work well on OS/2 provided you have the right edition (Red spine on the box means no Win16 support unless you install OS/2 over the top of an existing Windows 3.1 installation IIRC). IBM had a license for the Windows 3.0 and 3.1 source code and so was able to bundle a modified version of Windows with OS/2 - 3.0 with OS/2 2.0 and 3.1 with OS/2 2.1 and higher IIRC. So you'll find the full windows Program Manager there along with File Manager and other utilities.

Probably it would be good to start with hardware that has proper OS/2 drivers available for everything just to rule out any driver issues.

Reply 9 of 15, by Elia1995

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I got some of them to work after manually changing each individual file's permissions and disabling "read only".

It's a pain as I must do it one file at a time and some games are over 200 files!!! Is there a way to quickly change the permissions of multiple files on OS/2 like on windows?

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 10 of 15, by davidrg

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This is a surprising omission! Seems there is no built-in way to do it that I can find. The attrib command is the same as the DOS version and doesn't support acting recursively and the GUI doesn't seem to either.

Easiest solution appears to be to write a script - rw.cmd

/* Remove R/O attributes from directory tree */

arg dir
call RxFuncAdd 'SysFileTree', 'RexxUtil', 'SysFileTree'
call SysFileTree dir, 'file', 'D', '***+*', '***-*'
call SysFileTree dir'\*', 'file', 'S', '***+*', '***-*'

You can then call it with something like rw.cmd somedir from an OS/2 console window. I tried it out myself and it seems to do the job.

Credit: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.os2.bugs/ … /m/kN4_bk8qiLQJ
Documentation for the SysFileTree command: http://www.manmrk.net/tutorials/rexx/oorexx/r … xref/x30922.htm

Reply 11 of 15, by dr.zeissler

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Can You really play Dosgames within OS/2...I remember that most games did not work.
At the moment I only have a machine with Warp3 installed...I have to check gamecompatibility there...

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 12 of 15, by davidrg

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OS/2 was designed by Microsoft and IBM to be the successor to DOS and Windows so its compatibility with DOS is supposed to be extremely good on version 2.0 and up. Much better than Windows NT and possibly better than Windows 9x too given the amount of control it gives you over each applications DOS environment plus the amount of free memory DOS applications have access to. And if the DOS 5 emulation isn't good enough you can run real MS-DOS or DR-DOS inside the virtual DOS machine.

Windows 3.x compatibility should be very good on editions that include Win-OS/2 (box has a blue spine) as IBM had rights to the Windows 3.x source code at the time. Win-OS/2 is effectively a full copy of Windows 3.1 thats been modified to run inside the Virtual DOS machine. You can either run it full-screen (desktop background, program manager, the OS/2 desktop appears as a minimised window) or rootless (OS/2 apps and Windows 3.1 apps appear side-by-side on the OS/2 desktop).

Getting stuff on and off OS/2 prior to Warp 4 is a bit of a pain though as prior to Warp 4 the network bits were sold-separately (OS/2 1.x, 2.x) or as part of the 'Connect' edition of Warp 3. You can use the NetWare client on all versions of OS/2 to connect to a Mars NWE server on Linux or a real NetWare server though. Perhaps DOS packet drivers and mTCP might work in a Virtual DOS machine though - might have to give that a go some time.

Reply 13 of 15, by Jo22

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^I agree. OS/2 Warp is/was very sophisticated. For example, the DOS VM could have 736KB of RAM if video is limited to CGA or text-mode.
That configuration once existed on expanded XTs with
CGA card or equivalently configured PC/XT emulators for Atari ST/Amiga/..

There's just one thing that needs to be fixed still.
OS/2 and Win-OS/2 have trouble sharing the same soundcard.
Otherwise, direct i/o from Win-OS/2 works fine usually.

What's also cool - ecomstation and ArcaOS still have Win-OS/2.
So Windows 3.1x is still a living system, technically.
If ArcaOS (ex BlueLion OS) will support UEFI boot at some point, the OS might be really interesting to us.
As an alternative, to run our classic applications and games, but with direct access to modern hardware.
It would be really cool to still be able to do low-level stuff on an UEFI PC.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 14 of 15, by davidrg

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Yeah, ArcaOS looks interesting. Tempting to buy a copy though I don't know if it really offers much over regular OS/2 Warp4 besides more modern hardware support. There is a decent video having a look at it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utse8P_L8k0. He shows off Prince of Persia for DOS and Doom for OS/2 running as well as Word 6 for Windows in a full-screen windows session.

Not really relevant to DOS gaming on OS/2, but the video doesn't show how you can run 16bit Windows programs on the OS/2 desktop without Windows taking over the entire screen. So here is a pair of screenshots showing File Manager on OS/2 2.1 and Warp 4:
log-05.png img-05.png

You can install Win32s 1.25 on this as well to run some 32bit Windows software: Instructions

Reply 15 of 15, by JSO

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Disruptor wrote on 2022-05-18, 13:42:

What sound support does the AWE64 have in OS/2?
Can you load soundfonts?

I didn't tested that.

I can't answer.

https://www.russharvey.bc.ca/os2/awe64os2.html

DOS IS THE POWER OF OUR CHILDHOOD MEMORIES!