I have some floppies at my mother's house for a Win98SE computer there, and they are compressed with DriveSpace. Can I use them with a Win98SE installation with DriveSpace installed? Same with Zip100 disks?

Harry Potter wrote on 2022-07-16, 20:34:

I have some floppies at my mother's house for a Win98SE computer there, and they are compressed with DriveSpace. Can I use them with a Win98SE installation with DriveSpace installed? Same with Zip100 disks?

It might work in Dosbox-X (honestly don't know, somebody else might chime in on that), but my first thing to try would be Virtualbox instead for that use case. For the ZIP, if yourdisks your ZIP Drive is USB, Virtualbox's USB passthrough will likely make things easier.

darry wrote on 2022-07-17, 03:23:

Harry Potter wrote on 2022-07-16, 20:34:

I have some floppies at my mother's house for a Win98SE computer there, and they are compressed with DriveSpace. Can I use them with a Win98SE installation with DriveSpace installed? Same with Zip100 disks?

It might work in Dosbox-X (honestly don't know, somebody else might chime in on that), but my first thing to try would be Virtualbox instead for that use case. For the ZIP, if yourdisks your ZIP Drive is USB, Virtualbox's USB passthrough will likely make things easier.

Zip 100 disks could be mounted as if a hard disk image. I've archived ZIP disks before (it's easy in Linux using ddrescue and the USB version of the ZIP drive), the medium itself appears as an array of 512-byte sectors regardless of the file system written on it.

Are you sure the floppies are DriveSpace compressed? I've only ever heard of DriveSpace compressed hard disk partitions, but never floppies.

Yes, the floppies are DrivrSpace-compressed. I compressed them myself. 😀 Thank you for the info! 😀

New to Dosbox-x and got windows 98 running through it on a win10 system. Question I have is what is the procedure to get usb sticks to interact with it?
Install usb drivers via an image file? Can't seem to find any info on it so maybe it's a no go.

Try:

mount e d:\ -t floppy

where e is the name of the drive to call it and d:\ is the drive as Windows sees it.

buckeye wrote on 2022-08-01, 15:24:

New to Dosbox-x and got windows 98 running through it on a win10 system. Question I have is what is the procedure to get usb sticks to interact with it?
Install usb drivers via an image file? Can't seem to find any info on it so maybe it's a no go.

There is no support for USB pass-through.

Harry Potter wrote on 2022-08-02, 14:51:

Try:

mount e d:\ -t floppy

where e is the name of the drive to call it and d:\ is the drive as Windows sees it.

That is a folder mount, and will not work with a guest OS as such.

But starting with the latest DOSBox-X release, there is now support for dynamically converting a folder mount into a FAT HDD partition, available to a guest OS. This is documented on the DOSBox-X wiki. e.g.,
https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3AInstalling- … t_folder_mounts

Thanks all for the info, like to keep it simple so I'll stick to image files for transferring stuff for now.

On a side note can anyone explain why when in the guest os under the dosbox-x drive menu all the drives are "grayed out"?

buckeye wrote on 2022-08-08, 15:43:

Thanks all for the info, like to keep it simple so I'll stick to image files for transferring stuff for now.

On a side note can anyone explain why when in the guest os under the dosbox-x drive menu all the drives are "grayed out"?

That is a known limitation. It is because the DOSBox-X drive letters loose their meaning once you boot a guest OS. At that point the guest OS is responsible for assigning drive letters and therefore DOSBox-X does not know which drive letter corresponds to the drive letters from the guest OS. Internally a drive ID is used, and really once you boot a guest OS, those drive letters should probably be replaced by the drive ID, but that has yet to be implemented.

Hi! I have a feature request for DOSBox-X. I want to have a .conf file is the same location as a DOS program and the option to use the file to start the program.

You can specify the location of the config file with the -conf option. Just run `dosbox-x -help` for a list of options.

In addition, if there is a config file called "dosbox.conf" in your current working directory, it will automatically be used. No need for even using the -conf option.

Thank you.

Does anyone know a way to fix the audio issues I am having? I'll leave a sound clip here to demonstrate what I am dealing with as well as my .conf file.

That's probably just a minor hiccup in the emulation speed, nothing to worry about.

So there is no way to fix it then?

There can be many reasons for audio hiccups. To name a few...

• It could be that your PC simply cannot keep up with the emulation requirement.
• It could also be that the audio is being synced by the program/game to the emulated video output. So unless your host output runs at the same speed, you will experience issues. e.g. VGA modes typically use 70Hz, while modern LCD displays are almost always only 60Hz.
• Conversion between emulated and host audio frequencies can cause latency issues
• Audio buffering issues

Alevam-Inc. wrote on 2022-09-30, 18:45:

So there is no way to fix it then?

I had some problems with audio stuttering that was resolved by increasing the blocksize and prebuffer values, but that was in the DOS rather than Win98 environment.

I get good results from the following values (without any noticeable lag):

blocksize = 2048
prebuffer = 80

Also, in the Win98 environment, have you tried changing your emulated sound card to any of the other options (and updating your drivers in Win98 accordingly)?

I currently have DOSBox-X set to an emulated SB16-Vibra. What other soundcard would you recommend?

I would recommend trying the regular Sound Blaster 16 (sb16). Windows 98 should already have the files to enable plug-and-play installation.

If that, in conjunction with increasing the block size and prebuffer, makes no difference, then the issue you are experiencing is more likely to be related to underlying performance issues. If “max” cycles is already set, experiment with how high you can set fixed cycles and still achieve usable performance. For example:

cycles = fixed 120000