Thank you very much. I was able to run SDLPal quite well on bare metal MS-DOS 7.1 […]
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PalMusicFan wrote on 2026-03-19, 13:00: We recommend testing our libSDL DOS version; we’ve made numerous adjustments to ensure it runs on real DOS PCs. According to this discussion (Re: NVIDIA Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal VESA Bios Bug (workaround found)), we disabled double-buffering because we found it caused frame sequence errors on certain Nvidia graphics cards, and the known workaround did not work on 9300MG .
Additionally, we haven’t yet figured out how to integrate the SDL Audio with Sound Blaster’s DMA audio. On other systems, SDL Audio runs in a separate thread, but DOS doesn’t support threads.
Thank you very much. I was able to run SDLPal quite well on bare metal MS-DOS 7.1
I used files from the 1995 DOS version, and overwrote the language files from the English translation link given above.
This is running on a fast "modern" DOS system with an i5-8250 CPU, running at 3.4 Ghz. When I step down the speed to 1.7Ghz, it runs well still. However, slowing the CPU down to 900 Mhz, the game starts to lag considerably. The game's isometric view is outstanding, and it played smoothly and without errors all the way to the end. I killed the final boss, and got the end screens, etc. These are things I noticed in the SDLPal for DOS on bare metal:
1. The game's resolution seems capped at 320x200. VESA modes are detected up to 1920x1080 and listed in the logfile, but not utilized. (This happens when running SDLPal using the 1995 DOS files or files from the Windows version.
2. The sound and music would not work, even with VSBDHA or Sbemu. This was expected given what you wrote above about SDL audio and pthreads being required. I assume there's no way to get any audio working in pure DOS at this point. Because the sound doesn't work, I deleted the sound data files, and the game still played perfectly, just without sound.
3. Some Chinese glyphs are still present, for example in the Spells. These spells still work fine, but not sure what they do. Most spells (~85%) are translated into English, however, and that is of course very helpful.
4. The game's ending montage / scenes after the final boss is killed are still in Chinese. These are a series of bitmapped pictures / scenes, and there's no English translation, but it seems the girl becomes a princess and lives happily ever after!
5. The large .AVI files are not required to play the game in DOS. I deleted them, and set the "Play AVI files" flag in SDLPal.cfg to 0 and the game played perfectly.
6. The game completely freezes my system when I "Exit Game" from the System settings in the game. A hard reboot is required. No other freezes occurred during the playing of the game. It seemed very stable except for exiting.
7. The final compressed size of the turnkey .7z archive that I created with all required files to run on bare metal is 14.41 mb.
What are the differences in the DOS version and Windows version? The .mkf files in the Windows version are all larger (for example, the file GOP.MLF is ~16 mb in the Windows version, but only ~10 mb in the DOS version, yet the game seems to look and play exactly the same with both sets of files using your 32-bit DOS DJGPP binary of SDLPal from 15-Mar-2026 (which has an uncompressed size of 6.01 Mb).