superfury wrote on Yesterday, 16:15:

Rn you'd need an OS to setup the partition and the boot loader on the disk from what I can see? There aren't any tools included that can do this without an OS already installed (afaik that's Linux). Hence why you'd need included software to partition the hard drive (to FAT or Linux filesystem) and at least copy the boot configuration over (install GRUB or something compatible from what I've read here). Without any of those, the elf is unusable. If you don't have Linux (or a flavour of it) already installed, you can't even use the elf to boot (due to missing GRUB and no partitions configured for use).

You need that in case you want to setup a permanent install, and IMO is not yet time to do that.

But even if you wanted to do that, Linux is available in live setup since two decades, bootable windows like hiren's boot CD are available as well, so still no need of an already installed OS.

Then is matter of personal need's/preferences and skill level, as usual.

All you need is a FAT32 partition to store settings, and additional SW. But that's optional, you can use RetroOS and play Doom/Quake/whatever is included in a machine with no HDD

LSS10999 wrote on Yesterday, 11:51:

I just tested RetroOS on an older AMD based system (ASUS KGPE-D16) and it booted as well.
Not sure if the issue really was the HPET. But right now all my success cases are AMD ones and none of my Intel systems are booting.

Albeit really old (end of XP / beginning of Vista era), my Acer-5104 (Turion X2 / ATI Xpress 1100) shows a black screen after a really short moment when moment I can read the logs (likely the black screen comes when DN tries to start), so we have at least one AMD machine that doesn't work as expected. 😉

The Solutor wrote on Yesterday, 11:08:

For now, given the noumerous problems faced b LSS, I decided to test what happens on my Homeserver/HTPC which is based on a N100 […]
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For now, given the noumerous problems faced b LSS, I decided to test what happens on my Homeserver/HTPC which is based on a N100 CPU

This to be precise

https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/ … ime-n100i-d-d4/

And nothing, it boots and what I got is a 2cm white stripe on the top of the screen, and nothing else. (tested only in UEFI mode given I don't have CSMWrap installed there)

In short, this project seems one of the rare cases where AMD got more love than Intel, not that I don't like that (the N100 is the second Intel CPU that enters my home in 4 decades).

But still, I guess gsos needs some Intel HW to do some tests in person and enlarge the audience of the project.

The white stripe is shown when RetroOS rejects the GOP framebuffer provided and it cannot render boot log text.

What is the mode grub gives RetroOS on your machine? On that machine, pressing c at the GRUB menu and running videoinfo would show the modes GRUB sees (if you could provide a picture of available modes that might help). The decisive evidence is the mode actually passed to RetroOS, width, height, pitch, bits per pixel, and RGB masks

The Solutor wrote on Yesterday, 16:30:

LSS10999 wrote on Yesterday, 11:51:

I just tested RetroOS on an older AMD based system (ASUS KGPE-D16) and it booted as well.
Not sure if the issue really was the HPET. But right now all my success cases are AMD ones and none of my Intel systems are booting.

Albeit really old (end of XP / beginning of Vista era), my Acer-5104 (Turion X2 / ATI Xpress 1100) shows a black screen after a really short moment when moment I can read the logs (likely the black screen comes when DN tries to start), so we have at least one AMD machine that doesn't work as expected. 😉

What mode is this? Can you try "Boot diagnostic + native bios" mode (protected disk), that one stops before DN so you can take a pic of the log on the screen.

gsos wrote on Yesterday, 16:34:

The white stripe is shown when RetroOS rejects the GOP framebuffer provided and it cannot render boot log text.

What is the mode grub gives RetroOS on your machine? On that machine, pressing c at the GRUB menu and running videoinfo would show the modes GRUB sees (if you could provide a picture of available modes that might help). The decisive evidence is the mode actually passed to RetroOS, width, height, pitch, bits per pixel, and RGB masks

I'm going to test when I can shutdown the machine but IIRC is more or less the same list seen by Arandr under Linux

The only bit strange one is 1360x768 thing (learned very recently that the origin of this is 1360x760x8bpp fits in 1MB while 1366x760x8bpp does not)

I updated the white bar with a pattern that indicates what is wrong with the frame buffer

gsos wrote on Yesterday, 03:56:

@LSS10999: I added better hpet ahci detection perhaps that is the problem for your system.

Tested. Sadly this doesn't fix boot on my X99. Hangs the same place except I see the new line mentioning the HPET.
My B75 and H97 systems aren't booting, either. Same symptom.

1HPET: ACPI base 0xfed00000 (Multiboot2 ACPI tag)

This is the only difference compared to the previous build.
NOTE: If I'm booting a locally deployed kernel.elf with GRUB4DOS (via "kernel" directive), the HPET line reads (firmware memory scan) instead of (Multiboot2 ACPI tag), but no real difference (ACPI base is the same).

Anyway, I'd like to see the issue with multiple storage controllers resolved so I can further test it on my AMD systems (where RetroOS can boot) with my own stuffs.
Ideally, with adequate documentation on how one can manually deploy the kernel and base data, and set up GRUB entries.

I tried the iso from the last version I downloaded with my x86 emulator (which uses a ET4000/W32i graphics card setup). I get some text display for a bit when the OS boots, then some graphical mode, after which I get a green 1 or 2 lines on the top of the display with some weird pattern in it (which isn't regular)?

I added support for multiple disks, and a installer. It is still linux installer but on btrfs it can install the kernel.elf on your btrfs /boot and adds a grub entry.
The C: will be a fat32 or ext4 with /home/retroos directory, if multiple are possible "--c-uuid=...." and "--c-dir=..." you can select your wanted setup.

I'm afraid there is a regression.

My AMD machine wont boot anymore (black screen)

The intel server went from a white stripe to this (Top-Left corner of the screen)

Perhaps I think it's about time to do some versioning in file names, now that builds are piling up, taking track of releases starts to be complicate.

gsos wrote on Today, 15:37:

I added support for multiple disks, and a installer. It is still linux installer but on btrfs it can install the kernel.elf on your btrfs /boot and adds a grub entry.
The C: will be a fat32 or ext4 with /home/retroos directory, if multiple are possible "--c-uuid=...." and "--c-dir=..." you can select your wanted setup.

I've succeeded in setting up a locally deployed environment on my main X570 system, and it successfully picked up the partition I used to store my own games and data for RetroOS use.
So multiple disks support is working in my case.

However, I noticed games would complain about unable to read or write files, and it doesn't matter whether I use Protected Disk or Persistent Disk.
Not sure why, but considering I'm using ext4 for the backing partition, I wonder if I need to set permissions and ownership to something special from Linux...
I recall something about "retroos" group was mentioned in the docs. However, right now the partition's ownership (user:group) are set to my main Linux user so I don't need to be root to manage stuffs there.

As I'm booting via UEFI, the GOP framebuffer looks a bit better now, but text mode rendering is still not 100% perfect.

Despite the issues with file reading (mostly affects setup programs that manages configuration files), some games can be actually run at this point:
- Bio Menace
- Jazz Jackrabbit
- Rampart
- Skunny 32-bit
- Nova 9
- Arya Vaiv

I do have a few games that currently cannot run due to the aforementioned file access issue, which needs to be resolved before I can validate them.

I don't have anything to further validate OS/2 or Windows personalities yet. Not sure if it can eventually reach the point of running things like Program Manager.

BTW: How do I make changes to some default configuration values? Put my own CONFIG.SYS (e.g. /home/retroos/CONFIG/CONFIG.SYS) in my backing partition?
The issue right now is that, I need to set the mixer volume to 100% and output to "Jack" instead of "Headphone" for proper audio playback.

Does RetroOS support early SVGA adapters, like Tseng (ET3000AX, ET4000AX, W32(i)) or the like? They have extended registers (past the VGA standard) and also a segment select register for mapping VRAM into user address space (sort of like EMS does).
My implementation has a SVGA DAC (up to 24-bit color), but it's unusable if the VRAM isn't properly addressed using the 3CDh register for accessing the whole megabyte or more of VRAM (anything past 256KB of VGA VRAM).