That was a good suggestion! Unfortunately there was no link between the Daemon drive and the ISO. The result was 3 CD drives in Windows 95. The first two were the mounted ISOs, the third was empty. It seems to use Daemon I would need to add 4 CDs to the Windows 95 image.

Or setup an image with a later version of Win9x that has support for FAT32 for a larger disk image.

Well, what I meant was: if you try to create six virtual CD drives with Daemon Tools (even without mounting anything on them), does Windows try to stop you one way or another? Because that would also preclude trying to set up six emulated IDE devices via DOSBox.

In terms of actually mounting ISO images on Daemon Tools' virtual drives, I would put three ISO images on one 2 GB hard drive image and three ISO images on a second 2 GB hard drive image, as presumably mounting two large hard drive images wouldn't cause any problems for DOSBox.

apollo18 wrote:

Yes, I read that too, but it hasn't worked using ISOs or BIN/CUE versions of the Cds. The console shows the swap but Windows 95 does not see it. I tried both dosbox-x and the latest daum build.

you need to press F5 to refresh the CD list cache so it can detect the newly inserted ISO (or BIN/CUE), this has worked for me.

SA1988 wrote:

apollo18 wrote:

Yes, I read that too, but it hasn't worked using ISOs or BIN/CUE versions of the Cds. The console shows the swap but Windows 95 does not see it. I tried both dosbox-x and the latest daum build.

you need to press F5 to refresh the CD list cache so it can detect the newly inserted ISO (or BIN/CUE), this has worked for me.

I tried that too; I'm afraid that didn't work for me

Jorpho wrote:

Well, what I meant was: if you try to create six virtual CD drives with Daemon Tools (even without mounting anything on them), does Windows try to stop you one way or another? Because that would also preclude trying to set up six emulated IDE devices via DOSBox.

In terms of actually mounting ISO images on Daemon Tools' virtual drives, I would put three ISO images on one 2 GB hard drive image and three ISO images on a second 2 GB hard drive image, as presumably mounting two large hard drive images wouldn't cause any problems for DOSBox.

Daemon allows for 4 CDs, but I haven't tried combining that with the two IDE mounts. I guess it would stand to reason that W95 can support at least a tertiary setup (the IDE 1 for the HDs and IDE 2 and 3 for the 4 Daemon drives). Unless Daemon is using some proprietary engine to manage it.

OK. I tried to force Windows 95 to setup a tertiary HDD controller driver. It looks like it only allows for the primary and secondary using the standard driver and it won't let you reconfigure it for any other combination than 1F0h / IRQ14 and 170h / IRQ 15.

I suppose that if I were to add an option to have the IDE controllers show up as a PCI devices we might be able to get Windows 95 to see more than 4 ATA devices and therefore however many CD-ROM drives you want. I'll work on that this weekend unless anyone else here wants to take up that task and submit a patch.

I appreciate your recent improvements to the video emulation! I've followed the changes carefully.

I wonder whether the person making the IDE request could use the mscdex real mode driver and mount multiple cdrom drives that way. I've never mounted four cdrom drives for regular use, however. 😀 I am also not aware of any games which mandate more than two cdrom drives, or any (typically used) software that does either.

Updated Github URLs before they get lost in the noise here again:

DOSBox-X: https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x

DOSLIB source: https://github.com/joncampbell123/doslib
DOSLIB binaries: http://hackipedia.org/Projects/DOSLIB/

DOSLIB2 source: https://github.com/joncampbell123/doslib2
DOSLIB2 binaries: http://hackipedia.org/Projects/DOSLIB2/

I fixed some compiler flags in DOSLIB 16-bit realmode large model builds that may have fixed a whole lot of stability problems (related to whether or not Watcom C assumes SS == DGROUP and the act of calling subroutines from an interrupt handler) and added explicit support for the weird Sound Blaster commands in ESS 688 chipsets. DOSLIB is meant to be a collection of tools, "proof of concept" implementations, and "toy" programs to tweak and twiddle with the hardware. Source code that you can learn from about PC hardware and tools that give you better insight into the PC hardware details. You'll need the same dev system I have with Open Watcom 1.9 and Linux, though my shell scripts also generate .BAT files to enable compiling from DOS and Windows environments. If anyone wants to help with that feel free, there's a LOT of hardware out there 😀

You could make a page with all of the relevant links and then add a link to that page in your signature.

Just a quick update: I got Windows 95 to talk to the 3rd and 4th IDE controller by adding the IDE controllers to the ISA PnP BIOS device enumeration. Apparently if the standard IDE driver gets the description from the PnP BIOS it will use whatever I/O port it is told to use instead of restricting itself to 0x1F0/0x170 in the non-PnP case.

OK: Attaching two CD-ROM ISOs to each IDE controller (except the first), yields 7 CD-ROM drives visible in Windows 95.
Is that enough for your game to run? 😀

1imgmount 2 hdd -t hdd -fs none -size 512,63,128,1020 -ide 1m
2imgmount d: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 1s
3imgmount e: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 2m
4imgmount f: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 2s
5imgmount g: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 3m
6imgmount h: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 3s
7imgmount i: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 4m
8imgmount j: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 4s
9boot -l c

TheGreatCodeholio wrote:

OK: Attaching two CD-ROM ISOs to each IDE controller (except the first), yields 7 CD-ROM drives visible in Windows 95. Is that e […]
Show full quote

OK: Attaching two CD-ROM ISOs to each IDE controller (except the first), yields 7 CD-ROM drives visible in Windows 95.
Is that enough for your game to run? 😀

Copy code to clipboard

1imgmount 2 hdd -t hdd -fs none -size 512,63,128,1020 -ide 1m
2imgmount d: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 1s
3imgmount e: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 2m
4imgmount f: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 2s
5imgmount g: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 3m
6imgmount h: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 3s
7imgmount i: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 4m
8imgmount j: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 4s
9boot -l c

This looks great! So far I've been able to add drives 3 and 4. I'm getting stuck on 5 and 6. Dumb question -- can I use any non-conflicting settings or should I try to use yours? I'm guessing the former?

apollo18 wrote:

TheGreatCodeholio wrote:

OK: Attaching two CD-ROM ISOs to each IDE controller (except the first), yields 7 CD-ROM drives visible in Windows 95. Is that e […]
Show full quote

OK: Attaching two CD-ROM ISOs to each IDE controller (except the first), yields 7 CD-ROM drives visible in Windows 95.
Is that enough for your game to run? 😀

Copy code to clipboard

1imgmount 2 hdd -t hdd -fs none -size 512,63,128,1020 -ide 1m
2imgmount d: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 1s
3imgmount e: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 2m
4imgmount f: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 2s
5imgmount g: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 3m
6imgmount h: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 3s
7imgmount i: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 4m
8imgmount j: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 4s
9boot -l c

This looks great! So far I've been able to add drives 3 and 4. I'm getting stuck on 5 and 6. Dumb question -- can I use any non-conflicting settings or should I try to use yours? I'm guessing the former?

You will need the latest commit that I just pushed, and then you will need to enable the teritary/quaternary IDE controllers (they are now disabled by default unless you enable them). After that, any non-conflicting settings should work. That includes the IRQ---Windows 95 won't touch it if the IRQ conflicts with another controller, or any other ISA device. For the teritary and quaternary stick with the default base I/O 1E8/168 and IRQ 11/10 and it should work.

I'm using the daum build from January. I'm guessing I have 4 CD-ROMs because I'm using only the first two controllers, right? I would need to use your build to enable 3 and 4?

apollo18 wrote:

I'm using the daum build from January. I'm guessing I have 4 CD-ROMs because I'm using only the first two controllers, right? I would need to use your build to enable 3 and 4?

Yes. The code has been there for the 3rd and 4th IDE controllers, but Windows 95 ignores them by default. What I did just now to make them work with Windows 95, is add code to enumerate them when Windows 95 calls the ISA PnP BIOS. Windows 95 will only pay attention to the 3rd and 4th IDE controllers if told to by the PnP BIOS.

On a related note, the latest push increases the IDE controller count to 8, and the CD-ROM drive count to 16.
You have to do some sacrifices like removing parallel and serial ports to free up enough IRQs, but it's possible to have 8 IDE controllers now.
Unfortunately, beyond the first 4 IDE controllers the MS-DOS CD-ROM driver I'm using doesn't bother to detect them, but Windows 95 is able to deal with it.

1[ide, primary]
2enable=true
3int13fakeio=true
4int13fakev86io=true
5cd-rom spinup time=0
6cd-rom spindown timeout=0
7cd-rom insertion delay=0
8
9[ide, secondary]
10enable=true
11int13fakeio=false
12int13fakev86io=false
13cd-rom spinup time=0
14cd-rom spindown timeout=0
15cd-rom insertion delay=0
16
17[ide, tertiary]
18enable=true
19int13fakeio=false
20int13fakev86io=false
21cd-rom spinup time=0
22cd-rom spindown timeout=0
23cd-rom insertion delay=0
24
25[ide, quaternary]
26enable=true
27int13fakeio=false
28int13fakev86io=false
29cd-rom spinup time=0
30cd-rom spindown timeout=0
31cd-rom insertion delay=0
32
33[ide, quinternary]
34enable=true
35int13fakeio=false
36int13fakev86io=false
37cd-rom spinup time=0
38cd-rom spindown timeout=0
39cd-rom insertion delay=0
40irq=9
41io=140
42altio=148
43
44[ide, sexternary]
45enable=true
46int13fakeio=false
47int13fakev86io=false
48cd-rom spinup time=0
49cd-rom spindown timeout=0
50cd-rom insertion delay=0
51irq=7
52io=150
53altio=158
54
55[ide, septernary]
56enable=true
57int13fakeio=false
58int13fakev86io=false
59cd-rom spinup time=0
60cd-rom spindown timeout=0

61cd-rom insertion delay=0
62irq=4
63io=130
64altio=13C
65
66[ide, octernary]
67enable=true
68int13fakeio=false
69int13fakev86io=false
70cd-rom spinup time=0
71cd-rom spindown timeout=0
72cd-rom insertion delay=0
73irq=3
74io=120
75altio=12E
76
77[autoexec]
78# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
79# You can put your MOUNT lines here.
80imgmount 2 hdd -t hdd -fs none -size 512,63,128,1020 -ide 1m
81imgmount d: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 1s
82imgmount e: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 2m
83imgmount f: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 2s
84imgmount g: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 3m
85imgmount h: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 3s
86imgmount i: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 4m
87imgmount j: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 4s
88imgmount k: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 5m
89imgmount l: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 5s
90imgmount m: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 6m
91imgmount n: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 6s
92imgmount o: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 7m
93imgmount p: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 7s
94imgmount q: msvc152c.iso -t cdrom -fs none -ide 8m
95imgmount r: win95.iso -t iso -fs none -ide 8s
96boot -l c

Again, Daum's build is based on an older version of my IDE code and it lacks a lot of the improvements I've added since.

Hahahahahaha! And BTW, that was commit number 666!

I just noticed that.

Hopefully my branch is not cursed by the Number of the Beast.

I'm on the page, but I don't see a download link. The 666 must have blinded me.

apollo18 wrote:

I'm on the page, but I don't see a download link. The 666 must have blinded me.

😀

At the moment if you want to try it you'll need to compile it from source code. I don't have any Win32 releases on Github. The Win32 releases on Hackipedia are too old relative to this update.