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HX DOS extender?

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First post, by LouisSkolnick

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Anyone got this one up and running with sound on modern (Intel) systems?
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hx-dos/?source=typ_redirect
And this site: http://www.xaver.me/drdoswiki/index.php?n=Main.HX-DOS

The readme states "AC97 support in DOS". That would men we could use modern soundcards!
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hx-dos/files/misc/

Reply 1 of 13, by VileR

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Yes, under "Roadmap .... Below are the features which are currently missing in HX."

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Reply 2 of 13, by LouisSkolnick

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Darn that was stupid. I was so into finding something that supports modern sound cards 😜
But OpenGL in dos? Did anyone tested this?

Reply 3 of 13, by DosFreak

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I believe the rumour is that the original dev passed away and no one else is really interested in picking up the project, below is a modification to support more soundcards:

http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=14645
http://sound-dos.ucoz.ru/load/new_hxdos_exten … er_2_17/1-1-0-8

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Reply 4 of 13, by Jorpho

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DosFreak wrote:

I believe the rumour is that the original dev passed away and no one else is really interested in picking up the project, below is a modification to support more soundcards:

http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=14645
http://sound-dos.ucoz.ru/load/new_hxdos_exten … er_2_17/1-1-0-8

Japheth, dead? That's tragic. It would explain why his site has been down for so long.

These new mods are intriguing – though really, if one is just going to use it to run DOSBox, then one could just as well install Windows or Linux instead.

Reply 5 of 13, by leileilol

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For OpenGL in DOS all I know of is Bisqwit's (excessively slow) compilation of the Mesa GL libraries for software rendering.

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Reply 6 of 13, by Jorpho

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The second link there suggests it can do OpenGL acceleration on 3DFX cards (using 3dfxvgl.dll).

Reply 7 of 13, by KormaX

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For the Honour of DOS!

I tested it. OpenGL and sound support works very well I use it tu run many Win32 programs. I use DOS for the most things possible, for example I am writing this comment from DOS (Links 2.14 browser, graphical mode). I don't think it is a problem to run DOSBox on real DOS. It's not as "illegitim" as running it on Windows or Linux. It's okay, because it is for hardware emulation, not for OS emulation. If you don't have the old sound hardware, you have to emulate it, any driver for DOS would do it. Actually every existing driver for DOS does it. DOSBox is now a system component of my DOS distribution thanks to HX. Now not only MPXPlay and QuickView (those have native support for modern sound card) are able to output sound through my Realtek HDA chipset, but approximately any old DOS software. However I am planning to actually port DOSBox for DOS because for emulating only the sound hardware it's needless to emulate any other thing. I think every function could have a passthrough option to the real operating system. And this is only one useful feature that sould be implemented in DOSBox for DOS, but now DOSBox for Windows is a huge step up from the dark ages when the old programs were restricted to the old hardwares on their real OS and only foreign systems were able to run them. DOS-people! We have something great now! DOS ain't dead. (Also I can share my settings for DOSBox which works well and not laggy. Ps: lag can be also eliminated by refreshing the screen output somehow eg. change the resolution in the game, change the active monitor when using laptop or change the framedropping rate in DOSBox.)

May the DOS be with you!

Reply 8 of 13, by Azarien

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KormaX wrote:

However I am planning to actually port DOSBox for DOS because for emulating only the sound hardware it's needless to emulate any other thing. I think every function could have a passthrough option to the real operating system.

In my understanding, porting DosBOX to DOS would mean to compile a real DOS executable (with DJGPP or similar tool) without any "running Win32 code on DOS" hacks.
That's theoretically doable.

What you propose is more like "get the sound card emulation code from DOSBox and run it natively in DOS".
That's also theoretically doable.

Reply 9 of 13, by Scali

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Azarien wrote:

What you propose is more like "get the sound card emulation code from DOSBox and run it natively in DOS".
That's also theoretically doable.

It might be worth looking into SoftMPU: http://bjt42.github.io/softmpu/
SoftMPU basically took the Roland MPU-401 emulation from DOSBox and uses v86 mode under real DOS to virtualize the ports, capture any port reads/writes to the MPU-401 and forward it to the emulation routines.
If you were to perform the same trick for the other sound hardware in DOSBox, you'd have what you are looking for, I suppose.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 10 of 13, by KormaX

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Azarien wrote:

In my understanding, porting DosBOX to DOS would mean to compile a real DOS executable (with DJGPP or similar tool) without any "running Win32 code on DOS" hacks.

Not really. I mean that would be a way to do that, but not the way I would like to do that. Since HX is a valid DOS runtime, just like DOS4G or DOS32A, I think it is a valid concept to compile programs to it. I no more think of it as a "running Win32 code on DOS hack", I see this runtime as an intersection of Windows and DOS. By talking about "porting DOSBox to DOS" I don't mean leaving HX, but changing functionality into something meaningful on DOS, but meaningless on other systems such as the passthrough option for anything. It would not be ONLY for sound hardware emulation even though it could be used that way, but, for another program, you could use it for memory map emulation, and as a video card emulator for a third one etc. Or any combination of those. For the mouse, for example, I doubt that anyone would ever need a DOS to Windows API translation just for a DOS API emulation to get mouse for an application when it could be done by a simple passthrough to the real device driver, but a software video "mixer" is useful sometimes. Another useful thing is the multithreading which I use to listen to music while doing anything else through simultaneous CD-ROM emulation with a cuesheet. It's okay, and I'm not shure that it can be really compiled to DOS with DJGPP, while it can be if it is compiled for HX. Also no need to implement soundcard support for it, because it is given by the HX runtime.

May the DOS be with you!

Reply 11 of 13, by aaronwhooley

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I had an old netbook with a HDA controller lying around so I installed DOS 7.1 on it and tried it - I downloaded the modified version of hx 2.17 off http://sound-dos.ucoz.ru/, installed it and managed to get DOSBOX working with sound, although it is a little garbled.

update - managed to fix the garbled audio, adjusted the buffer..

I am very impressed, DOSBOX runs fast as hell under HX dos extender compared to the crappy Win7 installation it had on it before.. (The poor atom processor could barely keep up)

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Reply 12 of 13, by Biomecanoid

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aaronwhooley wrote on 2017-12-04, 08:27:

I had an old netbook with a HDA controller lying around so I installed DOS 7.1 on it and tried it - I downloaded the modified version of hx 2.17 off http://sound-dos.ucoz.ru/, installed it and managed to get DOSBOX working with sound, although it is a little garbled.

update - managed to fix the garbled audio, adjusted the buffer..

I am very impressed, DOSBOX runs fast as hell under HX dos extender compared to the crappy Win7 installation it had on it before.. (The poor atom processor could barely keep up)

Hello,

Can you help me setup HW extender ? I am trying to have sound working on 2 old netbooks I have running dos.

Acer Aspire one
Samsung nc110p

I can get dosbox running but sadly without sound. Any ideas of what could I be doing wrong ? Maybe I don't have the correct version on HX extender