https://github.com/diasurgical/DevilutionX/pull/8155
https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=22726
https://www.high-voltage.cz/sortky/diablo-po- … stupny-pre-dos/

SDL for DOS and Diablo for DOS (Developers) […]
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SDL for DOS and Diablo for DOS (Developers)

posted by Laaca Homepage, Czech republic, 05.09.2025, 05:34

On Czech forum High-Voltage.cz was few days ago mentioned the starting support for DOS in Diablo source port
DevilutionX.
Webmaster says that it works for him in DosBox without problems.
I tried it on two physical DOS machines. On the first one it does not work at all (error during video mode initialization) and on the second machine plays the intro but after that it crashes with exception fault and with the register dump.
I have also third DOS machine and I plan to test it there too.
However, it is interresting that all ports of Diablo/DevilutionX are based on SDL library, including the DOS port.
I know that years ago the DOS support in SDL was discussed but was never seriously started. Now there are real patches which add some basic support for DOS. DevilutionX uses this branch and there is also "rebase branch".
In both cases it is SDL 2 port.
I have not looked into sources yet but I suspect a bug in the VESA VBE code causing the error in the video mode initialization on my primary DOS computer. I suspect that code asks VBE for the mode list and examines the returned modes. Problem is that some VBE implementations use only one buffer which leads to rewritting the buffer with modelist after 4F01h call.