Hi all, I got in touch with Jim Hall about a month ago, and when he learned that I still run FreeDOS on vintage hardware, he asked me to test the games that ship with FreeDOS there. Many of them seem to have issues when run in virtual machines, and not all FreeDOS developers still maintain PCs from the nineties as far as I know.
I tried out the games that are supplied with the current release candidate (1.3 RC5) on my AMD 486 100 MHz Tower, and these are my results, with reference to Jim's initial e-mail on the topic. Note that I did not test sound apart from the PC speaker because I did not have time to set up the proprietary drivers for my sound card on the new installation. Bolitare works fine, also returns to the command prompt, but maybe I did not perform the "right" actions to brick the kernel. Boom runs fine graphics-wise. I suppose sound still works, assuming no one touched the source code for that since the 1.2 release. Beyond Titanic does not have any issues, which is not surprising, as it is a classic Apogee game and has virtually no requirements with respect to the hardware. Dosdef runs fine, although some sort of documentation would be great for newbies like me. :) I did not try Eliza, partly because I would not know what should go wrong there, and also because I agree with Jim that this program is not really a game, and on top of that has long lost its novelty factor, especially nowadays with advanced AI, deep fakes etc. at our fingertips. Empong gives me an illegal instruction error. Apparently, it relies on Intel-specific extensions and my AMD 486 cannot cope. Ev4de is unbearably slow. Not sure if the developers maybe aimed at VLB / later PCI graphics cards and / or Pentium-grade processors. In any case, my machine does not produce anything useful here. ewsnake is fine, colours look alright. An English menu would be good, though. ;) Floppybird works, including PC speaker sound. Fmines seems to be another of those games developed for much newer machines: It starts to load and then gives up pretty quickly, leaving garbage on the screen and freezing my whole computer. Freedoom plays alright, just loads a lot longer than Boom for some reason. With nansi loaded, gnuchess beeps away and does its thing (apart from a really annoying misplaced message right across the chess board -- I can supply a screenshot if someone is interested). Hangman works for me, as expected. Ivan did not finish loading for me, I have no clue what is taking so long as it only displays a black screen. Kraptor works, and I can confirm that the mouse speed is too low when compared to the keyboard input. Liquiwar works fine, despite a relatively long initial loading time. Mirror Magic runs fine, no issues, as does Mistral Report and Nethack. NGE Nibbles plays well. The slow fade-ins are not my favourite part of the game, but they are not so slow that it would be annoying. Maybe something is off with the timing on the VMs? Noudar looked and played well, no keyboard input problems for me. If I read the thread correctly, all those "double keypress" errors may be down to the same bug introduced by DJGPP, but the issue does not seem to manifest on my machine. Paku Paku works in all its annoying-PC-speaker-sound glory! :D Queen Tetris / Tetris Queen works fine, as do Senet and Smiley. Supernova is also a classic Apogee game and it works, as expected. Sudoko works and looks / plays surprisingly nice for the short startup time! Vertigo and Vi Tetris work as intended I guess (I have no idea how to fly a plane ;)). Wing works, but the Allegro engine crashes on shutdown. Not sure if that has any undesired side effects, as DOS has no virtual memory. Word Whiz is another Apogee shareware game and works fine. And last but not least, Zmiy also works as expected. I hope this report helps! As you can see, most games function better on the actual systems that DOS was intended for than on emulated machines. Please let me know if you need more details on the configuration of the machine or if I should test anything in particular again. If you already set up a wiki page with a compatibility table somewhere, I can add another column there as well. Kind regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
