Hi Lukas,
> Ok, I was born 1987. Had 386 and 486. Today I am software developer. I have As a software developer, you have to know that "My computer is not working, make it work" while hesitating to provide details is not making our life easier. A good bug report contains as many details as possible. > cd in the tray. Tried to remove second hdd so it is on drive D and it does > not help. Same use case is working in Windows 98 and its ms dos. So it is > clearly some incompatibility in Freedos driver. If you would be less impatient, you could have noticed that SHSUCDX lets you use any drive letter you want, possible range limited by LASTDRIVE, of course. So stop running around in circles, take a deep breath, read the documentation or at the very least the output of "NAMEOFTHEAPP /?" before you state that NAMEOFTHEAPP is "obviously broken" or start searching for a 90% unrelated "solution" such as removing your harddisk. The young people today just have too little patience ;-) > Please look at youtube, PhilsComputerLab. He has Youtube video about > freedos gaming. He mentions exactly these issues and that he need to > replace some files, but I dont know which files to replace. https://www.youtube.com/c/philscomputerlab/videos this guy has 677 videos as of today. Also 120 000 followers, so if I would know which of those 600+ videos you mean, it would be a promising channel. None of the videos has "copy protection" in the name, nor protect, but there are a few called "Create Installation CD from GOG.com DOSBox Game with ..." where ... can be ISO image or BIN/CUE image, optionally with audio. There is one called "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis CD Roland MT-32" and two called "Space Quest 4 CD Roland ..." for MT-32 or SC-55 which showcase some soundtracks. There are 78 videos mentioning "DOS", but only 6 mentioning "CD". Only a single video mentions "FreeDOS": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGmCVeAKR4w FreeDOS 1.2 Review - Can it replace MS DOS for retro gaming? It mentions that some BIOS boot the standard and some boot the legacy image. At 1:17 he shows a screenshot which apparently shows MEMDISK 4.05 int 13, 15 and 1e vectors, followed by the FreeDOS kernel booting, but then crashing as soon as HIMEM loads with invalid opcode. Probable MEMDISK-HIMEM-ELTORITO conflict? Might be fixed in newer MEMDISK or with better boot options? The installer asks for language, whether to overwrite the whole harddisk, keyboard layout and amount of installed packages, for which he suggests BASE packages only. Interesting that he likes manual install because he can delete even more old partitions. The boot menu seems to be the same as in 1.3, which means 1. JEMMEX with NOEMS, 2. JEMM386 "and SHARE", 3. no drivers and 4. few drivers. Phil recommends the first two options, but non-EMM386 options for e.g. Turrican. Wing Commander crashed for him with exception 06 at 1:bc0d while DS, SS and ES are 0 and FS and GS look like real mode segments, code at CS:IP is FE 50 9a 94, CR0=80000011, EFL=33002, ESP=f076, ESI and EDI use 32-bit values, other registers do not etc. Phil mentions that FreeDOS uses different config.sys menu syntax, so you cannot drop-in his MS DOS config file examples, but he has provided FreeDOS style config and menu files for us :-) https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-starter-pack.html He uses IDE DVD, K6 CPU, AGP Matrox graphics, 32 MB RAM, SD card via IDE adapter, SB16 with wavetable board and, notably, tried SOFTMPU. As said, with SB AWE32, you do not need SOFTMPU. Most games worked fine for him. Screamer 2 failed to detect the CD. Some games failed to have full sound without SOFTMPU. Need for Speed failed to detect the CD and the message was "cdromdirectoryentry - ERROR 2 READING DIRECTORY /frontend\movielow\ea.tgv" (note the mixed slash directions) Phil complains that playing "CD digital audio" does not work at all. You can test this by inserting an audio CD and using my CDROM2UI tool to tell your drive to start playing a track: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/1.3/pkg-html/cdrom2ui.html CDROM2 [EJECT|CLOSE|LOCK|UNLOCK|RESET] X: Audio: CDROM2 [PAUSE|CONT|INFO|PLAYnn] X: Ask *CDEX 2.0+ if a CD-ROM exists: CDROM2 N: Note that you will have to connect the internal audio cable. Phil later explains that audio failed because 1.2 used an outdated UDVD2 version. We now use the version about which Phil says that CD audio works fine with it, so there should be no need to switch to Acer VIDECDD for that. Given that Phil still prefers VIDECDD over updated UDVD2, my guess is that VIDECDD works better with some copy protection schemes? http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.3/previews/1.3-rc4/report.html Unfortunately, Phil only SUSPECTS that switching from SHSUCDX to MSCDEX could fix copy protections, but has not TESTED that. I wonder why Strike Commander crashes after the intro and whether that is supposed to be a copy protect issue? "We live in a time precious era" is a strange way of saying "Users in 2016 are too lazy to edit config.sys so I demand a perfect default install" in that video? If you are smart enough to copy your game to C: then you are also smart enough to install your VIDECDD, MSCDEX or similar, I would assume. As Phil mentions disk size limits in old BIOS, he should have mentioned EZ Drive and Ontrack and other solutions for those. Those are closed source and we cannot distribute them, but it should be easy to find them. They came with larger harddisks in the time when there was a risk of your BIOS being too old. Two months ago, somebody in the video complained that FreeDOS 1.3 is not out yet and Phil answered it would be upcoming, but without the fixes he wanted... One of the comments says they prefer OAKCDROM as driver, so you could also try that one. Another comment: "Strike Commander and Privateer were notoriously fickle to run on PCs back in the day - I'm not surprised they refused to run on FreeDOS. I remember the "help" pages of the PC games magazines back then being filled with people being unable to run them." Answers were that they mainly need good STACKS and EMM386. Lukas Satin has asked 22 hours ago https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT7Ad5kcEYETdI914zGOKuQ whether using MSCDEX instead of SHSUCDX helps with the copy protection issues of CD based games. Lucas, if you have MSCDEX, please test this yourself and let us know. Another relateable comment: "So you're turning down an open source version of DOS because you had to copy two driver files... Kids these days." Greetings to CZ and to that maker space :-) Eric PS: I see no email contact on Phils website, but Lukas, Ralf Quint, Jim and others could reach him via youtube, I guess. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
