Re: [Freedos-user] How to setup Sound Blaster?
2013/11/26 Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com Hi, What about Descent?? http://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Descent.html Descent works well; both music (MIDI) and sound; (By the way, Descend have utility setup.exe, which is useful to see BLASTER= variables probably) But some troubles exist. First - Descent can not see correct memory size. Add -NoMemCheck to avoid this. Second -Descend freeze; when I play with options (descent.exe --help), I disable joystick to avoid this; -NoJoystick; this two options I added to Descent.bat: ###DESCENT.BAT @echo off rem Batch file to run shareware version of Descent. if exist *.swp del *.swp dcntshr.exe -NoMemCheck -NoJoystick %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 echo. if exist *.swp del *.swp ## Probably, I need to set joystick port in BLASTER= variables, but it also works ;) And third trouble: it seems to CPU too fast. Some slow rocking of spaceship - has turned into a fast shaking. I just need to find some CPU-slow utility, my usual slowdown.exe not help in this case... I do it later... -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] MPlayer: Tips and Tricks
Some hints, for FreeDOS lovers, or HowTo Create a Nice Multimedia System from Old Hardware MPlayer is two versions: official FreeDOS, with sources: http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/user/mplayer/ and old build from Michael Kostylev; http://www.ausreg.com/dos_ports/index.htm ; it seems that sources not exist in Web... official is more fast on old hardware, but it have a small bug: it can freeze DOS, if play more than one file. For example, mplayer 2.mp3 work well, but mplayer *.mp3 or mplayer 2.mp3 3.mp3 freeze after first file played. It seems to be hardware-depend bug, I'll write more guess-work later... Build from Mr. Kostylev have not this bug. I tested the official FreeDOS mplayer. Hardware: NVIDIA Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2), (64 MegaBytes); CPU: Celeron 1600 Mhz, all hardware from approximately 2002 year. FreeDOS is native. First tip. Play excellent both AAC and MP3 audio tracks, up to 44 khz stereo, but sometimes sound is discontinuous. To avoid it, add -af resample 3. (or 16000, or 8000) Second tip. Sound can be too quiet. Add -softvol -softvol-max 1000 to fix it, it make volume possibility to 1000%... Third tip. Screen indication can be disabled, (it speeds up system): /dev/null. Under DOS exist /dev/null? Funny Forth tip. You can create file mplayer.bat with all options in it. here is my mplayer.bat: (mpoffi.exe is renamed official MPlayer) c:\mpoffi.exe -softvol -softvol-max 2000 -af resample 3 /dev/null %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 well, what about HD video? MPEG, 1024x720, 24 fps, sound 44khz AAC/MP3 works well (with sound resampling, as above). H264 works: 400x240, 640x360 - well. H264 800x480 (and more) - can not play at all, returns error: first frame is no keyframe, and another errors, I'll play with it later, probably, play with -vc something? Practically, all you need is graphics card after 2000 year; but unreliable old video card can play 640x360 or at least 320x240 video pretty nice. I hope it is interesting for somebody :) Thank you, FreeDOS MPlayer maintainer! P. S: here is link http://freedos.10956.n7.nabble.com/DJGPP-Mplayer-build-tp19621p19627.html (not tested yet); Thank you, Mr. Georg Potthast! -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MPlayer: Tips and Tricks
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 9:04 AM, Butterfly Close closebutter...@gmail.com wrote: Third tip. Screen indication can be disabled, (it speeds up system): /dev/null. Under DOS exist /dev/null? Funny No, /dev/null doesn't exist. The NUL device does, and provides the same function - stuff redirected to it is thrown away. There's an old batch file trick using it. To test for the existence of an empty directory, use IF EXIST dirname\NUL The NUL device exists in all directories, and the IF EXIST test will find it if the directory exists. COMMAND.COM doesn't have a function to test for the existance of directories. so this was a handy work around. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MPlayer: Tips and Tricks
Hi, On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 9:28 AM, dmccunney dennis.mccun...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 9:04 AM, Butterfly Close closebutter...@gmail.com wrote: Third tip. Screen indication can be disabled, (it speeds up system): /dev/null. Under DOS exist /dev/null? Funny No, /dev/null doesn't exist. The NUL device does, and provides the same function - stuff redirected to it is thrown away. DJGPP has its own /dev/null that it uses (among others) to fake more *nix compatibility. I'm guessing that this particular MPlayer build is compiled with DJGPP. Though that probably? wouldn't work from cmdline shell file redirection. Just use NUL and be happy. There's an old batch file trick using it. To test for the existence of an empty directory, use IF EXIST dirname\NUL The NUL device exists in all directories, and the IF EXIST test will find it if the directory exists. COMMAND.COM doesn't have a function to test for the existance of directories. so this was a handy work around. It's only MS-DOS COMMAND.COM that lacks this. 4DOS and DR-DOS shells both have other methods (isdir, direxist). Not sure about other DOSes, so who knows there. -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MPlayer: Tips and Tricks
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 9:28 AM, dmccunney dennis.mccun...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 9:04 AM, Butterfly Close closebutter...@gmail.com wrote: Third tip. Screen indication can be disabled, (it speeds up system): /dev/null. Under DOS exist /dev/null? Funny No, /dev/null doesn't exist. The NUL device does, and provides the same function - stuff redirected to it is thrown away. DJGPP has its own /dev/null that it uses (among others) to fake more *nix compatibility. I'm guessing that this particular MPlayer build is compiled with DJGPP. Though that probably? wouldn't work from cmdline shell file redirection. Just use NUL and be happy. Yep. There's an old batch file trick using it. To test for the existence of an empty directory, use IF EXIST dirname\NUL The NUL device exists in all directories, and the IF EXIST test will find it if the directory exists. COMMAND.COM doesn't have a function to test for the existance of directories. so this was a handy work around. It's only MS-DOS COMMAND.COM that lacks this. 4DOS and DR-DOS shells both have other methods (isdir, direxist). Not sure about other DOSes, so who knows there. It's MS-DOS COMMAND.COM that was the concern. The trick works in batch files run by CMD,EXE under WinXP, too. I have a couple of batch files that use it. I'm allocating a RAMdisk with a compressed NTFS filesystem using a third-party driver on boot, loading my Firefox profile to it and having FF put its cache there. Firefox is set to look on the RAMdisk for the profile it will use when run. One batch file does the load, and another stores the profile back to HD when I'm done. Faster to store the profile in a zip file, unzip to RAMdisk to load, and zip back to catch changes in profile than to copy. __ Dennis -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] How to setup Sound Blaster?
Hi, On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 6:58 AM, Butterfly Close closebutter...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/11/26 Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com What about Descent?? http://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Descent.html Descent works well; both music (MIDI) and sound; (By the way, Descend have utility setup.exe, which is useful to see BLASTER= variables probably) But some troubles exist. First - Descent can not see correct memory size. Add -NoMemCheck to avoid this. I haven't checked, but I'm assuming it uses DOS4GW.EXE (or maybe the professional version bundled to the main .EXE), which may be the culprit since it's somewhat old and limited (64 MB?). If so, you could try some better alternatives (DOS32A.EXE or WDOSX or Causeway). Oops, I forgot, professional may use some features not supported by others. Oh well, still maybe worth a shot. IIRC, at least Doom still worked. Second -Descend freeze; when I play with options (descent.exe --help), I disable joystick to avoid this; -NoJoystick; this two options I added to Descent.bat: No idea, but since most (?) PCs don't come with serial nor parallel ports anymore, your best bet for joystick is probably just to use DOSBox emulator. And third trouble: it seems to CPU too fast. Some slow rocking of spaceship - has turned into a fast shaking. I just need to find some CPU-slow utility, my usual slowdown.exe not help in this case... I do it later... Again, this is where DOSBox shines. It lets you adjust the frameskip or cpu cycles or even emulation core. Though to be honest, by default it's like a fast 486 DX, which is slow enough for most old '90s games. You could maybe also use DOSEMU, but I think DOSBox is better since it's more tested (and meant only) for games. I'm not that much of a gamer, but I did play the Chasm: The Rift demo (CHASM-SW.RAR) two years ago, and I had to do a few minor things to get it to work in real (native) DOS. It's an old '90s game that used BP7's 16-bit DPMI stuffs, so I had to load HDPMI16 and then FDAPM SPEED3 before it would work (albeit without sound, natch). IIRC, emulation was more enjoyable, but it's still nice to be able to run natively (for when emulation doesn't work or is too slow). I'm sure there are other slowdown utils (e.g. http://www.bretjohnson.us has SLOWDOWN, aka slodn310.zip), but I haven't tested them recently. P.S. Oops, almost forgot, it could be some timing issue with some driver or TSR in the background (e.g. some games don't like IDLEDPMS), so you could also try temporarily disabling most things and only booting (fairly) clean before playing. -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] MPlayer: Tips and Tricks
Hi, On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 8:04 AM, Butterfly Close closebutter...@gmail.com wrote: Some hints, for FreeDOS lovers, or HowTo Create a Nice Multimedia System from Old Hardware MPlayer is two versions: official FreeDOS, with sources: http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/user/mplayer/ IIRC, this is just an archival copy made by Jim Hall. It's not official in any sense as there was (AFAIK) never a DOS/DJGPP maintainer for this. I never rebuilt it (probably a big pain) and have no interest in multimedia (nor patents, ugh), so I never even tried running it. You'd have more luck asking on BTTR's Forum. At least some of them have rebuilt this (or similar, e.g. FFMpeg) in recent years, e.g. RayeR or Khusraw. and old build from Michael Kostylev; http://www.ausreg.com/dos_ports/index.htm ; it seems that sources not exist in Web... Mik was notoriously bad about publishing his efforts, and he basically just disappeared. I'm not sure if he really ever meant to fully propagate any of it. So most of it just wasn't properly vetted. He was not really actively trying to volunteer for DOS communities. But that didn't stop people from keeping what little bits of his that they could find. Anyways, I know GPL sounds nice here (which I assume is why you're mentioning sources), but unless you're a glutton for punishment, you will not enjoy trying to rebuild such things. DJGPP is just not well-supported (upstream or downstream), so you're really swimming against the tide. Just use Linux isn't advice, it's a requirement since most *nix-y projects flat out refuse to even pretend to support DJGPP. Forth tip. You can create file mplayer.bat with all options in it. here is my mplayer.bat: (mpoffi.exe is renamed official MPlayer) c:\mpoffi.exe -softvol -softvol-max 2000 -af resample 3 /dev/null %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 DJGPP supports response files, so mpoffi.exe @blah.txt should also work (esp. if you're going beyond 128 chars). I hope it is interesting for somebody :) Thank you, FreeDOS MPlayer maintainer! P. S: here is link http://freedos.10956.n7.nabble.com/DJGPP-Mplayer-build-tp19621p19627.html (not tested yet); Thank you, Mr. Georg Potthast! Again, it's probably not totally impossible to rebuild such things, but most of it doesn't work by default with DJGPP, and AFAIK there is no maintainer to any of this. Don't get your hopes up, what you see is (maybe) all you get ... for now. -- Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349351iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
