DosBox not launching

Does anyone have !DosBox running on a Pi 3B with RISC OS 5.27? I have alignment exceptions switched off but the app stubbornly refuses to launch or even give me a clue where to start.

I thought I had used !DosBox on this Pi before but it may have been a Pi 2, which would suggest this may be an ARMv8 thing. Ideas gratefully received.

Bonus points: how do we troubleshoot things like this, when things silently quit? Even running it from a Task Window doesn’t reveal any error message.

PatchSWP? – http://www.tellima.nl/riscos/

Why isn’t this in the OS?

Thanks Bryan, I hadn’t tried that. Now works fine.

But we still need a newer version :)

For information, some bugs in the SDL are now solved, so a newer build would work in fullscreen AND window modes. GCC has evolved too and DosBox could provide much better performances (support for VFP). Last point, some patches made for DosBox permit to install and use Windows 95 and 98.

I have no time left, but I could pay for the development of DosBox under RISC OS.

DOSBox 0.74 built with VFP support and the latest SDL 1.2 libraries is available here. Full screen works for Titanium and IGEPv5.

Assuming you already have a suitable hard disc image with Win95 on.

Copy the image e.g. ‘w95’ to ram disc otherwise disc access is very slow. In RISC OS change directory to where where ‘w95’ is.

At the command prompt in DOSBox type,

imgmount c w95
boot -l c

The following settings in dosbox.conf seem to make Win95 a bit faster.

core=simple
cycles=max

memsize=64

Coooool.

Does it include the dynamic recompilation core?

Copy the image e.g. ‘w95’ to ram disc otherwise disc access is very slow.

It would be really useful to be able to create several RAM discs (in DA).
CreateRAMFS size (return disc number)
CloseRAMFS number
LoadRAMFS imagefile TO number
SaveRAMFS number TO imagefile

Or to be able to cache files in DA.

DOSBox 0.74 built with VFP support and the latest SDL 1.2 libraries

Nice.
Do you happen to know what the actual differences were between DOSBox and the FastDOSBox?

Full screen works for Titanium and IGEPv5.

Pi2 as well. Just for the hell of it, I installed Windows 3.11 (Workgroups). The only comment was that there was some oddball screen corruption in the SVGA (800×600) 256 colour display modes, but the 16 colour version worked fine. As did pretty much everything else. It wasn’t crashy, it worked reliably, and after banging my head on the desk a while, I managed to fix the problem of the #~ key doing nothing, and \| doing #~ (as you can imagine, \ is kind of useful for DOS paths!).

I managed to fix the problem of the #~ key doing nothing, and \| doing #~

First, you need to be running with a configuration file. It’s outside the scope of this message, suffice to Google “dosbox conf file” will get you some info.

You will probably find an example contains the following line:

mapperfile=mapper-CVS.map

That won’t work as it isn’t a filename valid on RISC OS. Simply set it to mapper=keymap (and DOSBox will actually save “dosbox/keymap”!).

The [autoexec] section at the end is useful as you can set up DOSbox to get your environment running automatically as you start DOSbox.
For example, mine says:

[autoexec]
mount c /sdfs::riscospi/$/win
c:
cd windows
win

Set up DOSBox to use the config file by changing the run command to:

Run <DosBox$Dir>.dosbox -conf <dosbox$dir>.dosbox/conf %*0 >null: 2>null:

When the machine is running, press Ctrl-F1.

That’s the keymapper. It’s not the easiest thing to use but we can fix the keys easily enough.

Click on the ‘\’ just to the left of the Enter key.
The bottom of the screen will say EVENT:key_backslash and some other stuff.
Click on the Del button to the right of the key description.
Then click on Add and press ‘#’.

Now click on the ‘<’ key on the keyboard layout (beside left Shift).
It is bizarrely named key_lessthan.
Del whatever is there, then Add and press ‘\’.

Now click on Save to make these changes stick, then click Exit to go back to the emulation.

It might be an idea to include some default settings within the DOSBox archive (but obviously not within DOSBox itself, lest they overwrite the user’s preferences upon upgrading ;-) ). A directory containing !Run, the conf file, and a keymap file could be drag-copied into DOSBox to give a starting position for those who want to tweak the defaults.

Do you happen to know what the actual differences were between DOSBox and the FastDOSBox?

Dynarec