Mikeu on 4/12/2006 at 02:14
Thinking about trying Virtual PC. However I have to use the beta of 2007 which allows it to be used on Vista so that may cause even more issues. But I'll see what I can do with that
Hollowtip on 11/12/2006 at 03:45
I suggest you try (
http://www.freedos.org/) FreeDOS. Its an open source remake of DOS. When I used it, it was still in its early stages (haven't used it in a long time due to the fact that I can now run SS1 "natively" in Win XP), but ran beautifully, supporting all of my hardware (had real problems getting sound to work with other programs), and since its not an emulator, SS could run at full speed.
Now days, (
http://www.freedos.org/) FreeDOS can run inside a Virtual PC, or as a seperate operating system (pick which OS you want to use when the PC boots, and you don't need a seperate partion on your hard disk to install it, unlike when you install different versions of windows). I used the seperate OS, ran well, took about 15mins to work out exactly how to set it up to run SS perfectly.
The_Raven on 11/12/2006 at 04:11
I've been running FreeDos in VMware Player and it works fairly well, except for sound. The big problem is that the DOS drivers for my soundcard are wrapped around an ordinary exe file and wants access to a low level memory block. This means you can't load it properly at boot time, which is the only time you can take low level blocks of memory in FreeDos.
Vigil on 11/12/2006 at 08:02
What practical advantage does FreeDOS in a VM provide over DOSBox?
The_Raven on 11/12/2006 at 15:39
A simple answer would be more speed. The additional abstraction layers in a virtual machine will slow things down, but not to the extent that complete emulation will. In my case, a virtual machine is pretty much required since my computer is only 950Mhz, so complete emulation is too slow/costly.
Vigil on 11/12/2006 at 16:45
Good point, I'd been forgetting that VMware doesn't go to the extent of emulating the CPU. What settings do you use to get System Shock running? I could try putting together a preconfigured VMWare package a la SS Portable, assuming that something could be worked out regarding the sound.
Edit: I see that VMWare emulates a Sound Blaster PCI128... the driver for which you couldn't get working in FreeDOS?
The_Raven on 11/12/2006 at 18:22
That's it. I didn't come across too much information in my internet searches while I was messing around with it. Right now I've put it aside for exams, but I will probably pick it up over the christmas holiday and mess around with it some more. What I was trying to do was use the SB card that's in my computer under the guest OS, since emulation just slows things down too much, and I'm not too sure if it's FreeDos or the VMware sound emulation that's causing the problem. The drivers wouldn't even detect a sound card without the sound settings being enabled in WMware, but will still not load at run-time or boot-time. What I will do to help troubleshoot when I go home for the holidays is find an old version of DOS I have lying around and see if I can get it running under that.
