Re: Question about NTFS compression / Disk cache

Posted on 2011-08-12, 00:48

by

by Lofty

in Milliways

in Milliways

The on-disk cache would be used more efficiently, and there'd be less data to read from/write to the disk anyway, but I'm pretty sure the data is decompressed before storing it in Windows' own disk cache.

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Re: Master of Magic problem

Posted on 2011-02-19, 23:19

by

by Lofty

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

Both the item creation spells seem to work ok here (XP, dosbox 0.74, dynamic core, MOM v1.31), as does running Itemmake.exe directly. Edit: Maybe the game can't write to ITEMDATA.LBX or some other important file (set as read-only?) Any errors in the dosbox status window when it crashes?

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Re: PSOne / PSOne games on PS2 dithering question

Posted on 2010-12-25, 21:17

by

by Lofty

in Console & Arcade Emulation

in Console & Arcade Emulation

To approximate a higher color depth obviously But that's the thing! The PSOne renders everything at 24bit! It's only when it outputs the information onto the screen that it reduces the color depth. And that's something I don't quite understand... I don't know if that's true - I can't find any …

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Re: One Chance :)

Posted on 2010-12-11, 15:29

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by Lofty

in Milliways

in Milliways

keropi wrote: a wizard that watches you from his tower stops you. A wizard called "Flash Cookie". 😀

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Re: DOS Gaming Computer Help

Posted on 2009-09-13, 05:52

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by Lofty

in Milliways

in Milliways

The original version of Quake 1 used software rendering only which takes a lot of cpu power and memory bandwidth at high resolutions like 1280x1024. I think the lowest resolution you could select was 320x200 which was designed for low-end Pentium 1s (so around 75 Mhz) and it could still be a little …

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Re: Resolution, Scalers etc.

Posted on 2009-07-10, 18:06

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by Lofty

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

Low-resolution images almost always look bad when enlarged onto a big screen even though all that's happening is the pixels are being made larger. It tends to be especially bad on LCD screens as they don't have the slight blurring effect that old CRT screens do. Using OpenGL as an output method …

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Re: Save State?

Posted on 2009-05-02, 08:30

by

by Lofty

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

Nope. This gets asked a lot. Maybe some day it'll be supported but it's not trivial to implement. (One reason is a game can change files on any mounted drive, and that would have to be included in the save state.)

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Re: real/protected mode dos games

Posted on 2009-04-12, 14:22

by

by Lofty

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

Summarising: Real mode: 16-bit only. Basically a compatibility mode for software written for the 8086 such as DOS. Has 16-bit cpu registers and a 20-bit address space and so can address 1MB of memory (on PCs, this was split into 640KB "conventional memory" + 384K ROM). 386 (32-bit) protected mode: …

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Re: real/protected mode dos games

Posted on 2009-04-04, 09:09

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by Lofty

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

A bit of generalization there; there is also a 16-bit protected mode introduced with the 80286, I believe Wolfenstein 3-D is one game that uses it. Yes there is, but it had a lot of restrictions and wasn't widely used. I'm not aware of any game that uses it, although I guess there must be a few. …

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Re: real/protected mode dos games

Posted on 2009-04-03, 22:00

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by Lofty

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

Real mode is the normal 16-bit mode, and protected mode is the 32-bit mode. A game using DPMI functions perhaps provided by a DOS extender has to be running in protected mode. The DOS extender is there to allow the protected mode program to easily interface with DOS/BIOS functions that only work in …

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Re: Heretic series sound problems on dosbox

Posted on 2008-12-08, 17:35

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by Lofty

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

wd wrote: Though windows ports aren't too useful for non-windows people. Besides that i've never had any problem with sound in heretic/hexen games. Of course not, but he said he was using Vista. 😀

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Re: Heretic series sound problems on dosbox

Posted on 2008-12-07, 20:02

by

by Lofty

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

Might be better to use one of the Windows ports anyway. IIRC Doomsday will run Heretic and Hexen although I'm not sure if it works on Vista.

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Re: 16-Bit VESA graphics?

Posted on 2007-04-24, 23:28

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by Lofty

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

Yeah, the bottleneck is the *emulated* writing to the framebuffer (AKA screen memory). It goes emulated software -> emulated framebuffer -> real framebuffer. The first bit is the slow bit. Copying from the emulated framebuffer to the real one is relatively fast unless filters are applied along the …

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Re: Starting screen position

Posted on 2007-04-07, 14:43

by

by Lofty

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

Actually, monitors can send data to the PC (That's how monitor autodetect works), but MiniMax is right. For a while, monitors have been smart enough to store different adjustment settings for different resolutions.

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Re: ` Master of Magic `

Posted on 2006-08-08, 10:59

by

by Lofty

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

MOM is roughly 8 megs compressed. That does sound like the problem.

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Re: Front Ends

Posted on 2006-08-08, 10:42

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by Lofty

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

With the mount command, you can use long directory names and names with spaces in, but not with the actual dos commands like CD - real DOS and thus DosBox is limited to 8 characters + 3 for extension (8.3 format) without spaces. To get into a directory with a long name/with spaces, you need to use …

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Re: "Wrath of Earth"---running slow,screen updates slow.

Posted on 2006-08-02, 09:45

by

by Lofty

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

Output mode doesn't usually make much difference, and the best one varies between graphics cards. I'd go for Overlay, DDraw, or OpenGL. Just try them all and see. The command line is what you type to load the game. So, "WOE TranSend". If you're using a frontend, I'm not sure how you'd do it. Depends …

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Re: memory state save

Posted on 2006-08-02, 09:12

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by Lofty

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

This has indeed been asked a lot. The main problem is what happens when a game alters files on your hard disk. DosBox would have to make copies of these files too as part of the save state. This isn't an issue with most consoles, and it's less of an issue with floppy-based games like most amiga …

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Re: Odd problem with fullscreen...

Posted on 2006-08-02, 09:02

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by Lofty

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

I've noticed this or something similar on various games. Tyrian2K for example. Parts of the screen don't get updated properly after fading, or at least there's a delay before they do, and there's major slowdown during the fade. Only seems to happen with surface output mode for me though. Overlay and …

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Re: Im new and havent a clue

Posted on 2006-08-02, 08:27

by

by Lofty

in DOSBox Games/Apps

in DOSBox Games/Apps

A and B are floppy drives. The game expects to be installed from floppy disks. Did you try "mount a c:\skies" ?

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