TeaRex, that's easy to say ("it's SOURCE forge), but the fact is that on 99% of the open-source projects, one is -directed- to the sourceforge page; as THE place to get a program, and find out about it.

So it really isn't germane what the domain-name is. That's where people are sent to. Call it Bangagongforge.org or TelegramSamforge.org, and it's still the same...

But never mind my frustration with that sad situation...I'm just a computer USER.....grin...

(and no, I'm not going to get a C-compiler and devote my life to becoming a C-programmer. I've already got 10 complex skills and software packages to be up-to-speed on...i.e. ORCAD, Quartus-II FPGA design, Pro-E, etc.....can you tell I'm a hardware guy? grin)

Alkarion, thanks much. I will first find out what files pcad screams for; so that I'm uploading only the minimum necessary to get it to the point where it switches to graphics-mode and looks for the dongle. Then I'll zip it and upload it.

TeaRex, thanks for the brief on booting dos within dosbox. Yup, I have an old Winimage on disk here. I can make an image. And I will study the dosbox docs again.

All I saw before was the 'mount' command for drives...missed the IMGMOUNT thing. When I first downloaded and installed DOS box, it never even entered my head that I'd want/need to load DOS "again"....i.e. the assumption was that dosbox WAS dos, providing dos. Interesting that it can overlay -another- dos within/ontop of itself...

You started to talk about sourceforge, can't see anybody mentioning
it before in this thread.

For CVS builds, see DOSBox SVN Builds

For dos installations, see Sample usage of a harddisc image in DOSBOX

dozer wrote:

I find much of the sourceforge stuff to be simply impenetrable; as if it's purposely written to be obscure; understandable only to linux/C programmers....keep the club exclusive or whatever.

Dead right: SourceForge is a collaboration tool for programmers. What you describe is exactly what it wants to be. If you go there and don't understand anything, you can be sure there is nothing you miss - it's simply nothing that you need to know, since it is only useful to programmers.

`Moe` wrote:

Dead right: SourceForge is a collaboration tool for programmers. What you describe is exactly what it wants to be. If you go there and don't understand anything, you can be sure there is nothing you miss - it's simply nothing that you need to know, since it is only useful to programmers.

🤣 🤣

Then the thousands of programmers/authors might want to stop referring the millions of users there, hmmm ?? 😁

Seriously though, every day that that attitude continues is another day that open-source remains only 1% of the software world, and M$ et al remain on top with 99%. We lose.

I think that some of the programmers DO want people to be able to USE their tool. There are a number of projects there which are done very well indeed. The DosBox page is one of the better ones...as is the product itself. Very simple to find, download, install, and go.

WD: thanks for the link to the DOS-install page. That'll help.

Even if I can get it working that way though, I'm still very curious to hear what's not working in the normal DosBox environment. It has to be something very small and trivial. I didn't get a chance to bundle those files for Alkerion yet, but I hope to get to that tonight.

ps; please forget I said anything about the problems with open-source presentation and communications. It was not a valid part of this thread. I was just at a peak of frustration that day. I will go back and edit it away; if that's desired. My apologies for getting off-track.

And again thanks to those helping with the PCAD problem on dosbox.

dozer wrote:

Then the thousands of programmers/authors might want to stop referring the millions of users there, hmmm ??

I don't agree with the "millions" part, but you are basically right.

Sourceforge gives projects the possibility to host a project web site, just like dosbox.sf.net, and that should be the place where users go, nowhere else.

I guess the main fault is to use a phrase like "try CVS", since what people mean is "try one of the regular unofficial test builds". If we used that phrase, you wouldn't have touched Sourceforge at all and would be happy now 😉

hi Moe,

I think you've hit on a part of the problem. The use of "in crowd" language; when normal terms would do fine.

Just saying "try one of the beta versions on the CVS page" would carry the right meaning to a lot more people. I think that a lot more people know what a "beta" is than what a "CVS" is.

On the PCAD thing....

I've had the win2k console window minimized throughout this adventure...but happened to look at it while trying to figure out the min. set of files needed; and noticed an error message (from dosbox or a dosbox op I assume)...

CONFIG:Loading settings from config file E:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.63\dosbox.con
f
MIXER:No Sound Mode Selected.
MIDI:Opened device:win32
Opening Windows serial port
CreateFile failed with error 5.

I -could- get off on a tangent about the intensely frustrating habit of programmers not to tell us WHAT filename was involved with the error...but I won't.....grin....

Any ideas what's causing this 'error 5', or whether it's significant or not?

I wonder if it's involved with the write of SIBMPC.DRV back to disk, that....I think it was HAL....mentioned. ??

Just saying "try one of the beta versions on the CVS page" would carry the right meaning to a lot more people. I think that a lot more people know what a "beta" is than what a "CVS" is.

the problem is that we are speaking to "technical" here. The current source is not beta, it's under development (well, now it jumped to pre release candidate quality 😀). Beta is, strictly speaking, reserved for a special tag in the development, thus we always talk about "current CVS". Sorry for not adding something useful here 😀

Alkerion,

Attached is a RAR file of the minimum needed to get PCAD to the stage where it enters the graphics editor and puts the message at the bottom of "security device port failure".

Note: in the other module (not included here) for editing PCB instead of schematic, the error msg is slightly different. Says "security device not found". I don't believe this is significant, but thought I'd mention it.

I don't know that LOCATE.COM is needed, or even part of the PCAD pkg.

It could be just a DOS utility of some sort; but I didn't want to run it on this machine and end up trashing the HD by accident.

In any case, PCAD acts exactly the same with or without it in the \pcad\exe directory; fyi.

PCADDRV.SYS is a text file giving pcad the location and choice of drivers to use. The .DRV files need to be in whatever dir. is specified in this SYS file.

The three DRV files are system-interface, mouse-driver (this one is for MS serial mouse, i.e. generic), and display driver (this one is for std. 640x480 vga).

I included config.sys and autoexec.bat as well; in case it helps.

Speaking of mice....

I'm wondering if the issue is with DosBox's mouse handling.

Normally, when running pcad on a dos machine in the past, I include a command in autoexec to run "MOUSTRAK"; which is the driver that came with this ITAC trackball back when. However, I removed it because the mouse seems to work in DosBox without it.

But that makes me wonder.....if DosBox is handling mouse stuff, is it intercepting I/O and calls from programs to COM1 ?? That could be messing up the PSAVE operation perhaps.

Anyway, here are the files. Note that I renamed the RAR with a TXT extension so that the board would accept it.

> CreateFile failed with error 5.
This should mean the com port is already in use.
Try the unofficial test build and it will give you a better error message 😀
Besides, maybe the driver file needs to find a com port in the first place to work, even with the psave TSR. In 0.63 this is, depending on the search method of the program, not guaranteed even with enabled directserial.

hal, if you mean Pcad's serial mouse driver, then yes, you're right of course. It needs to find the port in order to read the mouse.

fwiw, both mouse and security-device are set to com1 in the pccaps.cfg file. This is normal, and does not cause any problem on a DOS machine.

Presumably, DoxBox is feeding windows-mouse data to dos programs somehow....emulating a com1 ??

Unfortunately, the DosBox window opens right on top of the win2k console window, and I can't move it fast enough....but I -can- see that that error msg isn't being printed immediately. It seems to appear on the console right near the end of the DOS "boot", i.e. as the autoexec is finishing loading things....of which PSAVE is the last item.

hmmm....just thinking....I am almost positive that PCAD's own drivers are NOT being loaded as part of this 'boot' process. I'm pretty sure they don't load until the PCCAPS.EXE is started.

And that is not part of the 'boot' process. Once the boot finishes, I manually type "pccaps" at the command-prompt to start pcad.

In which case, the error likely is -not- related to the pcad serial driver...since it hasn't been loaded at the time this error appears.

damn...just realized that I forgot to include dosbox.cnf in the upload. Let me know if that's needed. Fyi, I've tried it with directserial both on and off...and did not find any mouse-related items to vary for testing.

dosbox doesn't emulate a com mouse
it emulates a ps2 mouse.

Looks like it works in CVS? Or can I draw a circle without psave? When I tried it hung. No DOS booting, plain dosbox.

I didn't need to switch the directserial on, the serial dummy is seems to be sufficient.

Mouse doesn't work.

You did it !

No, you couldn't have drawn unless it was working. The display of "dongle not found" message, occurs immediately upon the graphics-editor opening.

Yup, you have it working all right.

As far as mouse not working, Qbix just noted that doxbox is emulating ps2mouse, not serial. So that might explain it.

pcad -does- come with a ps2mouse driver; which I just tried; but still got dongle failure.

OK, CVS it is. I wonder if it'll work fine with CVS plus a change to PS2 mouse driver...

I think someone posted a direct link earlier in the thread....was that to a binary, and was that the one you used HAL?

If so, I'll try that.

ps; how did you draw a circle without mouse? cursor-keys?

http://cvscompile.aep-emu.de/dosbox.htm

It works!

thanks for the link Qbix.

funny effect....after exiting PCAD, the mouse isn't working any more. No cursor.

And the weird thing is that it's gone bad even over -other- windows on the screen. I don't think I've ever encountered anything before which 'breaks" the mouse in win2k for anything other than its own window.

I tried typing EXIT at the dos prompt, and that closes both windows, and brings the mouse back OK.

I'm sure glad one of you guys put that "EXIT" command in there! grin

I'm going to put all the files back in the EXE directory, and try it on a real schematic file now...

There is some key combination to give you back the mouse ctrl + Fsomething - readme. I use alt+tab for that.
(I used my own CVS build - and yes, the kezboard was the only choice left for the circle 😀)

Yup, working fine!!

You guys are great.

Thanks to HAL, WD, Qbix, Aklerion, TeaRex, et al.

Really appreciate you looking into this and figuring out a way to make it work.

Please satisfy my engineer's curiousity....what do you think is different between the two dosbox versions which is making it work ??

ps; that "error 5" went away too, fyi

pps; HAL, yup, the ctrl-F10 unlocks the mouse and allows me to do something in another window, then come back. thanks!

In an attempt to make it run a little smoother and faster, I have disabled MIDI, and set CPU type back to "normal". I will try "simple" as well; since PCAD is pretty old 16b code...will run on an 8088 as far as I know.

Any other speedup tips? I already have modem disabled, and all the soundcard things I could find in the Conf. file.

Video: do you guys think it will work with VESA drivers? There is supposed to be a VESA driver for this version of PCAD around; which lets it run at 1024x768....which would be really nice, since the 640x480 is almost unusably small on this laptop....grin...

Thanks again to everyone!

My suspicion is a bug in dosbox 0.63: at startup the bios code looked for serial ports before those were activated resulting in the bios table reporting no port base addresses. But since I don't bother to check this suspicion is likely to be wrong.
For speed try dynamic core and ctrl+f12.
You may be lucky with vesa especially with latest CVS builds. Work has been done there.

HAL,

That might be a good guess though. It correlates with the message that PCAD put at the bottom of the screen. Perhaps the specific wording of that message -was- meaningful....i.e. "security device PORT not found". 😉

re: VESA stuff...

Right now, dosbox is opening a sub-screen 640x480 window on this 1024x768 laptop screen. (HP6000 Omnibook, P3-700, win2k).

What do you think would happen if PCAD successfully opens the graphics-editor at 1024x768? Would you expect the doxbox window to resize automatically?

Or ??

Might just the act of loading the 1024 driver crash win2k ??

I'm trying to picture how doxbox handles the different resolutions between dosbox-window and background win2k screen and windows...

I can see how it can simply resize the window, for resolutions smaller than the screen-size; and emulate the dos resolution within the overall win2k screen. But I wonder how it handles a call for something equal to the full windows screen. ??