On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Morten Rønne morten.roenne@tdcadsl.dk wrote:
Hi Wine-devel
My name is Morten and I would like for some of my old DOS/WIN95 games to work with wine. :)
I know that I most likely could solve this by using DOSbox and/or DOSemu. But I don't consider either of them user friendly in it's raw form. And I hope in the future it could be more of a Go to this menu item, click a few choices and then play game thing.
So I have been looking into what one of them is needing (XCOM Apocalypse).
The first thing that needs work is the VGA screen driver. The game needs one of the unsupported video modes. After looking further into it, I can see that the current screen driver, needs to be more of an emulator than just a copy of the framebuffer/RAM window to/from the DirectDraw surface.
But since I need to do a lot rewrite of the code, to get a emulator into things, I would of course like to test all the stuff that I don't touch (in term of videomodes). But there isn't a test catalog in dlls/krnl386.exe16. That could of course be due to the fact that it is pretty hard to write test for that old platform and get proper test on a live version. Or am I missing something here?
Looking over the list of videomodes, I can see that a lot of them says supported. Is that really true or do they simply not break? Again is there anyway to test that those modes are truely supported in my code change (and in the current code)?
Another problem that I am facing at a later stage is that most of the games needs to be installed in win95 mode. But I think that most people will run with something like XP, Vista or Win7 as default mode. That will break most of the old installers as DOS version becomes 5.0 or something "silly" like that. So I am thinking about having to create a wrapper program where you can install your old programs through so the mode gets set correctly during install. And perhaps also creates some proper shortcuts in the menu. And perhaps even into the new game database that new windows version have. And thoughts/ideas on this?
Another way to handle this would be to do something like a MD5 on the install.exe (hoping that they differ) and then look up in the AppDB, to see which mode to use as installer mode (and run mode). Yes, that would most likely require changes to AppDB. But I can see a use for this even for the above wrapper program (Autodetect using AppDB).
Once I get a new VGA "driver" running, I will most likely start looking into INT10h and others that try to interface to the VGA "driver".
Best Regards Morten Rønne
Hi Morten,
First of all welcome to Wine. Myself I'm a bit worried about whether we should improve our DOS support even further. The problem is that more and more people are moving over to 64-bit Linux. While you can run 32-bit programs on a 64-bit system, there is no protected mode support (vm86; there is emulation in some cases using a kernel module). I don't know all the details about what works and not but I fear the 64-bit move makes DOS support in Wine not that useful these days but I might be wrong.
Roderick