Advanced DOSBox TutorialIn the Basic DOSBox Tutorial you learned how to use DOSBox, and how to customize it to play games that don't run, or run incorrectly, with the default settings. This involved increasing or decreasing the emulation speed, changing the graphics mode or the type of PC being emulated, changing the SoundBlaster settings, and mounting a drive as a CD-ROM or floppy drive. These are all relatively simple to do, and allow the vast majority of DOS and Win16 games to be played. Some games, however, require proprietary Super VGA graphics chipsets, which is not yet part of the standard DOSBox distribution. Getting Windows 3.1 to use DOSBox's SoundBlaster emulation, and installing drivers to allow 256 or more colors are too advanced for a tutorial for beginners. You must be familiar with the Basic tutorial in order to follow these instructions. It's time to learn how to use DOSBox to play games with advanced graphics, and how to configure Windows 3.1 to play any game. In 2005, a fellow known by the handle "vasyl" wrote a Multiple SVGA chipset patch for DOSBox, which you can read about here. It makes it incredibly easy to add SVGA capabilities to DOSBox, but it's not part of the standard installation yet. Patching DOSBox is pretty advanced, so let's take the easy route. The DOSBox Daum Cafe compiles a DOSBox distribution that has a number of useful patches already installed. It's like one-stop shopping for DOSBox. Download a copy to get started.
Originally, all PC graphics modes were standardized, usually by IBM. Any game or operating system can support EGA or VGA graphics cards by writing support for a single standard, and any graphics card that supports that graphics mode will be supported. After VGA, IBM tried to make 8514/a the new graphics standard. It supported a 1024×768 resolution with 256 at 43.5 Hz interlaced (meaning that odd and even lines were drawn on alternate frames), and 640×480 with 256 colors at 60 Hz non-interlaced (or progressive, meaning that the entire screen is drawn every frame). For one reason or another, the standard didn't catch on, and soon there were dozens of incompatible graphics chipsets that claimed "Super VGA graphics". Common resolutions were 600×480, 800×600, and 1024×768, and common color depths were 16, 256, 32K, 64K, and 16M colors. How many of these modes were available largely depended on how much video RAM a graphics card had. The standard version of DOSBox supports basic Super VGA graphics, and will run the standard "Super VGA (800x600, 16 colors)" mode in Windows 3.1. The Multiple SVGA chipset patch adds support for some of the most popular SVGA chipsets of this era. At present, it supports early graphics cards from S3 Graphics, the Tseng Labs ET3000 and ET4000, and the Paradise PVGA1A. There is also an emulator that allows ET4000 graphics cards to run 8514/a software. We'll go through using each of these modes in DOS and Windows. DOSBox has a configuration file called dosbox.conf, which can be viewed and modified in any text editor.
Configuration options are arranged into groups. Daum Cafe's version of DOSBox includes a section called [vga], which is created by the Multiple SVGA chipset patch, and not found in the regular version of DOSBox. This allows you to choose a chipset, and decide how much video RAM should be available to the graphics card. In the screenshot above, the graphics card has 2 MB of RAM. Graphics cards from this era typically had 512 KB, 1 MB, or 2 MB of video RAM. S3 is selected by default. Since SVGA graphics cards are backwards compatible with earlier standards, it's safe to leave this on even if you're playing non-SVGA games. MoraffWare was one of the first companies to add Super VGA graphics modes to their games. Let's take the example of Moraff's Escapade. Many MoraffWare games start with a setup screen that asks you to select a graphics mode. Escapade just includes five executable files, named ESCMONO, ESCMCGA, ESCAHEAD, ESCTRID, and ESCTSENG. The readme file explains that these are for monochrome VGA, MCGA, Ahead Systems 1 MB, Trident 1 MB, and Tseng Labs 1 MB cards. MCGA was an IBM 320×200 with 256 colors graphics mode that became part of the VGA standard. The major difference is that VGA was capable of 640×480 resolution with 16 colors, but most games use the MCGA mode to make more colorful graphics with the 256 color mode. The Ahead, Trident and Tseng Labs modes are all 1024×768 in 256 colors, which means that they have roughly four times the vertical and horizontal resolution of MCGA (16 times as many pixels!), and still with 256 colors! Regular DOSBox limits your options to monochrome VGA or MCGA graphics. The only chipset that the Multiple SVGA chipset supports is the Tseng Labs card, so set svgachipset to ET4000 and videoram to at least 1024. Here's a side-by-side comparison of the two video modes. You'll have to click on the Tseng Labs version to see the whole screenshot because it's so huge!
Okay, so maybe Moraff's Escapade still looks pretty lousy at Super VGA resolutions. Escapade happens to support both VGA and SVGA resolutions, and now you can see what you've been missing if you've just been using regular DOSBox! For playing DOS games, it's just this easy. Playing games in Windows 3.1 is a bit more complicated. First of all, let's be clear on this point: DOSBox is a DOS emulator. It doesn't emulate Windows 3.1, so you'll need a copy of Windows between Windows 1.0 and 3.11 if you want to run Win16 games in DOSBox. The steps below detail the fastest and easiest way to run Windows 3.1 in DOSBox. Take your Windows installation disks and copy all of the data into a folder on your hard drive. For the purposes of this tutorial, let's call this folder INSTALL. Installation within DOSBox will be much faster this way, and you'll be able to make changes to your Windows setup without having to get your floppy disks when Windows asks for them. Windows expects to be run from a folder, named WINDOWS by default. It will not run properly if you mount the Windows folder in DOSBox. Instead, create a folder for all of your Windows games — let's call it WINGAMES. Put the folder with the files from your Windows installation disks in WINGAMES, and mount C:\WINGAMES as the C: drive. Navigate to your installation directory by typing:
Installation occurs in just a few seconds, since it's installing from the hard drive instead of floppy disks. Of course, you had to copy all of the data off of the floppy disks before, but you'll save a lot of time whenever you reinstall Windows in the future, or when Windows prompts you for one of the installation disks. Once installation is complete, everything should look like this.
For some reason, my mouse never works when installation is complete. Don't worry about that. You can exit Windows by pressing Alt+F to access the File menu, and press X or navigate to Exit Windows with the arrow keys. Always shutdown Windows properly to be sure that your changes are saved. Close DOSBox and start it up again. When you told Windows to install to C:\WINDOWS, it was installed to C:\WINGAMES\WINDOWS (this happens automatically if you choose Express Install). Since WINGAMES will always be mounted as C:\, you'll run windows by changing directory to the WINDOWS folder and typing "WIN".
Now everything you need, from Windows itself to the installation disks to your library of games, are all in a neat little package in your WINGAMES folder. Whenever Windows asks you to insert one of your installations disks, direct it to look for the files at C:\INSTALL. All of your games should be in folders within WINGAMES, so you can add programs by directing Windows to look for them in folders within the root directory (C:\). Remember, you must mount WINGAMES as the C: drive, not WINGAMES\WINDOWS, otherwise Windows will not be able to find any of the program groups. Okay, so you logged back into Windows. Did Windows greet you with a musical welcome? No? That's because it doesn't know that you have a sound card! You'll have to go into the Control Panel and click on Drivers. Choose Add and select Sound Blaster from the list.
Windows will ask you to insert Microsoft Windows 3.1 Disk #3, but you can tell it to look for the driver in C:\INSTALL. See? You've been using Windows for two minutes and already it's asking you for the installation disks! That's because hard drives were small in those days, so drivers weren't installed to your hard drive until you needed them. You're going to be asked to insert those disks a lot, so you must be glad that I told you to put those files on your hard drive! Windows will ask for a port number and interrupt, which are 220 and 7 by default. Windows will want to restart, and you'll get a cheerful little tune when it comes back up. Now you can configure Windows any way you want, from the wallpaper to the screensaver, and start adding games to your Games group. Windows looks and sounds exactly the way you remember it, and you can use all of your favorite features, from Minsesweeper to the old Windows Calendar program. The Windows calculator still has that bug that Microsoft was too embarrassed to reveal (try subtracting 3.1 from 3.11). Put DOSBox into full screen mode and it's just like running Windows on an old PC!
Most early Windows games only expected you to have VGA graphics, so this might be as much as you need to know. Later on, games and multimedia applications started to require higher resolutions and color depth. QuickTime came along and allowed full motion video clips to be added to games and encyclopedias on CD-ROM (remember how to mount a CD-ROM from the Basic Tutorial?). You're in high resolution VGA mode right now, which is 640×480 with 16 colors. Games are going to start demanding 256 or even 65 536 colors, which is where things start to get really advanced. Regular DOSBox will let you select Super VGA (800×600 with 16 colors), but we're going to need Daum Cafe's DOSBox to use the Multiple SVGA chipset patch, and then (unlike DOS games) we're going to have to install Windows drivers. To change the display settings, go to the Main program group and select Windows Setup. Hit Options, then Change System Settings. When you activate the dropdown menu for Display you'll notice that, with the exception of Video 7, none of the options allows high resolutions or color depths. At the bottom of the list is an option to add a new display mode, which requires drivers from the graphics card's manufacturer. This is why people hated Windows. Absolutely everything needed a driver!
Okay, so which graphics cards can we emulate again? The Multiple SVGA chipset patch can emulate an S3, Tseng Labs ET3000 or ET4000, or a Paradise PVGA1A. It doesn't really matter which one you choose, as long as you have Windows drivers for one of them. If you ever owned a card with one of these chipsets, you can use your old installation disk. If not, you can search the internet. I've located drivers for all four chipsets for you! You can download them in the Drivers section. I recommend the ET4000 drivers because I couldn't get any of the other drivers to work properly. This is probably a problem with DOSBox (or, more likely, the Multiple SVGA chipset patch), which may be fixed in the future.
Since you may want to try emulating more than one chipset, and since you may have to reinstall Windows someday, it's a good idea to create a DRIVERS folder in your WINGAMES folder. It's also a good idea to keep each set of drivers in a different sub-folder since some of your files will have the same name. Once you've placed all of the drivers you want in the DRIVERS folder, go into the configuration file for Daum Cafe's DOSBox and select the svgachipset that you have Windows drivers for. Run DOSBox and go back into Windows 3.1 and select "Other display" from the list of display modes. Tell it to look for the drivers in C:\DRIVERS\(whatever). Windows will give you a list of available display modes, and you can pick whatever you want. Windows will restart, and now you can display 256 or more colors!
WARNING! There is a good chance that any display mode that you choose won't work. Your display could become completely unreadable, making it impossible to get to Windows Setup to change it back! If you start Windows and the display is unreadable, don't panic! Shut down DOSBox and start it again. You can change your display settings from the DOS prompt. Type:
Now you can select something safe for your display mode, like VGA.
And that's about it. You're now an advanced DOSBox user, and you can play both DOS and Windows games in DOSBox! |
