Dosbox in a Browser

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DOSGuy
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by DOSGuy »

Sweet! Gobliins and Lure of the Temptress are now playable!

Animal Quest and Dinosaur Predators are still going nuts, and it seems to be mouse-related.
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leilei
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by leilei »

The Cybersphere games need cycles max, btw
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DOSGuy
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by DOSGuy »

Yeah, they're playing pretty slowly.
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danoon
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by danoon »

The Animal Quest bug is still on my list, it may be a while before I get to it. I'm in the middle of researching the feasibility of doing a dynamic core for the java port.

As for the max cycles issue: You can include dosbox.conf in the jar and reference it. Or in your case it might be easier to change the autorun.bat files to include:

z:\config -set cpu cycles max
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by DOSGuy »

It looks like the function keys are disabled in jDosbox, but F3 has some odd behavior in 0.74.19. When I press F3 (repeat the last command), the command line will populate with the first letter from the previous command, repeated for the length of the previous command.

i.e.

"dir" F3 -> "ddd"
"mount -u c" F3 -> "mmmmmmmmmm"
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

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The rounding bug strikes again. I just got 2.49939 points of experience after a fight in Aspetra.
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by DOSGuy »

Night Raid has some weird issues. The game loads, and the gun turret follows my mouse pointer. When I click the mouse button, the game makes sound effects like the gun is being fired, but a shot will only actually be fired if I point the gun to the far right.

My guess is that some internal math is producing an incorrect result, so the gun is firing, but the shot is going somewhere off screen (perhaps straight down). I also suspect that this is related to the graphics bug in Hocus Pocus on the level and difficulty select screens, where the stars are supposed to shoot out from the center in every direction, but almost all of them go directly right or directly down. If it's a rounding problem, fixing this one issue might also solve the bugs in Aspetra and Ant Run.
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deathshadow
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by deathshadow »

Silly request -- could you switch the paku paku install to use the CGA emulation and CM/S or Tandy sound? whatever is currently being used for sound is absolutely dreadful... and the VGA stretch -- or should I say lack of VGA stretch since it appears to be dropping into "SAFE" isn't exactly wowing me :D
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

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A regression in 0.74.22 has caused EGA games to stop working! I've had to go back to 0.74.21 because the list of broken games is so long, but here's a partial list of what's broken in 0.74.22.

Edit: All bugs fixed below fixed by commit 378.

EGA games that worked under 0.74.21 but are no longer playable due to missing graphics:

The Adventures of Captain Comic
Ant Run
Battle for Atlantis
Bio Menace
Blind Wars
Chinese Checkers
Cipher
Crates
Crusher
Dotso
Doubolo
Duke Nukem
Hero's Heart
Isle Wars
Kosmonaut
Mah Jongg
Math Rescue
Monster Bash
Numlo
Paganitzu
Solitile
Snarf
SuperFly
Tribolo
War-8}!
Wolfie's Music Games
WordMax
Word Rescue

Affected non-EGA games

Sudoku

EGA games that remain playable despite missing graphics, that were working fine under 0.74.21:

Block-Man
Drum Blaster
Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom

All of Soleau Software's EGA games are missing graphics right from the Soleau Software logo. Hero's Heart and Solitile display nothing but a gray box on the name entry screen. All of the character sprites are missing in The Adventures of Captain Comic. The car is missing in Kosmonaut. In SuperFly, the fly and the flyswatter leave fly/flyswatter tile trails as they move around. Block-man is still playable, but the Soleau Software logo is missing, the in-game background is messed up, and a gray trail is left behind wherever a block is moved. Hugo's House of Horrors is missing graphics on the title screen, which is now just a bunch of purple. Bio Menace's menu no longer displays text and Mah Jongg no longer displays tiles. Chinese Checkers never gets beyond a black screen. LucasArts' Indy/Loom/Secret of Monkey Island sampler has a black vertical line on every other pixel. War-8}! no longer displays the title screen and just fills the map with dirt once you get in-game. You can longer see your name as you type it in in, and there is no text on the menu screen, in Math Rescue and Word Rescue. The Apogee symbol is missing during the fanfare in Math Rescue and Monster Bash. There's no text on the menus in Duke Nukem and Monster Bash. Paganitzu no longer has text on the intro screen and stops displaying graphics once you get in-game. The starfield background is missing in Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom. The band is missing in Drum Blaster. Turbo Pascal's fill function isn't filling in outlines in Sudoku.

Since some, but not all, of the graphics are missing (in some games just the text, or just the sprites, or just the tiles), it looks like a layer priority issue. The graphics may be being drawn, but they're hidden under other graphics that are getting drawn over them. Could it be as simple as the uppermost layer should be layer 0, but the dynamic core code makes it layer 1?

Additionally, Doubolo flips a coin to determine who plays first, and then immediately declares the game a draw.
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

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Magic Crayon is going crazy, but I think it's just the mouse bug seen in other Alive Software games rapidly picking different pictures to color.
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

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In Dragons Bane: Mah Jongg II the mouse pointer wraps around the screen, and leaves a black trail behind as it moves.
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deathshadow
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by deathshadow »

I've been playing with the newest build, which adds Tandy sound support - still no tandy video :(

The Adlib sound in jdosbox is horridly off key (I think it's an octave too high?) but the tandy sound is spot on... so now we can start to have slightly better audio. Still no CM/S either apparently, but at least for my purposes it works fine. I've put together a .zip of paku paku with a dosbox.conf in it tweaked for what right now is the best settings for jDosBox.
http://www.cutcodedown.com/retroGames/p ... ku_1_5.zip

Which you can see running live at that same address with that latest build of jdb.
http://www.cutcodedown.com/retroGames/pakuLive

The latency on the audio is annoying in fast paced games, but I've come up with settings that while CPU hungry, at least play the audio properly.

Code: Select all

[mixer]
rate=11025
blocksize=256
prebuffer=1

[speaker]
tandy=on
tandyrate=11025
Dropping the sample rate helps with the cpu load, but the lag issues are cleaned up by using a smaller block size and dropping the prebuffer to effectively nothing. I've got the weird feeling the prebuffer number is being multiplied by a factor of 16; in comparison to a native DosBox install a prebuffer of 20 in jDosBox acts like a prebuffer of 320 on the real deal... Bug in the code maybe? In any case, prebuffer 1 seems to deliver 16ms, which is close enough to the 20ms stock dosbox that the audio no longer lags by a third of a second.

for the object embed, I'm doing:

Code: Select all

		<object type="application/x-java-applet" width="640" height="400">
			<param name="code" value="jdos.gui.MainApplet" />
			<param name="archive" value="jdosbox.jar,paku_1_5.zip" />
			<param name="param1" value="-conf jar://dosbox.conf" />
			<param name="param2" value="imgmount e jar://paku_1_5_160k.IMA -t floppy" />
			<param name="param3" value="e:" />
			<param name="param4" value="paku /tandySound" />
			<p>
				This game requires Java to function. Please either enable it in your browser, switch to a Java capable browser, or download the appropriate version off of
				<a href="http://www.java.com">Oracle's Java Website</a>
			</p>
		</object>
Amazingly the jar:// seems to work with normal .zip files so you don't have to jar pack if there's no java in it, though you still have to put things in the "jdos" subdirectory in the archive. Loading a custom config for the various games should help alleviate many of the issues, especially things like sound lag and video issues; Just setting many games to cga mode might help with the other games.

Of course, have a good laugh at the page I built for mine -- Those of you stuck in the last century using IE8- get a pretty crappy page, and even IE9 is missing a few bells and whistles; but the smart people using Opera, FF, Chrome or Safari will all get a most interesting page.

Especially since no images are used in it's creation -- that's all CSS3. Fun stuff.

Oh, on my .zip version of paku paku, I switched it to a 160k floppy image instead of the 4 megabyte hard drive image... Mostly just to show that YES, it will fit on a single sided single density 40 track 8 cluster floppy.

Just thought I'd share. Pretty sure those tweaks to the audio I came up with will help many other programs.
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danoon
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by danoon »

Thanks for the info on the sound, I too have noticed that the sound is far from perfect. I often even just hear clicks.

I'm still working on jdosbox, but just not as much lately because of a new job, but I hope to have a new release sometime in August. The main thrust of it will be Windows 98 support, but I also expect to nails down some bugs. The audio issue will be high on the list.

This week I started looking into the video code, I'm trying to track down why windows 98 goes crazy with 16 and 32 bit color. While I'm in there I will definitely keep an eye out for those mouse drawing bugs. That one has been in there since my first release, its getting really annoying that I haven't figured it out yet.
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deathshadow
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by deathshadow »

At the request of someone over on the Vintage Computer Forums, I put together a quick tutorial on making a floppy img and embedding jdosbox in a web page using valid modern markup.
http://www.deathshadow.com/jDOSBoxHowTo
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danoon
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Re: Dosbox in a Browser

Post by danoon »

Cool, documentation was never a fun part of programming for me :)

I'm not actively working on the java dosbox port anymore. I still like to think about what new features I could work on, but my wife is having twins soon so my free time has disappeared.

Now I like to follow the javascript port of dosbox that is based on my java port. Hopefully they will be able to pick up where I left off.
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