[Freedos-devel] game compatibility updates?

[Eric A. <e....@jp...>]

Hi!

As Lisa somehow managed to first change her email address, then drop
both the old and new address, I am moving an off-list discussion on
game compatibility back to the list. Which also is a good thing given
that I myself wonder how much compatibility improved since 2022 :-)



Her https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/issue-reporting/-/issues/56

is not exactly useful in current state. It just points to a two year
old youtube video which mentions that some games fail in FreeDOS.

We had a thread on the mailing list about that video back then:

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/freedos-user/thread/SY4P282MB3938F63400CB1FA5BBB955D7880C9%40SY4P282MB3938.AUSP282.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM/

(2022-03-04 to 2022-03-10)

Some highlights:

  - the default config should not be JEMMEX with max UMB, but
    rather HIMEM, or at least a more humble EMM configuration

  - back in the time, the default partitioning into piles of
    FAT16 partitions was rather user-un-friendly

  - people wondered, and still do, about WfW 3.11 compatibility,
    so we should make the patched kernel more easily available

  - there are a number of DSI Accolade games, including Test
    Drive 2 and Grand Prix Circuit, which all fail in FreeDOS

  - Carlos T has a large game collection for compat testing!
    He listed the following as not working in FreeDOS then:

    * Alone in the Dark 1 and 2 (floppy versions only,
      CD versions run fine)
    * Alpha Waves
    * Empire Soccer
    * Frontier Elite
    * Grand Prix Circuit
    * Test Drive 2
    * The Cycles
    * Tetris Classic
    * Virtual Chess

  - Stas mentioned that FDPP improved Test Drive compatibility using

https://github.com/dosemu2/fdpp/commit/c6efa7a203c8aafe8da952d6405ad5dfb49fd469#diff-e9118389bd658345f94d54c6159dc16b60454e193c33f16184d4fd5526180329

    and that Test Drive must be run from A: to F: not G: to Z:

  - of course, quite a few games have Runtime Error 200 speed issues.

Lisa also made a ticket about KRAPTOR palette issues in Virtual Box:

https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/games/kraptor/-/issues/3

This is a known bug in Virtual Box, not in FreeDOS.

She also asked for FreeDOOM 0.13.0 to become available for DOS:

https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/games/freedoom/-/issues/2

Finally, she apparently wonders how to share files between her
host windows and the FreeDOS inside Virtual Box. I guess some
people here use Virtual Box, so they can answer that, but to be
honest, I recommend NOT to use Virtual Box. Just use a VM which
is optimized specifically for DOS, there are plenty of those :-)

Regards, Eric