Re: dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

Re: dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

[Stas Sergeev]

Hello.

Jan Willem Stumpel wrote:
> hogthreshold = 0                      --- 99 % CPU
> hogthreshold = 1                      --- quiet behaviour
> hogthreshold = 800                    --- 99 % CPU
Correct.

> hogthreshold commented out altogether --- quiet behaviour 
> Mmm.. not very intuitive, this. Somewhere in the DOC's it
> says that hogthreshold should be related to the clock speed, and
> the higher hogthreshold, the quieter dosemu gets.
This mistake of the docs was already
fixed.

>> So you have applied some patches, havent you?
>  Well of course I did. The patch set posted yesterday by Bart
>  Oldeman. Or isn't that what you mean?
Nope... The fact that you got any sound
at all from Duke3D without an immediate
hang, is something very unusual.
To get a sound from Duke3D and no hangs,
this patch is a mandatory:
http://dosemu.sourceforge.net/stas/dpmi_sti4a.diff
Also read the comments about an adjustments
you have to make to dosemu.conf after
applying it.
You are the first person who got even an
intro with sound without that patch...

This doesn't explain a Wolf's problem
however.
What version of Wolf do you have?
(it is written in the bottom-right
corner of the screen where it is hanging
for you).
Tested with Wolfenstain V1.1 and
Spear of Destiny V1.0.
Do you have the same?
Also please produce a log of a sound
events (-D9+S) and mail it to me
compressed, and maybe I'll see the problem.

> Extra info: I use ms-dos 6.00. Maybe that's relevant.
No idea. I am using a PC-DOS 7.0 which
is a functional clone of MS-DOS 6.22
(or around it).
Try bypassing the config.sys and autoexec
by pressing F5 at startup. Maybe that
will help.

Re: dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

[Jan Willem Stumpel]

Stas Sergeev wrote:

> Nope... The fact that you got any sound at all from Duke3D
> without an immediate hang, is something very unusual. To get a
> sound from Duke3D and no hangs, this patch is a mandatory:
> http://dosemu.sourceforge.net/stas/dpmi_sti4a.diff Also read
> the comments about an adjustments you have to make to
> dosemu.conf after applying it.

I did, and now it works! A voice begins to utter threatening
language as soon as I select the difficulty level, and the game
goes on. In the demo there were only shooting sounds, etc. Maybe
voice synthesis is a different kind of task than making just "sounds".

Wolf3D still hangs at the start screen, however. At the bottom
right it says V1.1.

> Also please produce a log of a sound events (-D9+S) and mail it
> to me compressed, and maybe I'll see the problem.

I'll do that (as soon as I've found out how).

Regards, Jan

Re: dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

[Stas Sergeev]

Hello.

Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> IIRC, there was talk about important dosemu related patches that are
> present in the most recent kernels.   i think it was said that the
> patches have been in the ac kernels for awhile, but have just recently
> made it into the vanilla 2.4 kernels.
Generally that patches are needed if
you have a "Segmentation fault" crash
without a "(core dumped)" when dosemu
is not in DPMI mode.
Also if you are going to do some weird
thing like starting WinNT installer
under dosemu, you'll need one of those
patches.
Another one is required if you have
problems using a direct hardware access
under dosemu (this one was even considered
a security-related by RedHat:
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2002-158.html
)
There were also some other work, but in
general (unless the specified sympthomes
are matched) kernel upgrade may not be
necessary to get one or another program
to work under dosemu.

Re: dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

[Stas Sergeev]

Hello.

Jan Willem Stumpel wrote:
> According to "top", 1.1.3.9 takes up 99 % CPU even when just
> displaying the C:> prompt.
[]
> $_hogthreshold = (800).
Sure with such a hogthreshold value.
Since 1.1.3.8 you don't need to set
most of the options manually, so just
delete the $_hogthreshold from your
dosemu.conf and you're fine.

> Wolfenstein 3D:
> 1.0.2.1, 1.1.3.7, 1.1.3.9 play with $_sound = (off) .
> 1.1.3.0 hangs (with or without sound) after displaying the
> start-up (setup) screen. Control-Alt-PgDn is the only way out.
> 1.1.3.7, 1.1.3.9 hang with $_sound = (on) .
Very strange... Wolf is the one of
those few progs that used to work with
sound even on early dosemus (like
1.0.2.1) and that was my main testcase
for the new sound engine and I think
I made wolf to sound flawlessly.
So I would suspect there are some
problems in your dosemu.conf again.
Probably XMS/EMS are too low.
Try to throw away all the options from
your dosemu.conf (except for the most
important ones like $_hdimage if you
use some non-standard booting methods)
because the default options are just fine.

> 1.1.3.7, 1.1.3.9 play, with $_sound = (on) and soundblaster
> selected in Duke Nukem Setup.
So you have applied some patches, havent you?

> (sounds, no music).
Well, getting sound and music together is
currently not always possible. But if
you have an SB Live card or some other
card with a hardware mixing abilities
(and the driver supports this), you can
get music working together with sound.
sound-usage.txt of 1.1.3.9 describes the
ways of doing that (thanks to Rob Komar
for the detailed instructions about getting
the music to work on ALSA).

> however, when I try to
> select the difficulty level the program hangs.
[]
> $_dpmi = (8192)
Too low. Remove that option from dosemu.conf
and see if it helps (Duke works perfectly
here most of the time) and if not - try this:
http://dosemu.sourceforge.net/stas/pic_prot.diff
However yes, 100% reliability of DPMI progs
is not yet.

Re: dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

[Jan Willem Stumpel]

Stas Sergeev wrote:
> Hello.

And hello to you too!

> Jan Willem Stumpel wrote:
>> According to "top", 1.1.3.9 takes up 99 % CPU even when just
>> displaying the C:> prompt.

> Sure with such a hogthreshold value. Since 1.1.3.8 you don't
> need to set most of the options manually, so just delete the
> $_hogthreshold from your dosemu.conf and you're fine.

OK.. used the new dosemu.conf (everything commented out), set
hdimage to "dos" to make it boot on my system, then only changed
hogthreshold. Tried it (1.1.3.9) with

hogthreshold = 0                      --- 99 % CPU
hogthreshold = 1                      --- quiet behaviour
hogthreshold = 800  		      --- 99 % CPU
hogthreshold commented out altogether --- quiet behaviour

Mmm.. not very intuitive, this. Somewhere in the DOC's it
says that hogthreshold should be related to the clock speed, and
the higher hogthreshold, the quieter dosemu gets. Anyway, you know
what I think about the dosemu doc's.

With all these values of hogthreshold Wolfenstein 3D hangs (it
keeps saying "one moment" forever). This is with everything
commented out apart from hdimage and hogthreshold.

Now I uncomment sound, and set it to 0. Now it works with
hogthreshold values 0, 1, 800, and commented out altogether.

This suggests that sound (on) is the default (as you surely
intended). OK, now trying Nukem 3D (*everything* commented out now
apart from hdimage). Use Duke3d "setup" program (in dosemu) to
select the Sound Blaster card for sound, nothing for music. Run
duke3d. Result: sound, demo visible and audible, when I want to
play it hangs when I choose the difficulty level.

> So you have applied some patches, havent you?

Well of course I did. The patch set posted yesterday by Bart
Oldeman. Or isn't that what you mean? Anyway I get a boot-up
message which begins

Linux DOS emulator 1.1.3.9 $Date: 2002/12/15 $

Extra info: I use ms-dos 6.00. Maybe that's relevant.

Regards, Jan

Re: dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

[Bart Oldeman]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Jan Willem Stumpel wrote:

> OK.. used the new dosemu.conf (everything commented out), set
> hdimage to "dos" to make it boot on my system, then only changed
> hogthreshold. Tried it (1.1.3.9) with
>
> hogthreshold = 0                      --- 99 % CPU
> hogthreshold = 1                      --- quiet behaviour
= 1 is the default. This is what dosemu.conf mentions.

> hogthreshold = 800  		      --- 99 % CPU
> hogthreshold commented out altogether --- quiet behaviour
>
> Mmm.. not very intuitive, this. Somewhere in the DOC's it
> says that hogthreshold should be related to the clock speed, and
> the higher hogthreshold, the quieter dosemu gets. Anyway, you know
> what I think about the dosemu doc's.

Much of what is in the docs is out of date that it one of the problems.
Anyway the thing you stated was taken out of context:

"Usually it is a good idea to format the drive after it."
this applies to a new disk image. The other "problem" is that new
Linux users are in general less technical than they were in say 1994, and
while this statement looks obvious to me it apparently does not do so for you.
(violating the art of technical writing).

"the drive" here means, "the DOS drive that you get if you use the freshly
created hdimage". in any case, hdimages aren't necessary for most people
anymore and here the out-of-date problem shows its ugly head.

> Mmm.. not very intuitive, this. Somewhere in the DOC's it
> says that hogthreshold should be related to the clock speed, and
> the higher hogthreshold, the quieter dosemu gets. Anyway, you know
> what I think about the dosemu doc's.

now to the point: hogthreshold, see README.txt:

   The HogThreshold value determines how nice
   Dosemu will be about giving other Linux processes a chance to run.

      $_hogthreshold = (1)   # 0 == all CPU power to DOSEMU
                             # 1 == max power for Linux
                             # >1   the higher, the faster DOSEMU will be

what this means is that the higher, the _faster_, not _quieter_, DOSEMU
will be, that is, the more CPU time DOSEMU will get! So (800) will get
DOSEMU much more CPU time than (1). You can basically view (0) as (infinity).

and there's also something in README-tech.txt

   The HogThreshold value determines how nice Dosemu will be about giving
   other Linux processes a chance to run. Setting the HogThreshold value
   to approximately half of you BogoMips value will slightly degrade
   Dosemu performance, but significantly increase overall system idle
   time. A zero value runs Dosemu at full tilt.

the HOWTO says:

   Daniel Barlow(jo95004@sable.ox.ac.uk) reported (95/4/8) that

   HogThreshold should now be set to approximately half of the BogoMips
   value that the system reports on boot.

this is really out-of-date, as you have seen. hogthreshold has been
tweaked recently, it is really something you have to play with to see
what's the best compromise, mind you, you can use "speed"  inside dosemu
to change it, ie.

c:\>speed 1
(be nice)

c:\>speed 0
(be fast)

> > So you have applied some patches, havent you?
>
> Well of course I did. The patch set posted yesterday by Bart
> Oldeman. Or isn't that what you mean? Anyway I get a boot-up
> message which begins

well there are some related (experimental) patches at
http://dosemu.sourceforge.net/stas
to get sound going for duke3d and doom.

Bart

dosemu 1.1.3.9 for testing

[Bart Oldeman]

Hi,

it's at http://www.dosemu.org/testing. This should be the last testing
version before 1.1.4, the new development version.

Important things that changed from the user's perspective:
* 'make install' works again. It installs dosemu to locations
  specified in compiletime-settings; a FreeDOS tarball is optional
  (see compiletime-settings.help)
* setup-dosemu is broken (sorry, it needs adjustments to deal with the
  paths and I'm not able to fix it quickly). For now, just edit
  compiletime-settings* directly.
* for per-user installations:
  use ~/.dosemurc instead of ~/dosemu/conf/dosemu.conf and
  ~/dosemu/conf/dosemurc.
  boot.log is now in ~/.dosemu instead of ~/dosemu
* you can specify absolute paths for $_hdimage in dosemu.conf and
  ~/.dosemurc
* the default configuration files have everything commented out;
  DOSEMU uses default values if the options are not set (corresponding
  to the commented-out values).

Please let me know if anything is broken in the new 'make install'.

Bart

dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

[Jan Willem Stumpel]

According to "top", 1.1.3.9 takes up 99 % CPU even when just
displaying the C:> prompt.

1.1.3.7 does this also; but 1.1.3.0 and 1.0.2.1 do not. They
hardly use any CPU when just displaying the prompt (or waiting for
a keystroke in a text-mode program).

Wolfenstein 3D:
1.0.2.1, 1.1.3.7, 1.1.3.9 play with $_sound = (off) .
1.1.3.0 hangs (with or without sound) after displaying the
start-up (setup) screen. Control-Alt-PgDn is the only way out.
1.1.3.7, 1.1.3.9 hang with $_sound = (on) .

Duke Nukem3D:
1.0.2.1 plays fine without sound.
1.1.3.0 plays without sound, but after a short while suddenly
disappears (no more dosemu window).
1.1.3.7, 1.1.3.9 play, with $_sound = (on) and soundblaster
selected in Duke Nukem Setup. I can see *and hear* the demo
(sounds, no music). When I want to start a game, I can select the
game type ("L.A. Meltdown" or whatever); however, when I try to
select the difficulty level the program hangs.

All this with kernel 2.2.18pre21, $_dpmi = (8192) , $_hogthreshold
= (800).

Regards, Jan

Re: dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

[Peter Jay Salzman]

hi jan,

IIRC, there was talk about important dosemu related patches that are
present in the most recent kernels.   i think it was said that the
patches have been in the ac kernels for awhile, but have just recently
made it into the vanilla 2.4 kernels.

i have no idea what the patches do, but you can try using 2.4.20 and see
what happens.


btw, it sounds like you're playing in an xdos box.  have you been able
to play at all in console?

have you been able to have xdosemu grab the mouse?  i've been having
trouble playing redneck rampage because if the mouse "moves over" too
far left or right, the mouse leaves the xdos window.

pete



begin Jan Willem Stumpel <jstumpel@planet.nl> 
> According to "top", 1.1.3.9 takes up 99 % CPU even when just
> displaying the C:> prompt.
> 
> 1.1.3.7 does this also; but 1.1.3.0 and 1.0.2.1 do not. They
> hardly use any CPU when just displaying the prompt (or waiting for
> a keystroke in a text-mode program).
> 
> Wolfenstein 3D:
> 1.0.2.1, 1.1.3.7, 1.1.3.9 play with $_sound = (off) .
> 1.1.3.0 hangs (with or without sound) after displaying the
> start-up (setup) screen. Control-Alt-PgDn is the only way out.
> 1.1.3.7, 1.1.3.9 hang with $_sound = (on) .
> 
> Duke Nukem3D:
> 1.0.2.1 plays fine without sound.
> 1.1.3.0 plays without sound, but after a short while suddenly
> disappears (no more dosemu window).
> 1.1.3.7, 1.1.3.9 play, with $_sound = (on) and soundblaster
> selected in Duke Nukem Setup. I can see *and hear* the demo
> (sounds, no music). When I want to start a game, I can select the
> game type ("L.A. Meltdown" or whatever); however, when I try to
> select the difficulty level the program hangs.
> 
> All this with kernel 2.2.18pre21, $_dpmi = (8192) , $_hogthreshold
> = (800).
> 
> Regards, Jan
> 
> -
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Re: dosemu 1.1.3.9 user report

[Bart Oldeman]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

> have you been able to have xdosemu grab the mouse?  i've been having
> trouble playing redneck rampage because if the mouse "moves over" too
> far left or right, the mouse leaves the xdos window.

try ctrl-alt-home. I noticed in your dosemu.conf that you uncommented the
mgrab_key setting, but it should work by default.

Bart