Re: App database, libsynth

Bart Oldeman
2003-07-11T20:23:32Z

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Ryan Underwood wrote:

> You may be right that people are stuck with OSS drivers that only
> support 1 stream and have no FM device. I don't see a way to deal with
> this at the moment. Though you would be hard pressed to find a
> soundcard that didn't have an ALSA driver these days. And, c-media PCI
> cards have an opl3 onboard and cost something like $5. :)

I just keep wondering about the FM devices. The DOSBOX people seem to have
been able to get that working, so what is special about DOSBOX that is so
difficult in DOSEMU?

I was wondering btw:

http://www.happypenguin.org/show?DOSbox
http://www.happypenguin.org/show?DOSbox&start=10

the opinions here are really different (no I didn't contribute but I'm
wondering who did)... I only recently had a look at
DOSBOX -- they really want games and games only; the builtin DOS doesn't
worry at all about "undocumented" DOS stuff and backspace doesn't work
very well in DEBUG. But then I may be a little biased.

In any case whatever works better in DOSBOX (e.g. parts of VGAEMU still I
think) can be looked up in the source code; they thank DOSEMU too.

> > replacement for coopthreads is already in CVS,
> > but the complete removal of coopthreads will
> > require also removing comcom.com, so the
> > coopthreads is still there.

just to clarify, it's still there but it's dead code as long as you don't
use comcom. Before it was always initialized.

> There is always the possibility to port to a non-linux platform but I
> think it will take untying it from the x86 hardware to get more people
> interested in dosemu long-term.

agreed. And QEMU will probably stand a better chance now than Alberto's
simx86 since some very capable people work at it and Alberto doesn't seem
to have time for simx86 anymore. Right now QEMU also emulates DOSEMU
itself which is a little strange however.

One interesting platform is AMD's x86-64 (hammer, opteron, or whatever
it's called today). Linux for x86-64 does have modify_ldt but no v86.
That means that a potential future DOSEMU for it has to run "real
mode" 16bit apps emulated but can execute DPMI apps natively.

http://holarse.wue.de/?content=emu_dosemu
has an interesting opinion too:

Fazit: Auch wenn Dosbox bereits einiges leistet, kann er auch im Spielebereich
Dosemu noch nicht ersetzten. Beide haben vor und Nachteile. Bei Dosemu stört
sicher am meisten, das er auf Linux/x86 beschränkt ist. An Dosbox vermisst man
dagegen den Fehlenden Protectedmode sehr. Es ist also sicher am besten,
beide zu probieren und für jede Aufgabe den zu wählen, der sie am besten
bewältigt.

rough translation:
Result: Even if DOSBox already really accomplishes something, it cannot
really replace DOSEMU for games. Both have adavantages and disadvantages.
With DOSEMU it's most annoying that it is restricted to Linux/x86. With
Dosbox one misses protected mode a lot. It is certainly best to try both
and to decide which one to use on a case by case basis.

Bart

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