Re: DosEMU, Ghost: VGA screen garbled...

[Frantisek Hanzlik <franta@hanzlici.cz>]

Frantisek Rysanek wrote:
> Dear DOSEMU developers and users,
>
> first of all thanks for keeping this wonderful project alive :-)
> I've used it for several minor tasks in the past, I recall how amazed
> I was when I ran Sid Meyer's Civilization under DOSemu...
>
> I've been wondering for some time, if it would be possible to run
> Symantec/Norton Ghost under Linux.
>
> I've been aware for some time that "wholedisk is not supported". To
> me, this has been a show-stopper - I never even tried Ghost under
> DOSEMU for that reason. Much to my amazement, I've recently found out
> that this is not quite true anymore, if it ever was, and I've managed
> to make "wholedisk" work for me. I can use the fdisk from FreeDOS to
> partition physical hard drives...
>
> I'm attaching a short patch to this message, which adds support for
> disk drives reporting>16k cylinders to the OS. I've noticed that
> DOSEMU internally uses "int" variables for CHS, so I've added some
> ioctl()s to src/base/misc/disks.c to get the LBA size of the disk
> drive and calculate the correct "cylinders" value based on that, if
> the 16bit value obtained via HDIO_GETGEO is clearly bonkers...
> And the IBM/MS extensions seem to work just right with that, judging
> by the fact that the FreeDOS FDISK reports my big drives correctly :-
> )
>
> So today I've finally tried Ghost under DOSEMU, and yikes: the VGA
> screen is all garbled. Ghost is clearly alive behind the veil of
> ASCII garbage, responds to keyboard - but the user interface is
> unusable, because you can hardly use Ghost blind-folded. The screen
> consists of random non-text characters with random foreground and
> background colours, in 80x25 VGA text mode. As if Ghost was writing
> pixels to the video RAM, but the VGA hardware was really in 80x25
> text mode. And yes, this is the native VGA screen of the machine, not
> a remote SSH session :-)
>
> There was a time when I used to think that Ghost ran in some VGA
> graphics mode, maybe 640x400x16 or some such - judging by the
> "graphics mode" arrow for a mouse cursor. Today I suspect that maybe
> it's just a text mode with a custom font and with the arrow cursor
> implemented by an on-the-fly font swapping hack I've read about the
> other day: the four characters overlapped by the graphical cursor are
> transparently toggled to a few special ASCII codes, whose mapped
> characters in the VGA font table are modified with every movement of
> the mouse, to display an arrow when combined with the
> original/underlying text characters...
>
> Native Ghost under DOS runs just fine on bare metal on the hardware
> that I'm using (Intel 865G).
>
> I've noticed someone else's posts from back in 2004, that he was able
> to run Ghost under DOSEMU and the user interface looked allright.
>
> I've tried fiddling with some graphics configuration options in
> dosemu.conf, but the defaults are clearly all I could hope for /
> liberal enough.
> I've tried with $_chipset=svgalib and plainvga, I've tried specifying
> a range of ports for direct access (along with device /dev/null). To
> no avail.
> I've also noticed that, on graceful exit, DOSEMU complains about
> UTF/non-UTF mismatch between my terminal and the "Locale" environment
> variables. If I export LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8, the error message on
> shutdown is gone, but Ghost produces garbled screen output just the
> same...
> I've nuked the framebuffer drivers out of my kernel .config. No
> improvement there... (this is vanilla Linux 2.6.28.6).
>
> And that's where I ran out of good ideas :-)
> Any further hints are welcome...
>
> Frank Rysanek
-- 
I probably not help You, but I just quickly tried run ghost (v7.5,
in DOSEMU devel svn1954 on Fedora11/i686 non-emulated mode).
When run in console, screen was garbled as You wrote. Under root,
"dosemu -s" switch screen to some mode unsupported by my monitor,
screen was black and I wasn't able switch to other virtual console
or X, I must reboot via remote SSH.
But, when I run ghost in xdosemu (from X terminal), all appears OK, mouse
was working too.

Franta Hanzlik