MiSTer FPGA Forum

yeah, you can't have any other ao486 folder anywhere or it breaks a lot of things.

I am working on setting up my own VHD's based on the "ExoDOSConverter for MiSTer AO486 (PC DOS) Setup from Scratch and first look!!!" video. I watched the previous video that uses Metropolis to find the games you want. Is there a way to use Metropolis to filter the games you want to a folder, and then use the ExoDOSConverter on that instead of the entire ExoDos collection?

yeah I think you could use Metropolis to get the games list and export that to a text list and then import that list into the Exodos converter. The names would have to be exact. it might be easier to grab the name from this excel document and just make your own list that you import into the selections screen on exodosconverter:

https://github.com/Voljega/ExoDOSConver ... oDOSv5.csv

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Sat Oct 02, 2021 9:05 pm yeah I think you could use Metropolis to get the games list and export that to a text list and then import that list into the Exodos converter. The names would have to be exact. it might be easier to grab the name from this excel document and just make your own list that you import into the selections screen on exodosconverter:

https://github.com/Voljega/ExoDOSConver ... oDOSv5.csv

Thanks! I am pretty good at DOS, but I am a little lost. I have a working Top 300 DOS setup. In the tutorial, it says you need to run the tdlindexer python script, but I am not sure if I need to. The latest ExoDOSConverter makes a TDL_VHD folder which I assume is all set with nothing needed to do to it. I created a new VHD with Windows and used the guiformat utility to make it FAT32. The issue I have found is that my Total 300 VHD has a D and and E in it, and everything is on the E. My drive only has a D. I assume I need to make multiple partitions to make this work correctly, correct?

I plan to make a bunch of these and I want to do it as painlessly as possible. I am not sure if I should makes drives with D and E on them, or change the Top 300 C: drive so that it can work with games in D:. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edit:
I am making some progress. I edited the TDL.INI on the new games VHD I created and changed it to D:\games for the cache folder. I also made a copy of the Total Dos C: drive into a new VHD and edited the autoexec.bat.

Now I can launch games, but I have new problems:
- Some games work fine, Space Quest III for example. However, if I change Turbo to Slow which this game needs for the intro to play all the way through, the mouse goes crazy. Putting it back to fast works with the mouse.
- Some games have screwed up music, King's Quest VI for example using the CD and MT-32 options. I confirmed it is using the Sound Canvas mode even though I chose MT/32 (it sounds good on my Sound Canvas, but terrible on my MT-32)
- King's Quest V asks what mode you want to start with, but doesn't wait for an answer and launches immediately
- Many programs say "bad command or file name" after you pick which mode you want to launch the game with, and then it launches the game anyway. This may be the reason for the sound card selection problem. Space Quest III is able to change between Sound Blaster and MT-32. I tried Sound Blaster on King's Quest VI and it was mostly silent, but for a moment, it sounded like screwed up chip tunes but not music. Laura Bow 1 didn't have the "bad command or file name" and succesfully plays MT-32 and Sound Blaster.
- King's Quest VI starts the intro, but it says "unable to open movie file" which tells me it doesn't know where to find the CD drive. It is on F:. Maybe I need to edit TDL.ini for that too.

thorr wrote: ↑Sun Oct 03, 2021 1:11 am

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Sat Oct 02, 2021 9:05 pm yeah I think you could use Metropolis to get the games list and export that to a text list and then import that list into the Exodos converter. The names would have to be exact. it might be easier to grab the name from this excel document and just make your own list that you import into the selections screen on exodosconverter:

https://github.com/Voljega/ExoDOSConver ... oDOSv5.csv

Thanks! I am pretty good at DOS, but I am a little lost. I have a working Top 300 DOS setup. In the tutorial, it says you need to run the tdlindexer python script, but I am not sure if I need to. The latest ExoDOSConverter makes a TDL_VHD folder which I assume is all set with nothing needed to do to it. I created a new VHD with Windows and used the guiformat utility to make it FAT32. The issue I have found is that my Total 300 VHD has a D and and E in it, and everything is on the E. My drive only has a D. I assume I need to make multiple partitions to make this work correctly, correct?

I plan to make a bunch of these and I want to do it as painlessly as possible. I am not sure if I should makes drives with D and E on them, or change the Top 300 C: drive so that it can work with games in D:. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edit:
I am making some progress. I edited the TDL.INI on the new games VHD I created and changed it to D:\games for the cache folder. I also made a copy of the Total Dos C: drive into a new VHD and edited the autoexec.bat.

Now I can launch games, but I have new problems:
- Some games work fine, Space Quest III for example. However, if I change Turbo to Slow which this game needs for the intro to play all the way through, the mouse goes crazy. Putting it back to fast works with the mouse.
- Some games have screwed up music, King's Quest VI for example using the CD and MT-32 options. I confirmed it is using the Sound Canvas mode even though I chose MT/32 (it sounds good on my Sound Canvas, but terrible on my MT-32)
- King's Quest V asks what mode you want to start with, but doesn't wait for an answer and launches immediately
- Many or all programs say "bad command or file name" after you pick which mode you want to launch the game with, and then it launches the game anyway. This may be the reason for the sound card selection problem.

Yes correct on the D and E. If you look at my secondary VHD you will see a stub disk for D which then allows for the assign dos command to take over that and duplicate the CD drive from F to D.

Exodosconverter now does all you need for TDLconverter so you don't need to do that if you are using the converter. Voljega added all that to the converter with the goal of the converter creating everything you need to just transfer that to a VHD (that has both the stub D: drive (10MB or whatever) and E: (everything else).

D: is setup because the CD drive is defaulted to D: in eXoDOS and it prevented a change to every launch file.


There are an amazing amount of changes still needed to eXoDOS's setup to get games working on AO486. This is why I ended up with the github repo for just the Top 300 games, with more that 200 changes after the initial image was created. Some game ini files still reference different directory structures, drive letters, etc. You can look at my repo for the specifc games to see what I had to change to get it working with my setup.

I wouldn't put an amazing amount of effort into TDL and the converter as we have something new coming that is better.

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Sun Oct 03, 2021 2:48 am Yes correct on the D and E. If you look at my secondary VHD you will see a stub disk for D which then allows for the assign dos command to take over that and duplicate the CD drive from F to D.

Exodosconverter now does all you need for TDLconverter so you don't need to do that if you are using the converter. Voljega added all that to the converter with the goal of the converter creating everything you need to just transfer that to a VHD (that has both the stub D: drive (10MB or whatever) and E: (everything else).

D: is setup because the CD drive is defaulted to D: in eXoDOS and it prevented a change to every launch file.


There are an amazing amount of changes still needed to eXoDOS's setup to get games working on AO486. This is why I ended up with the github repo for just the Top 300 games, with more that 200 changes after the initial image was created. Some game ini files still reference different directory structures, drive letters, etc. You can look at my repo for the specifc games to see what I had to change to get it working with my setup.

I wouldn't put an amazing amount of effort into TDL and the converter as we have something new coming that is better.

Thanks! That explains a lot. I was also beginning to suspect that there were lots of issues with the eXoDOS defaults. I think I will try just manually configuring every game and running it the old fashioned way for now. I am excited to hear about the new something that is coming. I hope it works with the graphical vmode we talked about previously that provides pixel perfection DOS text on CRT's, but if it doesn't, don't sweat it. Thanks again!

P.S. I edited my post after you started to reply to it so there is more info in there, but based on the problems you mentioned, nothing worth worrying about at this point.

I got King's Quest VI to work by reinstalling it from the CD. I chose the "small" install and it runs almost everything off the CD which is nice because it saves a ton of VHD space. However, MT-32 music is still totally messed up. I wonder if I need to update my mt32pi. I have a pretty old version.

Short question, has anyone gotten sound working for Wing Commander 2, I neither have soundblaster nor MT32 sound on this game. WC1 works fine though so I suspect it is a settings problem somehwere.

Just downloaded this pack from archive.org, updated it with AO486_Update_Top300_Pack.sh, and... it works like a charm! Waiting now for my RPi 3A+ and MiSTer MT32-Pi Hat to enjoy this gift even more. Thank you!

RalphJB wrote: ↑Fri Jul 16, 2021 5:54 am Is anyone else having an issue with Wing Commander 2 having no sound?

Yes I do a handful of other games expose this behavior as well, has anyone resolved the issue? My guess is that some internal game volume
flag is down to zero.

I asked it in another thread, but got no solution to the problem (viewtopic.php?p=35741#p35741)
During the update process the mounted vhd somehow becomes readonly, hence the update process fails. I'm not a Linux guru, don't know what to check and what to change. Would somebody be so kind and take a look at it? Thanks in advance!

I wish the pack had the DOS version of Bad Apple and Pinball Fantasies.

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Thu Nov 04, 2021 4:45 pm I wish the pack had the DOS version of Bad Apple and Pinball Fantasies.

I can add Bad Apple to the Demo Scene section of the Shareware Pack so that it gets pulled down with the next update for that. There are a bunch of demo's in it already here: https://github.com/flynnsbit/DOS_Sharew ... mo%20Scene

Pinball Fantasies doesn't work on the AO486 core, it has graphical glitch problems. Last time I tried Pinball Fantasies it did what Pinball Illusions does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3aPDvtJerE

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Thu Nov 04, 2021 5:52 pm

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Thu Nov 04, 2021 4:45 pm I wish the pack had the DOS version of Bad Apple and Pinball Fantasies.

I can add Bad Apple to the Demo Scene section of the Shareware Pack so that it gets pulled down with the next update for that. There are a bunch of demo's in it already here: https://github.com/flynnsbit/DOS_Sharew ... mo%20Scene

Pinball Fantasies doesn't work on the AO486 core, it has graphical glitch problems. Last time I tried Pinball Fantasies it did what Pinball Illusions does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3aPDvtJerE

Merci... Bad Apple is like the movie Space Odyssey 2001.

Pinball Fantasies was a game that I played with when I was a young teenager. I remember when my parents got me a sound blaster 16 for Christmas. The sound that came out of the speakers was amazing. Even my parents could not believe it.

Thanks for putting both packs together. It has brought back a lot of good memories.

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 4:37 pm Pinball Fantasies was a game that I played with when I was a young teenager. I remember when my parents got me a sound blaster 16 for Christmas. The sound that came out of the speakers was amazing. Even my parents could not believe it.

The original version runs perfectly on the Amiga/Minimig core, if you want to play it!

Edit: Sorted out my first problem and got it up and working. However, the CD based games don't seem to run? I got them all in the games folder of my external hd like the floppies but all I get is an error saying:

No files found D:\**

ADD "/cd/WarcrafD/wctod.cue" TO /GAMES/AO486/CD/. RESTARTING

limi wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 4:55 pm

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 4:37 pm Pinball Fantasies was a game that I played with when I was a young teenager. I remember when my parents got me a sound blaster 16 for Christmas. The sound that came out of the speakers was amazing. Even my parents could not believe it.

The original version runs perfectly on the Amiga/Minimig core, if you want to play it!

I have played it on the Minimig. I like the DOS version better.

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Sat Nov 06, 2021 5:57 pm I have played it on the Minimig. I like the DOS version better.

Did you run the AGA version?

Arades wrote: ↑Sat Nov 06, 2021 5:10 pm Edit: Sorted out my first problem and got it up and working. However, the CD based games don't seem to run? I got them all in the games folder of my external hd like the floppies but all I get is an error saying:

No files found D:\**

ADD "/cd/WarcrafD/wctod.cue" TO /GAMES/AO486/CD/. RESTARTING

Anybody can help me out what i'm doing wrong pls?

Got this all setup over the past few days, updated to the latest, lots of good stuff in here, thanks for the effort!
I use this on a TV and that is working well too.

The one thing I have not been able to figure out is how to enable gamepad usage (for both the DOS frontend and games).

Is there some config option somewhere to enable this? I've already setup and mapped my gamepad in MiSTer and for the ao486 core.

Thank you for the 300 DOS pack. Any chance this 300 DOS Pack will be updated with the MyMenu launcher or is there a tutorial showing how to setup this from scratch?

Hi guys
I get this message since I changed to external USB SSD.
What did I miss?
And how can I unmount drives?

jvas wrote: ↑Wed Nov 24, 2021 4:03 pm viewtopic.php?t=1237

Thanks for the unmount.

What about my error message?

Hey guys. Has anyone been able to get Sam and Max Hit the Road working with Midi? I have an MT32-Pi that works with everything else, but not with this game. The options are present when launching, but don't seem to kick in properly. After searching around it looks like a couple people highlighted this issue a while ago but no one ever followed up with a resolution. Thanks!

having issues with monkey island cd not the mt32 version im getting a rasberry pi mt32 and was going to use i downloaded the top 300 from the archive .0rg butt i cant get the sounds to work on the cd games i did the ini file like this fat /media/games /ao486 but the cd games still dont place sound should i try slowing the computer down im at a loss trying to figure it out

CD-Audio isn't implemented in the AO486 core. I left the options there for when that does happen.

Hello @flynnsbit, i just installed Top 300 DOS Games Pack on my MiSTer and it work well (I only have some problems with the video resolution but never mind).
My preferred game "The Dig" is only in eng but i have iso/img of EU version with eng, ita and others.
The question is, can i add this in some way or (better) can i add a choice to run first or second one?

First off, thanks so much Flynnsbit for putting this together. I finally got around to setting this up & am loving it. I've run into a couple of issues -

I can't get any sound to work for DOOM no matter which sound option I pick.
Full Throttle intro seems to work but at any point after that the game just freezes on a black screen.
The same thing happens with Monkey Island 2, will play for a bit then just freeze.

Curious if these are known issues & if not how I can fix those!

Cheers,
Corey

@ siskavard : did you try the regular version of Doom and not just Fast Doom ? (I have no sound on Fast Doom but no problem with the regular version)

siskavard wrote: ↑Tue Dec 14, 2021 1:57 am First off, thanks so much Flynnsbit for putting this together. I finally got around to setting this up & am loving it. I've run into a couple of issues -

I can't get any sound to work for DOOM no matter which sound option I pick.
Full Throttle intro seems to work but at any point after that the game just freezes on a black screen.
The same thing happens with Monkey Island 2, will play for a bit then just freeze.

Curious if these are known issues & if not how I can fix those!

Cheers,
Corey

Do any games work without freezing?

What speed is your ao486 core running at? The default speed at startup is 90mhz. You can choose to run at lower frequencies of 15mhz, 30mhz, and 56mhz. You don't need 90mhz to run Monkey Island 2 or Full Throttle. I've played Monkey Island 2 all the way through without any issues at 30mhz.

Good luck.