AO486 Compatibility List

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Caldor
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by Caldor »

Neocaron wrote: Mon Nov 08, 2021 3:36 pm
Caldor wrote: Mon Nov 08, 2021 1:18 pm
Neocaron wrote: Mon Nov 08, 2021 7:34 am

Yeah one of my idea as a solution for the music, is to mount the cd on deamon tool with analog audio activated on windows 98 (daemon tool works like a charm), but I have one hurdle and I wish I could get some idea to ge around it... For this to work I need ms-dos to start games in ms-dos windowed mode, but so far any game I tried to boot with dos 6.22, 7, even 8 are hanging at the start command.

If I manage to get Alien Trilogy to work in windowed mode, I'm pretty sure the music would be run by the deamon tool analog audio emulator with probably a performance penalty but it should work... Any idea on how to get that working? I remember as a kid being able to start these dos games and run them while windows 98 was running as well so it should be possible. And in my case Windows 98 as been very stable and usable, combine with QEEM. I can even play some native app like Caesar III.

Anyway, any help would be appreciated :D
Yeah, that should work. Last I tried using Windows 98 in AO486 it was very unstable though, so I have been avoiding it since. I have gotten Daemon Tools to work under Windows 95 and it does support audio CDs, but I have not tested that part of Daemon Tools in AO486 yet.

As for DOS games under Windows 98. That should also work, but depends a lot on the game. Some games wont be happy to have Windows loaded into the memory and I do think with the games that are already pressed on performance like Duke Nukem 3D, they probably wont be happy about trying to run under Windows. I have been wanting to try again with Windows 98 to make a new installation and see if it might have gotten more stable since last I tried, which must be more than 6 months ago now.
Well my experience on Windows 98 has been pretty stable, if that is any indication, not blazing fast, but stable.
Maybe I shoud try with windows 95, I used Daemon tool 3.47 if I recall correctly. But all the games I tried stalled in dos windowed mode (totally unrelated to daemon tool) so that had been frustrating. I also managed to install windows ME for the fun of it, using the upgrading path, it's the only way to get the video drivers to work.
Not sure its relevant for AO486 and Windows 98 but I remember that VDMS sound was a great way back in the day to run DOS games under Windows. I think it worked very well under Windows XP as well. It helped make DOS under Windows support DOS audio cards.

Reading up on it, it might have only been XP, and probably also Windows 2000, because it seems to be Windows NT specific:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=2389
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by HarborSeal »

I installed The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel on both the Top 300 and the My Menu shareware VHD's. The keyboard and mouse both lock up and don't work once the game starts. I tried changing memory managers, changing cache usage, etc, and I wasn't able to find a solution.

The game features an excellent MT-32 soundtrack.
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by held »

flynnsbit wrote: Mon Nov 23, 2020 9:24 pm The ExoDOS collection uses IRQ7 as default which is the only reason I switched to using it as default. You can pull my configs from archive.org if you want a boot disk configured for CD support and maximum memory free. I think the version I have out there with misterfs, ctmouse, doskey, cdrom drivers, and assign loaded is around 626K free of conventional memory. You may ne able to grab some ideas out of that. Just search for ao486. If you don't want to whole pack, I have the boot OS separate from the games vhd so you could just grab that. It's a 100MB vhd.
ExoDOS is using IRQ7 because of DOSBox's defaults :D

Code: Select all

BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 T6
ULTRASND=240,3,3,5,5
jd213
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by jd213 »

I'm pretty DOS-illiterate, but I wanted to try the DOS version of Dracula's Shadow (Castlevania II inspired fan game from the 2000's, there's also a Windows version but it only works in windowed mode on my Win10 machine for some reason, the F12 key is supposed to make it fullscreen but nothing happens when I press it).

I tried the version on flynsnbit's 2000-19 VHD with each of the memory modes from the "IDE 0-0 BOOT-DOS98" VHD, but no success.

Have skimmed through this thread but not sure what else I should try.
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by Malor »

My go-to emulator for difficult DOS games is DOSBox-X on Windows. It has both MUNT and Fluidsynth built-in, though you still have to provide the ROMs for the MT32, so you can have MT32 or General MIDI without needing an MT32-Pi. It's highly compatible with almost everything. The latency will be somewhat worse than the Mister, but it might be acceptable. It may be somewhat noticeable on a Castlevania-type game.

I'm not super-fond of the AO486 core. A lot of stuff works, but many games don't. :(
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by dougan78 »

@jd213 for Dracula's Shadow the F12 Full screen thing only works when you are in game afaik. You need to be in the game walking around for any of the keys mentioned on the start screen start working. It is quirky that way. Good luck.
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by jd213 »

Ah, that worked for a split second but it crashed immediately after going into fullscreen. Thanks anyways, one of these days I'll make a partition for DOS/Win98 on a PC I built with older parts.
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by akeley »

I seem to recall some folks saying that latest ao486 is "unstable" (ie crashes more than previously), but can't find this thread again. Just saw my Doom install crash on the latest, while it works fine on older versions, so was wondering if anybody else saw similar symptoms?
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by scanline_samurai »

Has anyone figured out a way to install The Elder Scrolls: Arena on ao486? I can't get the installer to work, the "install game" button is greyed out, and trying to just run the exe from the CD just gives me "Not enough EMM"

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thera34
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by thera34 »

scanline_samurai wrote: Sun May 07, 2023 10:50 am

Has anyone figured out a way to install The Elder Scrolls: Arena on ao486? I can't get the installer to work, the "install game" button is greyed out, and trying to just run the exe from the CD just gives me "Not enough EMM"

Ignore the greyed out menu item, just go on and Configure Game (sound effects and music to your preferences, I go with SB for effects and MT32 for music). Then Exit. It will create (by default C:\ARENA_CD) folder with arena.bat.
The EMS part is that you will need to use either EMM386 or QEMM memory managers for the game to work. Both easily usable from top 300 pack iirc.

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breiztiger
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by breiztiger »

hi

i try to play with another world ...

but tank in first Delphine Software Screen

without EMM manager and another N (nosound)

have somebody success to play with this game ?

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NML32
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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by NML32 »

breiztiger wrote: Sun Jun 18, 2023 10:54 am

hi

i try to play with another world ...

but tank in first Delphine Software Screen

without EMM manager and another N (nosound)

have somebody success to play with this game ?

I sent you a PM.

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Re: AO486 Compatibility List

Unread post by scanline_samurai »

thera34 wrote: Wed Jun 07, 2023 11:27 am
scanline_samurai wrote: Sun May 07, 2023 10:50 am

Has anyone figured out a way to install The Elder Scrolls: Arena on ao486? I can't get the installer to work, the "install game" button is greyed out, and trying to just run the exe from the CD just gives me "Not enough EMM"

Ignore the greyed out menu item, just go on and Configure Game (sound effects and music to your preferences, I go with SB for effects and MT32 for music). Then Exit. It will create (by default C:\ARENA_CD) folder with arena.bat.
The EMS part is that you will need to use either EMM386 or QEMM memory managers for the game to work. Both easily usable from top 300 pack iirc.
20230607_140939-screen.png
20230514_233124-screen.png

Thanks for this. I'll try it when I've unpacked enough to the point where I can actually set up my MiSTer again.

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