HX DOS Extender

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Caldor
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HX DOS Extender

Unread post by Caldor »

Anyone tried this on the AO486?

It seems pretty amazing... but, so far the videos and such I have found is people using it in DOSBox or on pretty high end PCs. Some even use it to run DOSBox from DOS, to get support for audio.

I found this video where someone managed to run Quake 2 and Hexen II in DOS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dq0yaWZ8ZA

This is its original web-site. I read that the developer died unfortunately, but someone else has added one update to it since, which seems to have been two months ago, so the project might still be alive. But also... if it can run Quake 2 in DOS it might already be good enough for several things.
https://www.japheth.de/HX.html

This is the git of the newest version:
https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/HX

It has a version 2.18 and a 2.19pre. Otherwise the latest version is 2.17, but 2.16 is the one the original developer considered stable, with 2.17 being a beta or something. I read someone should have gotten ScummVM to run under DOS with it, the Windows version of ScummVM that is, since there is also a DOS version of it, its just pretty old now.

I have been trying to use it for a few things. It needs some extra DLLs after being installed. One for OpenGL although that will probably not help much for AO486, but also other ones like SDL, to help run SDL apps, like ScummVM. So far no luck using it on AO486 though. Not sure what goes wrong, since it does not even seem to crash or throw errors, it just returns to DOS.
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Re: HX DOS Extender

Unread post by Caldor »

I have put together a VHD with HX DOS to make it easier for people to test it.
http://dionysus.dk/software/DOS/FreeDOS1.3rc3.zip
Reed_Solomon made the original image, and I modified it a bit by f.ex. adding Star Commander and the HX DOS Extender to it. Its in the Apps folder. I also gave it some bat files, that are mainly to make it easier to remember. One I called "windos" which will load into memory and try to help running Windows apps, the other is runwin which takes some windows executable as a parameter which tries to force win32 UI mode, but the windos method should automatically do that if needed.

So far I have not gotten anything to work though. Well, except some test files included with HX DOS.
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Re: HX DOS Extender

Unread post by Caldor »

I have been trying it some more, and while I have been unable to run actual Windows apps in DOS, especially graphical ones, it does seem to help run apps in protected mode. F.ex. Warcraft 2 can run when using it, and also it helps run some games included with FreeDOS that otherwise wont run.
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