Posts by felsqualle

  • Help us to test the upcoming ScummVM 2.9.0!

    The ScummVM Team opened public testing for the upcoming 2.9.0 release.

  • New release: DREAMM 3.0.2

    A few days ago, Aaron Giles released version 3.0.2 of his DREAMM emulator.

    DREAMM is a bespoke emulator for LucasArts games (complete list).

    Changelog:

    • Added support for Amazon versions of Indy Crusade, Indy Fate, Loom, The Dig, EfMI
    • Fixed Rebel Assault 1.7 installation (requires reinstall since I was missing a file)
    • Fixed X-Wing/TIE CD Collector's editions when running from GOG/Steam releases
    • Fixed juddery scrolling in Super Star Wars prototype
    • Fixed launching Rebel Assault variants in standalone mode
    • Fixed POV hats in Windows games
    • Improved joystick remapping in the presence of asymmetric axes
    • If you have no joystick, games will now see no joystick present
    • Improved MacOS behavior when switching in/out of full screen
    • Fixed occasional crash during user interface animations
    • Fixed occasional crashes when encountering corrupt or unexpected image files

  • VMAudioBackHost: A new way to fix sound for Windows 2000/XP guests on VMware Workstation

    Okay, more news.

    I updated my machine to Windows 11 24H2 this morning, and now the CPU virtualization counter stuff broke again (which breaks basically each and every update). Even though Hyper-V and Core Isolation is disabled, I can't get to boot the VM with these options enabled - and without them, the sound issues are back again.

    Turns out that you _really_ don't want to update until _after_ the VMware update that grants compatibility... sigh.

    UPDATE: I rolled back to yesterday's backup which is still on 23H2 and the issues are gone, so I am very confident that 24H2 is the culprit.

  • A DREAMM come true: DREAMM 3.0.1 is here!

    A few days ago, Aaron Giles released version 3.0.1 of his DREAMM emulator.

    DREAMM is a bespoke emulator for LucasArts games (complete list), including:

    If you are new to the tool, I recommend checking the great documentation.

    Over the last months, I used DREAMM quite a lot, and I never ran into issues. The most demanding game I was running was Curse of Monkey Island, and this ran very well.

  • VMAudioBackHost: A new way to fix sound for Windows 2000/XP guests on VMware Workstation

    Since a couple of years, Windows 2000 and XP guests running inside VMware Workstation suffer from sound issues - in many cases, you will get a lot of stutter and distortion.

    There were a couple of fixes over the years like VMAudioFixTray and VMAudioBack, but due to some changes in Windows 10/11 and current VMware Workstation releases, they mostly stopped working.

    Thankfully, there's a new tool called VMAudioBackHost. Instead of running inside the guest OS, it targets the host OS directly by injecting a timing fix into the VMware process. A more in-depth explaination about the fix is provided in the project's readme.

    I tried this on my Windows 11 host with VMware Workstation 17 and a Windows 2000 VM, and I can confirm that this fully fixes all sound issues.

  • Creating New Installation Media for MS-DOS 4.0

    On April 25, 2024, Microsoft released the source code of MS-/PC-DOS 4.00 to the public, and the community managed to provide MS-DOS 4.01 as well.

    While the original release was available as a set of six 5,25" floppy disks (and optionally three 3,5" disks for version 4.01), this open-source release does not have official installation media.

    Recreating the original media would theoretically be possible, but I want to focus on the 720k images for this project. Having to swap around six floppies multiple times isn’t practical. Furthermore, we can build images for 1.44 MB floppy disks for increased compatibility—the SELECT utility used for the installation process doesn’t like it if you install it on floppies with a different format than the source disks are written in.

    The open-source release is missing a few program files and the entire DOSSHELL environment, so we also have to deal with this.

    Read more...

  • If I Ever Get a Dog, I'll Name It Rover: A Brief Introduction to Microsoft Bob

    March 1995. Although PCs had been around for many years at this point, less than 40% of households in the US owned one. Back then, people mostly associated PCs with being a machine used at work, not a thing you’d even need at home. They were complicated and… unfriendly.

    Just a few months before the launch of the all-new Windows 95, Microsoft Bob was an attempt to create a user-friendly interface that runs on top of Windows to increase the popularity of PCs at home and show how valuable a PC might be for purposes other than business.

    This interface provides a virtual home inside your computer, divided into multiple rooms resembling your house’s rooms. It’s designed to be intuitive and user-friendly, so you don’t need to know what a word processor is or how the applications are named — for example, just click on the pen and paper on your virtual desk and start writing a letter.

    Read more...

  • BAGEL: A ScummVM engine for "The Space Bar"

    The ScummVM project announced that "The Space Bar" is now ready for public testing:

    Quote from ScummVM project website

    In a universe where bagels meet bars, the BAGEL engine has been perfectly toasted, and the ScummVM team is now ready to serve a slice of The Space Bar nostalgia. No, it’s not the key on your keyboard. Rather, it’s a detective story set on a distant planet. Important data has been stolen, and the perpetrator is a shape-shifter laying low in a spaceport dive bar until he can flee off-planet. You play a hard-boiled detective who has the skill to psychically visit bar patrons’ memories to gather clues and narrow down suspects.

    This is thanks to the kind people at ZOOM Platform, who provided us with the original game sources to work with. Help us test the game by grabbing a daily build. Read through our testing guidelines. The game features a lot of options to chat around with bar patrons’ and do various actions in the different flashbacks. So we really need people to spend time experimenting and make sure everything works correctly. And please take some screenshots along the way.

    If you don’t own The Space Bar, you can try one of the free demos or purchase it digitally from the ZOOM Platform. Testing is also available on Steam via a beta branch, check the Steam announcement for more details.

    Now, good luck, and fingers crossed you can find the perp. Otherwise, your bureau chief will have you getting up close and personal with toilet duties for the rest of your career. Oh, and PS: The viewpoints of different aliens differ. For the Bartender, who has segmented eyes, even the original developers felt it was difficult and left in a cheat key of ScrollLock to switch back to a single viewpoint. Feel free to use it if, at any point, the flashback becomes too much for you :)

    I have to admit that I never heard of the game before development of the BAGEL engine started. Considering it was published by the same studio that did "Obsidian", this should be a very, very fun (and hard) ride.

  • Printer emulator for Atari ST

    Quote from dressupgeekout

    Sometimes I feel like an outsider even among retro computing folks because of my enthusiasm for *word processing* of all things -- it's not glamorous or sexy like games, hah. But I honestly would love to have a little hardware gizmo that can do all the above. In practice, I have multiple workarounds to (mostly) achieve what I'm trying to achieve, but it's not streamlined, and the results on paper still don't look quite right.

    Just wanted to share one of my more intriguing project ideas here!

    Oh, this is really cool! The Atari ST stuff is still on my never-ending backlog - I only ever used it once in an emulator, but I don't really remember a lot of it since it was a few years ago.

    Quote from dressupgeekout

    (Edit: Should I have posted this to The Outlet forum instead?)

    Yep - no worries though, I'm still trying to make the forum structure more intuitive. I moved the thread to The Outlet.

  • About Improving MS-DOS Screenshots With Calculated Distortion

    Thank you very much - now that I read the thing with the progress bar, I think I remember someone posting quite a while ago - I wonder who it was though. It was most likely on Twitter back then, so I'll have a hard time finding it...

    Oh, and now I remember even more - there was a "trick" back then where you could create your own BMP file, save that one as LOGO.SYS, maybe edit something in the MSDOS.SYS and you had your custom boot screen... Memories!

    And you are absolutely right regarding the dimensions:

    Quote from https://web.archive.org/web/20240608142917/https://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=367201

    The size: If you view an existing Logo.sys in MS Paint, you'll notice that it is sized 320 pixels wide by 400 pixels high. The Windows startup routines stretch it out to 640 x 400 when it's displayed. You can create a new graphic at 640 x 400 — or at 533 x 400 if you want to maintain the 4:3 ratio (width to height) that is the standard for video monitors — and then use MS Paint or Paint Shop Pro to shrink the graphic to 320 x 400.

    Color: Your Logo.sys file must have a color depth of 256 colors (8 bit), and its file size must be 127K. If it is 320 pixelsx 400 pixels x 256 colors, it will be 127K in size. The Windows startup routine will reject a Logo.sys file that doesn't meet these criteria.

  • About Improving MS-DOS Screenshots With Calculated Distortion

    Quote from mihi

    However, I'm pretty sure that the startup and shutdown animations on Windows 9x were not in 640x400, but in 320x400 (even more distorted) 256-color mode. Most boot screen viewers therefore stretched the image by 200% to make it look as if it was 640x400.

    Oh, that's interesting. I wasn't able to find any real documentation about it, so I used the dimensions of the screenshot taken with 86Box as reference. Maybe it already does some line-doubling magic to be able to even display the image? This is surely something I'll check again.

    Quote from mihi

    And the link to this comment section in the post is broken :)

    Thank you, fixed!

  • The ISA PicoMEM Extension board: A software defined multi-purpose ISA card

    The ISA PioMEMO Extension board is a new, software-defined extension board for the original PC:

    Quote from GitHub

    Current Functionality

    - Memory emulation with 16Kb Address granularity:

    128Kb of RAM can be emulated from the Pi Pico internal RAM with No Wait State. We can emulate the whole 1Mb of RAM address space from the PSRAM. (With 6 Wait Stated minimum added) EMS Emulation of Up to 6/7 Mb. (Only 4Mb for the moment as using the LoTech EMS Driver) Memory emulation is used to add 4Kb of "Private" memory for the PicoMEM BIOS Usage. 4Kb of RAM is also added for disk access (Or other) 512b only is used for the moment.

    • ROM Emulation for its internal BIOS and custom ROM loaded from the MicroSD. (Custom ROM not implemented yet)
      The Board has its own BIOS, used to automatically detect/Extend/Configure the RAM emulation and select Floppy/Disk images.
    • Floppy and Disk "emulation" from .img files stored in uSD through FasFs and DosBOX int13h emulation code.
      Emulate 2 Floppy and 4 Disk (80h to 83h), Disk up to 4Gb (More later)
    • USB Mouse support through a USB OTC Adapter. (Micro USB to USB A or USB Hub)
    • POST Code on Rev 1.1 and 1.11 (Port 80 Display in Hexa) through this device : https://www.sparkfun.com/products/16916
    • ne2000 network card emulation via Wifi is working on boards with a PicoW.
    • USB Joystick for PS4 and Xinput controllers.
    • NEW: Adlib using a PCM502 I2S module.

    Future Functionality

    • There is already a mechanism implemented, so that the Pi Pico can send command to the PC, we can have the Pi Pico taking "Virtually" the control of the PC.

    This can be used to perform ROM/RAM dump, Disk/Floppy DUMP/Write, display/kb redirection....

    • More USB Host to be added (Keyboard, MIDI...)
    • Bluetooth support for device like Gamepad may be added.
    • Use of the Qwiic connector for more information display (OLED), maybe RTC and other.

    I don't have an original PC from that era, so unfortunately, this is not something I can try right now. Given the extensibility thanks to the software-defined nature of this card, I'm really wondering what this little thing will achieve in the future.

    Adrian Black covered this card in a recent video:

    External Content www.youtube.com
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

  • New release: WinUAE 5.3.0

    Finnish Amiga mastermind Toni Wilen released another update of his WinUAE emulator:

    WinUAE 5.3.0 | WinUAE Amiga emulator

    Quote

    New emulated RTG boards

    • CyberVision/BlizzardVision PPC. 2D only, 3D is not implemented. (Permedia 2)
    • GVP EGS 110/24. (INMOS G364)
    • Graffity. (Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428)
    • Merlin, includes support for configurable serial number used by ProBench (Tseng ET4000W32)
    • oMniBus (Tseng ET4000AX or ET4000W32)
    • Rainbow III (INMOS G360)
    • Visiona (INMOS G300)

    All “classic” 1990s RTG boards are now emulated.

    New features/updates

    • Prometheus FireStorm PCI bridge emulation
    • Release raw input devices when GUI is open (except during input Test/Remap) or when debugger window is active. Allows Windows shortcut keys like Win+E to work without need to unfocus the window.
    • Added Misc panel option to disable default on screen keyboard gamepad button 4 mapping.
    • Some uae-configuration (and other similar) debugging logging messages automatically opened the console window. Now only entering debugger will open it.
    • Added “Always on (Fixed only)” sound filter option. This enables A500 fixed filter but never enables “led filter”. (A1200 does not have fixed filter, only “led” filter)
    • Replaced old Windows 2000 compatible Windows clipboard handling with newer, simpler and more reliable method introduced in Vista.
    • Allow also 68020+ CPUs to fetch instruction words from custom chipset space. Only if more compatible is set. If some program really wants to do something weird like execute code located in AGA palette registers 🙂
    • Lightpen/gun cursor in any edge of screen: lightpen/gun not pointing at the screen = position can’t be read by the program.
    • Statefile shortcut keys now select current config file name as a base statefile name (for example, if “test1.uae” config file is loaded, SHIFT+END+0 will save statefile as “test1.uss”. Quickstart mode config still uses original default “default.uss”)
    • Both “SaveImage” (automatically created ext adf when write-enabling non-writable image like ipf) file extension variants are now detected automatically when checking if file exists. Paths panel SaveImage mode option now only affects generated file name when new saveimage is created.
    • Added LDP-1450 laserdisc player OSD font emulation. Fixes laserdisc arcade game Platoon (Nova) previously missing “YOU’RE HIT!!” messages. (All OSD graphics are generated by Amiga except this message!)

    Bug fixes

    • Fixed XT based Bridgeboards non-working floppy drive emulation, broke during 5.1 DraCo updates (wrong density detection)
    • Serial port data receive was unreliable. Loopback serial port mode didn’t work in fast CPU modes.
    • CD32 FMV video image size and positioning was weird in most scaled modes.
    • Exclusive fullscreen and RTG resolution switch (RTG resolution switch to another RTG resolution without switch to native mode and back) didn’t change fullscreen resolution.
    • Some ECS programmed modes (for example SuperPlus) had first visible line blanked.
    • Fixed corruption in some “weird” programmed modes, introduced in 5.0 betas.
    • Some hardware emulated RTG boards had flickering colors during horizontal panning (>8 bit modes only)
    • Fixed ECS Denise superhires mode hires sprite pointer strange odd/even horizontal movement.
    • Fixed pre-KS 1.2 HDF/directory filesystem boot. Broke long time ago.
    • Multi-monitor active state was not fully reset when system was hard reset. (Multimonitor window was open -> hard reset -> window didn’t open anymore again)
    • If x86 bridgeboard SVGA and also other hardware emulated RTG board was active and END+F9 was used to switch monitors: both monitors’ output was drawn in same window, causing corrupted graphics and possibly also crash if monitor sizes were too different.
    • It was not possible to write and read ECS/AGA genlock transparency bit in color registers. Was broken long time ago.
    • Delay ALG LDP seek complete status reply slightly. Fixes laserdisc arcade game Platoon (Nova) few second hangs.
    • Los Justicieros (Zorton Brothers) laserdisc arcade game left holster hooked up correctly. (Was stuck active previously)

    The Amiga (500) was one of the very first systems I played with when I discovered the wonderful world of emulation, so WinUAE and WinFellow will have a special place in my heart forever.