Working DosBox for X50v found

[DeadTaco]

I stumbled upon a build of dosbox that runs great on the X50v. Granted, it doesn't have sound and the mouse is a little hokey, but it seems to run fairly fast.

http://www.geocities.com/pdosbox/details.htm

If you configure it before running it, you can get it to work pretty well. However, it doesn't have a software keyboard of its own so you have to use the standard windows mobile keyboard.

I emailed the guy who made it, and he basically said that very few people know about it because he's not advertising it. Personally, I think the word needs to get out since it actually works for my X50v.

[playmobil]

That's great news!!

Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to run - maybe you could ellaborate as to how exactly you configured it.

Steps I took:
1)Copied the pDOSBox0.63-p1 directory to my sd card.
2)Changed the following 2 directives in the dosbox.conf file:

mount c "/SD Card/Apps/pDOSBox0.63-p1/DosPrograms"
fullresolution=640x480

3)Rotated the display to landscape.
4)Tried to launch by clicking on the exe file from the File explorer.

All I get is the spinning cursor, which forces me to perform a soft reset... :(

[DeadTaco]

Here's the config I used (I have DosBox running on my compact flash card, but running it on an SD card shouldn't make a difference I wouldn't think...) You'll notice that I have fullresolution set to 320x240. I did that to make sure it worked, and it seems to.

[sdl]
fullscreen=false
fulldouble=false
fullfixed=false
fullresolution=320x240
output=surface
hwscale=1.00
autolock=true
sensitivity=200
mapperfile=mapper.conf

[dosbox]
language=
captures=capture
memsize=4

[render]
frameskip=1
aspect=false
scaler=none

[cpu]
cycles=9000
cycleup=100
cycledown=50

[dos]
# xms -- Enable XMS support.
# ems -- Enable EMS support.
xms=true
ems=true

[autoexec]
mount c "/CF Card/pDOSBox0.63-p1/DosPrograms"
mount d "/CF Card"
Mount e "/"

If you still can't get it to work, try unmounting all drives and then run it. You don't have to have a mounted drive in order to get it to work if I remember right (you can mount the drives manually by typing 'mount' when it's running). It didn't work for me on the first try either, so I had to remove the mounted drives at first.

COOL!
I will try it tomorrow. Does anybody know if this runs any faster then PocketDOS?

BTW, you can use the code tags to but the above info in.

[DeadTaco]

I've done a little bit of testing, and I've gotten it much faster on a few games than pocketDos, however, the lacking keyboard and mouse issues are a bit of a pain. It also seems to run the games that require XMS memory or 386/486 processors. I'm hoping that if it gets popular enough, the creator will work on it a bit more. From the sounds of things, he didn't feel there was much interest in it so he's not working on it that much. Let's convince him to keep going :)

Poor dev guy.. I hope he is ready for the enthuasism that I am ready to express for more working apps on the x50v...

[FallN]

Please forgive my ignorance, but what the heck is a "DosBox"?

It's an emulator of a personal computer running dos 6.22 on your pocket pc. PocketDos is much more stable but tends to be more limited in what it can run.

[FallN]

Thanks for the info. What can you do on the DosBox that you CAN'T do with the normal Windows Mobile OS?

Use dos apps.. apps made for normal computers. Think they used this to run windows 95 before.

Actually I think that's a myth, I have never seen a verified report of anyone successfully loading anything beyond 3.1 which I think had problems. I have heard of fairly successful running of Windows 3.0, but why would you want to. I think a few people have loaded 95 but I don't think they were ever able to actually run anything.

not trying to be a party pooper, but so what if it can run win 3.11 or 95? if this happened 5yrs ago, then i would still have those old programs that would work on these old OS. unless it can run win98, i doubt i would have any real use for it

[deedas]

Ohh! The ignorance!

There were a lot of cool games, programs, etc, that ran under DOS. Games and apps that will never be ported for Windows mobile. Not that many people know DOS anymore, especially the younger ones. So I suppose one could reason that there is a coolness factor there.

It would be just great being able to make some of those old proggy's run again. LOL

Ohh! The ignorance!

There were a lot of cool games, programs, etc, that ran under DOS. Games and apps that will never be ported for Windows mobile. Not that many people know DOS anymore, especially the younger ones. So I suppose one could reason that there is a coolness factor there.

It would be just great being able to make some of those old proggy's run again. LOL

hehehe...ok that's a good point. i do have a couple DOS games in 5.25in floopies somewhere that i never completed. anyone here used to play games created by the company apogee? they made pretty good games on dos & i still have some of them :approve:

it is a sad thing, nowadays you talk about DOS, and everyone talk you are speaking in Latin or something

[deedas]

Hmm! Now you got me going PPT.
I wonder if "US Navy Fighters" would work on here. I used to play that for hours on end. How about the original DOOM, hmmm!

People, you gotta remember that the X50V is light years ahead of the first PC's. My first PC was a Timex Sinclair. It came with 2K of RAM. You'll be surprised what you can do with 2K.

My first IBM PC was an XT that ran a 4.77MHz Intel 8086 processor. At enormous expense, I built it up to 640K of RAM. It had two 5 1/4 floppies. One for the OS (DOS 3.0 which fit on a 360K floppy) and the other for your programs. You had to boot from the floppy so you could run your programs. My first hard drive, which cost about $1000, was a 10M drive. Now you could load the OS and then your games without shuffling floppies.

There were many game companies out there like Apogee, Sierra, Id, etc,, The only way those games were available was on a floppy. The first color monitors allowed you to display 4 colors (CGA), then came 16 colors (EGA) and then 256 colors (VGA).

We've come a long way since then.