Hmmm now i had time to test it ; ) Link is gone

Googled a little to find informations on vga emulation. If I understood right, to emulate a "more advanced" graphic card, Bochs needs to use the vgabios-latest-cirrus and set the "vga extension" to cirrus. If I do this, Bochs exits with a panic error because it can't recognize that setting. Maybe something still unimplemented in this AROS port? Will Bochs support network?

I've done a bit of looking into bochs online, and from what I can tell there was a major speed regression in one of the latest versions. Ive seen some benchmarks from version 2.3.7 and theyre considerably better than what Im getting with 2.4.5 on both AROS and Windows versions. I also had a few older versions Id done for AROS and it seemed faster than this latest version. I'll do some experimenting and see what can be done about the speed. I'll also look into qemu for aros as well, and actually have a new version of Dosbox I'll upload soon. As for Dosbox vs. Bochs, I'd imagine that Dosbox would win hands down most of the time. Win95 on Dosbox is probably at least 2x as fast (more likely 4) from my experiments so far (although its emulation of gfx cards is just different enough to the real things that installing a driver for that "card" woks, but the display gets corrupted heavily so youre limited to vesa modes).
Personally I think the best thing about having bochs for aros so far is that it gives you the ability to create harddisk images and install Win9x on AROS, and then use that image to use Win9x in Dosbox.

Anyway, I guess one of the big incentives in me porting these emulators is that I'd like to be able to take advantage of a few bits of software that aros lacks at the moment withough having to use another machine. It's mostly for my own use, but thankfully there seems to be a few people that share my enthusiasm for the idea, which helps when Im feeling slack :)

i didnt knew bochs was that slow. (it took loooong time to see it arrive in arosland).

i dont want to be the boring, but wouldnt be better if it would be qemu the one? (dunno if it would be harder or easier)

otoh, have bochs (an emulator) has other behaviours, for other archs for example.

i wonder if someone will try some dosbox X bochs benchmark! :)

congrats fish, bochs, from the history i remember was not an easy port.

I think you over estimate Bochs. Diablo1 is probably overshooting, let alone Diablo2. Bochs is *very* slow, even on my aros machine (c2d@3.86ghz). I've yet to benchmark it, but I suspect it's roughly 486 - low end p1'ish speeds on my machine.

Can't wait to test Diablo 2

The problem with the mouse cursor it because the aros cursor simply cant be seen while over and sdl window, its always still there, and isnt locked into the bochs window. Hopefully shouldnt be too hard to implement a workaround, but it's one of the less important problems for now. As for the colors, make sure youve got the correct drivers installed from the windows side of things. I think certain cirrus logic cards are emulated (make sure you use its bios too). Alternatively you could also use some vesa drivers (from widnows side) too. This is all of course in theory, Ive yet to try it myself yet. The problem with mouse clicks on icons I know about, its a timing issue and I think I know whats causing it.

It's great to have Bochs for AROS. Waited for it for long. I've just installed W98se on Bochs and I found some strange behaviour of the mouse. Every time I'm using the mouse on Bochs and AROS' mouse is outside Bochs' window, it stops moving if the screen border is reached and every time I left click outside Boch's window the pointer returns to AROS. Sometimes, left clicking on Windows icons has no effect and to open/run something I need to right click and use the "open/run" command. Sometimes Bochs quits if right click outside Bochs window.

Other strange things: on hardware information window the "BIOS plug and play" has a yellow square with an exclamation mark and Windows now uses a standard vga with only 16 colors. Maybe the last thing is due unimplemented features?

Quote:

Good idea! i didnt want to commit to anything, but now i may get a chance to test it! ;)

Unfortunately Bochs is an emulator rather than a "Virtualiser", so performance, to be honest is fairly bad. This is true of bochs on all formats though, and its not just the aros version. I'll do my best to make it as fast as possible, while maintaining as much practical functionality, but at best expect pentium1 class speeds. The earlier versions appear faster so I'll see what I can do about merging the best of the old and new.

Anyway, I was going to just get a few people to test it for me, but its probably easiest if I just post a link in here and use this thread for feedback. Thanks

bochs alpha


Oh, as for use, Ive included my .bochsrc file, it obviously wont work as paths will be different, but it should be a good point of reference. Just start bochs and use the shell prompts to configure it to your liking/needs. The numbers/words/etc in brackets represent the current value, and those values will be used if you just press enter. Feel free to ask for help if need be, but to begin with the most important parts are the bios and vga bios. Additionally there's a tool included to create new hard disk images.