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Messages - Mathias

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121
Hardware / Re: Warpstock Europe
« on: May 21, 2019, 10:42:02 pm »
Most interesting (for me) was Lewis' announcement, where DTA is renamed to DTAudio (no idea what A stand for before), but it's initial release is planned for ArcaOS 5.0.5 . This means sound in WinOS/2 sessions and DOS VDM via wrapper to Uniaud. - Very cewl for retro gaming! *__*

122
Games / Re: ArcaOS - Retro Gaming Machine
« on: May 17, 2019, 04:56:46 pm »
André, sure thing; But I doubt regular users would be able to bring the machine to its limits with DOS games. :> - Therefore, I suppose a crazy and much more modern PC case would do the job already, attracting people in between all the old Amigas and retro things.  - No need to spend hundreds of EUR just to run retro applications, where some already run way too fast on the Intel Atom. :D

The aim is to attract people first, and then make them sit down and play around with the stuff installed.

Sound.. yes.. that would then complete the user's retro experience, as soon as they have started a game. - But that's nothing that I could do much about. I have to wait for the devs to come around with a solution.


Ivan, it's crazy what bugs and potential security holes are found by some individuals and laboratories. - All this renders whole computer fleets unsafe all of sudden, and what was state of the art a moment ago, is now unsafe trash from one to the other second. It's true that AMD has not yet been impacted by such kind of bugs, but why didn't these "boffins" come around with that stuff some years ago, when these CPUs had been released? - Not sure, but I think that is somehwat on purpose, so we all have to buy new hardware all the time. - Lucky AMD users for the moment, but I suppose when these scientists would check AMD CPUs, they might find one or another similar bug too.. :o

It's unfortunate, but today everything is unsafe, as long as it has not been proven to be safe.. but then, the next day somebody comes out of nowhere, telling you "all your hardware is unsafe and needs to be replaced".
Same with Volkswagen and co: First they tell you all is excellent, and the other day they take the car out of order, as you produce much much more toxic output as you are allowed to. - Who pays for this? Of course not the industry, but the customer needs to buy new stuff to comply with regulations. (Atleast german customers need to. I have heard VW is sentenced to give buyers their money back in the US, which IS RIGHT, just why not here in DE??) Why does industry never pay for their own faults?
I would say that Intel needs to hand me my money back, as I need to buy new CPUs now.. since the old ones are unsafe in any aspect.. rendering them almost useless.. if I care for data security.

Mathias


123
Article Discussions / Re: ArcaOS - 2nd Year
« on: May 17, 2019, 03:24:09 pm »
My AracOS experience is, until now, a quite good one. It also brought me back to the good old DOS gaming world, brought back some Win 3.11 memories and lets me start with Visual Age 4 (didn't have that one back then in OS/2 3 days).

Stability wise I had quite some issues. Even out of the box, especially with Panorama, when switching between resolutions from DOS fullscreen mode back to desktop resolution.. or click the SNAP advanced button works at first, but when you want to return to the desktop, the whole thing hangs (always reproducable on all my hardware)

But.. as long as you know where NOT to click on, or what to do to avoid stuff, that could break the OS, it's great and stable.
I am sure these things are all minor and will be fixed over the time. As for now, browser, USB3 and UEFI are the big things to concentrate on.. so let's not bother with stuff like freezing desktop when switching between consoles.. ; )

Still, there is that bug from the old OS/2 days, where Windows 3.x sees there is nothing free on the hard drive, but infact there are 2+ GB of free space left. (there is a patch for that, which is acutally not yet delivered with the OS)

All in all you need to know what you are doing, or else you might run into problems.. like for instance let a computer n00b use it... it might not be a good experience for him... also only until they know what to do and what better avoid to do..
It's not as bulletproof as Linux Mint or Windows 7 yet. But as it is only two years old yet, I think, it's likely to have small quirks and problems. (Remember Windows 95 and Bill Gates trying to scan some paper, resulting in a bluescreen? :D)

Also, since ArcaNoae is still active and still releasing more and more features, the journey will most likely continue and hopefully bring this OS/2 based operating system a future on modern computers. : ) - Which is GREAT and I like to thank ArcaNoae and all its supporters for maintaining and developing such a nice operating system!

And let's not forget VOICE, Bitwise and co for their VERY nice support for the whole OS/2 platform, porting stuff to OS/2 is always appreciated from my point of view, and enriches the OS with new possibilities. : )

Mathias

124
Games / Re: ArcaOS - Retro Gaming Machine
« on: May 15, 2019, 08:56:31 am »
Hi Ivan,

> That sounds like a rather nice machine

It's a ten year old power saver with a rather slowish CPU. - And the onboard graphics chip was said to be HD ready, but the reality is even 720p had performance issues at times.
Also browsing the internet can be quite a test of patience. - Writing an article in a Minecraft forum with that machine took ages, as the forum website had a javascript running, that was completely killing the CPU. - ArcaOS, same as Linux, same as Windows 7.
So.. I would rather not use that anymore for daily use, but for retro projects, it's perfect. : )



> I am not surprised about the ASMedia SATA card working because those chips are used by the Ryzen chipset

I see! oo: - Interesting. - This card must be atleast 5 years old, maybe even older, and still this chipset family is being used by top-notch AMD boards?

I am too an AMD person, in theory, but some years ago I had to switch *some* machines to Intel, as I needed 64 GB RAM in two machines. But AMD boards could only do 32 GB at max, back then.
Today this is a complete other story, and I might get AMD machines again. The cost2usage ratio (for me) is and always was simply better @ AMD.



> which means that I have to use a VIA USB 2 PCIe1 card for any USB needs.

Hmm.. the day will come, where these cards are getting rare. But as I heard, development is ongoing for USB3 drivers, I have confidence, OS/2 will make the jump on USB3 and also UEFI.


> The fact you made an image after you got it installed is good.

Of course. Returning the machine from the con means, somebody could have changed, installed, infected something, so I need the image to roll back the HDD to where it was before: Clean ArcaOS install with all the games and icons in place.
Also if something goes wrong at the retro con, and I need to reinstall ArcaOS.. I can roll out the image, and the machine is back on display in 20 minutes.
Or afterwards, the machine can be used for other things, allowing me to always get ArcaOS on it again, when needed.
So.. creating images is always a good idea. : ))



> I had to do that to bypass problems with the ArcaOS installer on all the Ryzen boards I have.

Oh!! So the installer does not (yet?) work with Ryzen boards?
So you installed the OS on another machine and imaged it to the Ryzen machine, which worked out in the end? :D - Another cewl feature of OS/2: You can swich the hardware underneath the OS without breaking anything. Just replacing drivers in config.sys...
Try that with Windows... :p


125
Games / Re: ArcaOS - Retro Gaming Machine
« on: May 14, 2019, 07:44:03 pm »
Just had a look at the martian SATA controller, that was compatible with the ArcaOS installer. : )

--> Asmedia SATA Controller 106X Version 0.95 AHCI Mode (SMART supported, PCIe Gen2)


Martin, thanks for your feedback! : )) - Yes there is indeed a picture of the machine, but it's quite small, since the picture shows the whole room. I have made a couple of photos just now.
It's not the nicest case, but I like it for some reason.

As for MIDI... mhmm.. unfortunately I have no MIDI knowledge with OS/2. Just Linux and Windows. But of course, as I love testing stuff out, this might only be a temporary situation.. :p - I'll try to free up some time.
And yup.. next year I hope for the Soundblaster 16/AWE32 wrapper/translator to bind DOS sound to UNIAUD. - This will definitely raise the attraction level quite a bit!

126
Games / Re: ArcaOS - Retro Gaming Machine
« on: May 14, 2019, 09:50:49 am »
Ivan, sure thing. : )

The machine is what I had free at the moment. It's not toooo modern, but modern for OS/2 aspects. It is an Intel Atom with 2x 1,6GHz with Hyperthreading, so it shows 4 cores.
It's got a 512 GB SATA hdd and 4 GB RAM installed (plenty for the OS), has no external drives, just USB slots.

Installing the current AracOS (DE beta) I had troube, as the ION chip onboard appears to be incompatible with the installer; It didn't recognise the hard drive at all, just the ArcaOS install USB stick, so I could have installed it there, but naw... I wanted the stuff to be on hdd.

So I took a Transcent USB3 PCIe 1x card, that I had flying around. This one also comes with an SATA controller onboard. (If you are interested in the controller type, please let me know. I will have a look.) The martian SATA controller on there was recognised by the ARCAOS installer, and so it worked out. - I was VERY surprised this weird SATA controller was supported, and the much more widely spread Intel ION chip was not. :o

The installer ran trough, and finally the ArcaOS desktop showed up.
It turned out, all hardware was supported and did work instantly. Also the network card. - Instantly I went and updated everything step by step using the Arca Noae Packet Manager. After two reboots this process was done, and I tried to set up SNAP, just to find out, that it does not support my onboard ION graphics chip. - Still, as it turned out later, THIS installation was much more stable than my other Panorama test installations. - It ran all DOS, Windows and OS/2 games fine without crashing once, it had no trouble switching between DOS full screens and OS/2 windows, everything was smooth and nice. - I never had such trouble free usage with Panorama... so ... even though SNAP offered no acceleration (I had to disable full window dragging... dragging the frame itself was fine and quick), the whole user experience was good still.

Besides graphics and SATA controller, I had no trouble at all with that machine. Everything worked as expected.

Of course I've created an image of the finished machine with all games and stuff, using Clonezilla. - Just to allow me to roll back to a working OS in the case of an emergency.

127
Games / Re: ArcaOS - Retro Gaming Machine
« on: May 13, 2019, 11:14:42 pm »
Report for the 13th Retro gaming night @ Leipzig, Germany on 11th of May 2019!!
First of all some pictures :D --> http://www.schreibfabrik.de/img/spielenacht2019/

I have been there with an ArcaOS machine that I had prepared only for this con, loaded with DOS, Win3.x and OS/2 games. :D

Machine was advertised as:
DE:
ARCA OS "Blue Lion"
Retro-Gaming-Plattform
für DOS, Win3.x und OS/2
mit der Hardware von heute!


EN:
ARCA OS "Blue Lion"
Retro-Gaming-Platform
for DOS, Win3.x and OS/2
using the hardware of today!


The following games were installed:
===========================
DOS-Games:

A320
AGENT (Secret Agent Man)
ALADIN
ALIEN
Asterix
ATOMINO
BILLARD (Magic Pool Billard)
bmenace (Bio Menace)
BMH (Bundesliga Manager Hattrick)
Bombrman
BOULDER (Boulder Dash)
CARMAG (Carmageddon)
CComic (Captain Comic)
CIV (Civilisation)
COLON (Colonisation)
CRYSTAL (Crystal Caves)
DESCENT
DOOM1
DUCK (Duck Tales)
DUKE3D (Duke Nukem 3D)
Dune2
dynablas (Dyna Blaster)
ELECTRO (Electro Body)
EXTREME (Extreme Pinball demo)
EXTREMEV (Extreme Pinball full version)
F15
F22LIGHT
Flashb (Flashback)
GAMEBOY (Gameboy emu)
GLUECKSR (Wheel of fortune)
HiOctane (Hi-Octane (Bullfrog))
HL14-18 (History Line 1914 - 1918)
iTrader
JILL (Jill of Jungle)
Keen1
Keen2
Keen3
Keen4
Keen5
Keen6
Lionking
LOLLYPOP
machine1 (The Incredible Machine)
machine2 (The even more Incredible Machine)
MAHJONG
MARIO
MENACE
MIG29
MMissing (Mario is missing)
MSFS5 (Microsoft Flight Simulator 5)
NASCAR (Nascar Racing 1 with ultra high resolution and details)
OUTRIDGE (Outer Ridge)
PACMAN
PAGAN (Paganitzu)
PRINCE (Prince of Persia)
QUAKE
ROBOT (The game of Robot 1 - 6)
S1 (Settlers 1)
S2 (Settlers 2)
S2_Gld_E (Settlers 2 Gold English)
Schach (various Chess games)
SEGA (SEGA emulator)
SIDE (Side Tetris)
SIM2000 (Sim City 2000)
SIMCITY (Sim City 1?)
SolarWnd (Solar Winds)  -- WOW niice one!
SpeedH (Speed Haste)
StarBl_D (Star Blade German)
StarBl_E (Star Blade English)
STARTREK (numerous Star Trek games)
TD3 (Test Drive 3)
TFX
TIE (Tie fighter)
TORNADO
VEGI
Warbots (self programmed robots fighting game :D)
Wrestle (WWF Wrestlemania)
XARGON
XWING


===========================
native OS/2 games:

ABE-1_0
ASTEROIDS-2_30
BINGO2-1_4
BLACKJACK-0_50
Blubbels
ColorCode__Mastermind-0_7_0
Connect-Four
Connect-Four_PM-1_24
Dave_Gnukem
December_Poker-1_0a
Formido-1_0
Hex-a-Hop-8_8
HexMines
JumpNBump-1_50
Kniffel
Krone_der_Macht
Las_Vegas_Craps-2_00
lBreakout2-2_6_5
Lemmings-Demo
Lode_Runner-1_2B2
Makman
Master_of_The_Empire
Mine2
Mine_Sweeper2-1_4a
Overthrow-0_90
Pipeline-2_2b4
Prince_of_Persia-1_16
Project_Starfighter-1_6
RockDodger
SIM2000Demo
Sim_Blob
Sokoban-1_1_5
Sudoku
The_Ancient_Game_of_GO
Tower_Toppler-1_1_6
tWorld (Tiles World)


===========================
Windows 3.11 games:

BACKGAM (BackGammon)
Blitzer
BLOCK-BR
CHECKERS
CHESS
HATHOR
HERMAN
HEX-TET
Hyperoid
JULIETTA
KARTEN
MISERMIN
PIPE
ROULETTE
SYMBOLR
TETRIS
TRIPLETS
WINPOKER
Winskat
YACHT-Z

-------------------------

The crowd was NOT interested in the OS itself, just the games. Well yes, surely no owners of their own retro machines.. just playing games that they were playing when they were young, but apparently they don`t play these games anymore, as most of them told me. o.O

ONE guest actually asked how this is possible on such a modern hardware.. without CD drive, no floppy drives, etc.
So I had the chance to show him without boring him.. ; )
Clearly that guy wa simpressed by the OS! - But well yea.. what did I expect.. :p  -The majority of peole is not interested in HOW the games can be played, but rather the games themselves. - This is too pro for them.

But I suspect all the other exhibitors weren`t asked for the details either... just the crowd rolled in over the day, and was plaing the games on the machines, and that was it. Maybe this is NOT the right con for presenting ArcaOS.. but on the other hand, we might need two things to bring the attention to the masses.. :p
1) Soundblaster 16 sound wrapper for DOS & Win 3.x to (f.i. Uniaud and co)
2) Better merchandising, banners, etc... to get the attention ``Hey wait.. what is this?!``

: )  - Still, the machine comes with me next year again.. :D

128
Hardware / Re: One Mix 3 and OS/2, eCS or AOS?
« on: May 10, 2019, 12:10:14 pm »
Hmm.. as long as the storage controller is recognised, the graphics chip can be used with snap or so, network card works... sure why not. : )

But as far as I remember.. OS/2 Warp 3 needs a 512 MB partition right at the start, containing the OS. Should not be bigger. Not sure though if that is the same with Warp 4.x ...

129
ROTFL :D - Indeed a good one hihi

130
Games / Re: DOS Gaming and ArcaOS
« on: March 28, 2019, 09:57:06 am »
WOW! What a list! Also impressive to see which stuff does what and for which games. - Hats off! : ))
*bookmark*

131
Games / Re: DOS Gaming and ArcaOS
« on: March 10, 2019, 10:33:30 pm »
The config "per session" can be exported like so:

1) right click on the DOS application (or link) --> Properties
2) Tab "Session" --> click on the "DOS Properties" button
3) Select "All Settings" (I do not know if it exports really all settings if you do not select all settings.. needs to be tested..) --> click the "OK" button
4) mind the "Print" and "Load" buttons. --> Print means Export, Load means Import.

To export, click on Print --> (if you do NOT have a printer, an info dialog shows up (click OK here) --> select (x) Encoded File (do not print this stuff! :D) --> enter a path and file name.. like C:\myconfig.txt
To import, click on Load --> enter C:\myconfig.txt and click on the "Load" button. --> All configurations for this DOS application (or link) are now overwritten with the ones in the txt file.

This is a nice (the only?!) way to export settings per session.
I'd do so, and attach such a file to each game in the posts here. : ) --> Of course the previous ones too! :D


132
Games / Re: DOS Gaming and ArcaOS
« on: March 10, 2019, 04:34:46 pm »
Ha! That did the trick, Dave! Great hint!!

ArcaOS:
Desktop --> Computer --> Install/Remove --> Add Programs --> Search for Programs

Warp 2:
option appears not to be available

Warp 3 & 4:
Right click onto desktop --> Sysconfig --> Add Programs --> Search for Programs

Sim City 2000 DOS runs fine ^___^

Btw Martin, what do you think? Should we provide the DOS settings as attachment to the posts here? You can save and load these for each DOS session.

133
Games / Re: DOS Gaming and ArcaOS
« on: March 09, 2019, 02:47:37 pm »
Didn't work for me this way. I have found a solution that runs ElectroBody for me with Speaker Sound:
memory settings: DOS = HIGH
other settings: HW_TIMER = ON

(both non-standard)

Right to the next game.. :D

The great well and known Sim City 2000! (DOS)
The sc2000.exe tells me:
Code: [Select]
DOS/4GW Professional Protected Mode Run-time  Version 1.95
Copyright (c) Rational Systems, Inc. 1990-1993

You do not have enough memory free to run SimCity 2000

1.904.096 bytes more free expanded/extended memory required

according to the mem command I do have...

Code: [Select]
    646144 bytes total memory
    646144 bytes available for DOS
    625856 largest executable program size

   2473984 bytes total EMS memory
   2097152 bytes free EMS memory

   2031616 bytes total XMS memory
   2031616 bytes available XMS memory
         0 bytes available contiguous extended memory
           DOS resident in High Memory Area
           High Memory Area in use

Maybe they need this 0 bytes available contiguous extended memory? Mhmm.. how to set this up?

Running the "install.exe" in the same directory as sc2000.exe brings up a weird one:

Code: [Select]
Your computer only has 1015 MB of RAM installed.
This game requires atleast 4096 MB of RAM.

This machine has thousands MB of installed RAM.. grr xD

134
Games / Re: DOS Gaming and ArcaOS
« on: March 03, 2019, 11:24:59 am »
Now I've tried the game [Electro Body]. All with default settings for DOS Full Screen. Autoexec.bat with a "mode co80" line, Config.sys unchanged from ArcaOS installation.

First I was greeted with a message, that Electro Body needs atleast 580.000 kb of free memory.
The "mem" command said I have 591.408 kb free... mhmm..

Then I've left the DOS fullscreen window, and set it's DOS memory properties to DOS=HIGH which results in a whopping 625.856 kb free!!! *_____* WOW, any game runs with that whole lot of free memory!! :D

The game starts now, and I could play... (even has PC speaker support) BUT, it runs terribly slow. Do you know a trick there? (Quit the game with F10)

135
Games / Re: DOS Gaming and ArcaOS
« on: March 03, 2019, 11:06:29 am »
Hi Martin! : )

About Extreme Pinball:
I've had the same effect, indeed. - But setting the sound to "no soundcard" (Setup.exe), which unfortunately leads to no sound at all (speaker not supported in this game?), plus adding "mode co80" to autoexec.bat seems to have done the trick. Now all the tables can be played. \^___^/ - Yihaw! So this game actually works in OS/2's DOS full screen. Sound needs to wait for the maybe upcoming SoundBlaster "mapper" driver.. ; )


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