Bochs?

[facattack]

I'm trying to run Tand-em on Bochs. What should I set the various things to? I downloaded a Free DOS images and an ISO plus an ISO of Ubuntu 12. Do I have to make a disc image of my hard drive or would the physical drive letter do?

 

[Mike Chambers]

Using Bochs to run Tand-Em is like killing a fly with an AK-47. You can't give Bochs a physical drive letter, it doesn't work that way. If you made an image of your hard drive, that would almost certainly not boot correctly. Bochs works exactly the way a real PC would. You create a blank hard drive image, and for DOS you boot Bochs from a DOS installation disk, fun FDISK and then proceed to format the drive and install DOS like you normally would. Also, that Ubuntu ISO is useless if you're trying to run Tand-Em. Tand-Em is a DOS program, not a linux program.

Just forget about Bochs, and go download DOSBox. It has DOS built-in, and it needs no disk images. You can simply unzip Tand-Em anywhere on your hard drive, and when you start DOSBox you can mount/map local directories/drives to drive letters. Better yet, just forget the whole thing and download a different Tandy emulator that's designed to run on a modern computer and OS.

Now that I think about it, DOSBox itself has a Tandy 1000 emulation mode that you can set in the config file. What are you trying to do exactly?

 

[facattack]

I'm trying to build a computer for Tandy games... it's a HP Pavilion 6535 I am going to have to sub the CD-ROM drive with a 5.25 drive ... I put FreeDOS on it but that didn't recognize the 5.25 floppies. DOS BOX can be downloaded for Debian. That's the basis of Ubuntu?

 

[Chuck(G)]

Can Bochs use IBM BASIC-in-ROM?

 

[Ole Juul]

I'm trying to build a computer for Tandy games... it's a HP Pavilion 6535 I am going to have to sub the CD-ROM drive with a 5.25 drive ... I put FreeDOS on it but that didn't recognize the 5.25 floppies.

There are several kernels. The one for 386 that I made 5.25 images of works in plain (non virtual) hardware. The VCF thread where I posted the images is here. It sounds like you have some other problem.

You can find other FreeDOS kernels here.

DOS BOX can be downloaded for Debian. That's the basis of Ubuntu?

Yes.

 

[deathshadow]

Now that I think about it, DOSBox itself has a Tandy 1000 emulation mode that you can set in the config file. What are you trying to do exactly?

That was what I was thinking -- DOSBox will do tandy video and tandy sound just fine, is available for damned-near every platform there is (I've even got it on my android tablet!) -- Use that instead of some decade out of date DOS only emulator that to be frank, never worked all that great in the first place. Just make a dosbox.conf, set:

machine=tandy

under [speaker] set

tandy=on

DONE... and you can add Disney Sound Source/covox support, adlib support, SB-16 support, midi support...

AND, dosbox is in the software repositories for Ubuntu -- just install it from the "software center".

 

[Eudimorphodon]

The other alternative to DOSbox that *might* be worth a look under Ubuntu would be MESS, if you *really* want to emulate a bare-metal machine more closely than either DosBOX or Tand-Em does. MESS emulates several Tandy 1000 models as variations of its IBM PCjr support, and if, for instance, you wanted to emulate a Tandy in order to program for its unique video modes the virtual environment might match up a little more closely to a "real machine" than DOSbox does. However:

1: MESS can be a huge pain to set up and the documentation ranges from "sketchy" to "non-existent". Getting the right BIOS images alone to match up with a given version of MESS can be a huge and irritating challenge. It's not for beginners or the "casual gamer".

2: MESS is constantly in flux, and many of the machines it "supports" are in fact only partially so. I've played with the PCjr emulation and it seems to work "fairly well", but at that time the 1000sx emulation was very broken. Maybe it's improved since then.

If you're just after this to run games then DOSbox is almost certainly the better choice, as DOSbox is specially tweaked to run games well.

I would strongly recommend transferring whatever you want from the 5 1/4 disks to disk images instead of trying to run them straight off the original floppies if at all possible. As long as the floppies in question are not copy protected that's trivial under Linux; a simple DD will do it. If you're trying to run copy protected stuff then you may need to seek out a "cracked" version no matter what emulator you use.

 

[facattack]

Trying to use Oracle VM Virtual Box... I'm going to see if I can emulate the OS for the Tandy 2820 HD laptop I've got to test things before trying to put them on the machine.

It ran MSDOS 5 I think and had dosshell and Deskmate. But what versions I wonder? Here are the support pages.

Then again the machine is monochromatic... if you check my post about it on Tandy forum, you'll see some of the questions I have in regards to the hardware. I see a flashing orange BATT light on the machine saying it has trouble with the battery...

I also have a VM setup for Ubuntu 10 on my computer as well as Freedos 1.