Hi guys! so close with win95….need help!

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  • #6420
    ManfredVonRicthofen
    Participant

    Hi! I’ve recently discovered magic dosbox 3 weeks ago, and have been having a BLAST running DOS games and reliving my childhood…. I got TIE Fighter collector’s CD-ROM running smoothly with full PS4 Dualshock 4 controller via bluetooth, and Red Alert DOS version is working great too. Tony the creator of DOSBOX was very helpful and responsive when I emailed him directly, and he lead me to here.

    I wanted to run the windows version of Red Alert, so I followed Tony’s videos on youtube and managed to set up win95, and it works flawlessly. I know that a lot of people on the youtube video comments stated that they could not get the win95 CD to boot, but I worked around that by installing 2 CDROM drives in the virtualbox win95 image, with 1 drive containing the 95 ISO and the other 98 ISO. I booted into windows 98 set up first (since it has CDROM support), partitioned the drive, and then installed windows 95 into it.

    My question now is this… when I run windows 95 inside magic DB and boot to windows desktop, there is NO CDROM support… i know this is why Tony recommends installing virtual drive or whatever it is to mount CD images inside windows, that I get… my question is how do i make magic DB “see” these ISO/IMG files so that I can run Red alert windows set up and install it? I have created both ISO and IMG files of the actual installation CD, but i just dont know how to link it to the windows 95.

    #6440
    ManfredVonRicthofen
    Participant

    Bump

    Hi can someone please help me? I haven’t made any progress since I successfully installed win95.

    On a normal desktop, once you boot into windows you pop in a CD and start the installation of any game… Well how do I go about loading a CD image of any game so windows 95 sees it while running on dosbox?

    The whole idea of not having a physical cd rom is what’s throwing me off…i can’t for the life of me figure out how to add any files, cd rom images, folders, etc, into win95 from the outside.

    #6443
    Al ex
    Keymaster

    Sorry, I missed your last post. I’m using an old version of Virtual Clone Drive. What you need to do is copy the iso file to a hard drive image, and mount that image as drive D: in Magic Dosbox. Then you can mount the iso file in Windows 95 as virtual cd drive.

    You can use one of these images. Correct values for setting up the hdd image are included in the zip file.

    Please let us know if it’s working for you! 🙂

    #6444
    ManfredVonRicthofen
    Participant

    I think I understand now… Basically those HDD images r like blank CDs… And I’m burning or injecting ISO into it so I can connect it to windows and run it. I am having trouble with the command to connect it to windows IMG so it recognizes it on boot… I tried reverse engineering the drivers.img expert command line u had on the windows.mgc, but to no success. Can u tell me what I need to write? I went with the 2gb hdd image, but the actual size of the image is less.

    #6445
    ManfredVonRicthofen
    Participant

    I GOT IT!

    I deleted the d: drive holding the drivers.img file…. I figured I won’t need that drive anymore (I hope) since I already installed the drivers on windows.

    I mounted the new 2gb image on the d: drive and it boots into windows fine.

    So now I have a new question… Does this mean I cannot mount and have more than maximum 2 hard drives at the same time?

    #6446
    Al ex
    Keymaster

    Lol, this is quite tricky to set up. Here’s how I do it:
    1. on my Windoes PC, I use UltraISO to copy the iso images to the hdd image (weird tool, it’s got an unlimited free trial with no restrictions ?)
    2. copy the hdd image to my sd card (doesn’t actually matter where)
    3. use these mounting commands in Magic Dosbox (change file path according to your file structure):

    imgmount c /storage/9C33-6BBD/Games/PC/Win95/c.img -t hdd -fs fat -size 512,63,32,520
    imgmount d /storage/9C33-6BBD/Games/PC/Win95/2GB_Thief_Commandos.img -t hdd -fs fat -size 512,63,64,1023
    boot -l c

    You have to use the 2GB image values. As lomg as the image isn’t broken, it should work. In Windows 95, you can then mount the iso images from hard drive d: as virtual cd-rom.

    #6447
    admin
    Keymaster

    You can have only two hdd mounted under win95. I am not sure now why. Yoy can have both system and data hdd at 2gb size.

    #6448
    ManfredVonRicthofen
    Participant

    Hey guys thanks for all the help, I got the images mounted and working and even managed to install a windows game.

    That’s about all the good news… The bad news is that while installing games, the virtual cd either locks up or crashes randomly so it’s very hard to get it working. I got red alert installed and working, but none of the other add on games like aftermath or counterstrike will install successfully.

    Any idea why virtual clone drive is so unstable?

    #6449
    Al ex
    Keymaster

    The plain truth is that Windows 95 and Clone Drive just are an unstable mess.
    I usually install and setup Win95 games in Dosbox on my Windows PC, then copy the hdd image files to my phone. I think in some cases, the installation simply slowed down to a crawl, but on the PC at least , with enough extra power, it continued slowly after a while.
    Counterstrike will be a pain to play in Dosbox though. I’ve made a short video of Half Life running on my old S7 edge (still one of the fastest phones for Dosbox emulation), and it was barely playable: https://youtu.be/dAr5u7fgR5o

    I also made some other videos on my Youtube, and you can check the benchmark section on this forum to compare your phone’s specs with others. That will give you a rough idea of what will be possible.

    For Half-Life / Counterstrike, get Xash3D from Google Play. It’s an interpreter, and runs the game at 60 fps even on a six years old Galaxy Note 2.

    #6461
    ManfredVonRicthofen
    Participant

    That’s a good idea.. So what you did was one copy of windows with a full game installed and running on virtualbox, then u imaged the whole thing so that one image has ALL you need to run in dosbox without having to image mount, right?

    Here’s a question… Where did you download the windows 95 drivers needed to run it correctly inside virtualbox? Does oracle provide them? It didn’t seem like it to me…. When virtualbox recreates a pc inside virtualbox, I can’t tell what video card it mimics, so I can’t tell which company’s driver I need to download.. This applies to other hardware as well. Because of this I noticed that a lot of the hardware runs in compatibility mode.

    EDIT: so I think I found something… https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=9918

    I’m gonna give the guide here a go and see if I can use these generic Scitech drivers

    BTW… WOW I can’t believe u got half-life 2 to run in a phone! ?????

    #6462
    Al ex
    Keymaster

    That Half-Life 2 thing was tricky af, all credit to n0n4m3, the creator of GLTools. That’s such a helpful tool! Only downside is that at least on older Snapdragon devices, HL2 won’t work. I even discussed that with n0n4m3, but he came to the conclusion that Qualcomm had messed up their gpu drivers. Not the only issue I had with my Note 4 back then (SD 805), so I guess he was right.
    Anyway, Exynos and Kirin devices seem to be fine (both closer to ARM reference design, that’s probably why). I’m really curious if the new SD 845 chipsets are compatible now, they’re also much much better at running Dosbox than their predecessors.

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