MiSTer FPGA Forum

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Mon Sep 27, 2021 10:33 pm
A couple of things:
1. Yes, in the pack the F: drive is the actual CD drive that is mapped in DOS, then the D: drive is a like a symbolic link to F:. D: and F: are the same.
2. GPF usually means the disc didn't mount correctly. If you manually try and mount it using the mister menu, then at the dos prompt run a DIR on either D: or F:, does that work?
3. IF so, you just need to fix your paths. it would need to be exactly the way it is called in the 1_LAUNCH.BAT script for The Dig. You can edit that script using the 3_EDIT.BAT command in the same directly. That will just open EDIT 1_LAUNCH.BAT in the event you want to change the launch script. Look for the exact path that is being mounted and make sure that is exactly like the folder structure you are using. Sometimes it can be case sensitive, if your SDCARD or USB drive is formatted using NTFS.

Last ditch effort, rename your thedig.bin file to thedig.iso and see if you can mount the iso, if so, just change the launch script to reference .iso instead of .cue/bin.

All of this should have worked out of the box with the pack though...

Hi,
Just tried to manually mount the image and it worked, as in I could browse the files on D:
Before I manually mounted the image from the OSD I saw that I looked as it was mounted(but got GPF), probably from my last try do start the game vid TDL.

My 'cd' folder is placed here /media/fat/games/AO486/cd/
But I noticed that the error screen says: add "/cd/dig/thedig.cue" TO /GAMES/AO486/CD/."
My games folder is lower case while the above error message in capitals. Perhaps it's not case sensitive(I use SMB/CIFS).

One thing I also noticed is that the 1_START.BAT that says:
CALL imagery ide10 D "/cd/dig/thedig.chd" "/cd/dig/thedig.cue"
The .cue files look correct and points to the .img file, but I have no .chd file in the /cd/dig folder.
Perhaps I should change that to something else, but not sure?

I’ll just set it up from scratch again

nizce wrote: ↑Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:04 pm

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Mon Sep 27, 2021 10:33 pm
A couple of things:
1. Yes, in the pack the F: drive is the actual CD drive that is mapped in DOS, then the D: drive is a like a symbolic link to F:. D: and F: are the same.
2. GPF usually means the disc didn't mount correctly. If you manually try and mount it using the mister menu, then at the dos prompt run a DIR on either D: or F:, does that work?
3. IF so, you just need to fix your paths. it would need to be exactly the way it is called in the 1_LAUNCH.BAT script for The Dig. You can edit that script using the 3_EDIT.BAT command in the same directly. That will just open EDIT 1_LAUNCH.BAT in the event you want to change the launch script. Look for the exact path that is being mounted and make sure that is exactly like the folder structure you are using. Sometimes it can be case sensitive, if your SDCARD or USB drive is formatted using NTFS.

Last ditch effort, rename your thedig.bin file to thedig.iso and see if you can mount the iso, if so, just change the launch script to reference .iso instead of .cue/bin.

All of this should have worked out of the box with the pack though...

Hi,
Just tried to manually mount the image and it worked, as in I could browse the files on D:
Before I manually mounted the image from the OSD I saw that I looked as it was mounted(but got GPF), probably from my last try do start the game vid TDL.

My 'cd' folder is placed here /media/fat/games/AO486/cd/
But I noticed that the error screen says: add "/cd/dig/thedig.cue" TO /GAMES/AO486/CD/."
My games folder is lower case while the above error message in capitals. Perhaps it's not case sensitive(I use SMB/CIFS).

One thing I also noticed is that the 1_START.BAT that says:
CALL imagery ide10 D "/cd/dig/thedig.chd" "/cd/dig/thedig.cue"
The .cue files look correct and points to the .img file, but I have no .chd file in the /cd/dig folder.
Perhaps I should change that to something else, but not sure?

The CHD thing is okay. That is for people who wanted to compress all their CD's for more disk space so the script is setup to try either file.

Just setup the pack again with original files, still the same issue though.
Tried both before and after running the update script for the 300 pack, same issue
Dumb question, the error message seem to indicate that there should be a cd directory inside the /games/ao486/cd/ directory, I guess that's just a type-o?
ex. /games/ao486/cd/cd/dig/thedig.cue

Any other ideas?

akeley wrote: ↑Tue Sep 28, 2021 8:44 am It's really easy to DIY: just put the games you want in a directory, run the TDL script on that directory and then put the result on a vhd.

Thanks. In order to get all the various sound and video options like there is in the top 300 pack, would I need to get the huge exopack that has every game in it, then delete all the folders I don't want, then run the script? Or if I just find the game somewhere else, will the TDL script create all the various sound and video options for it?

thorr wrote: ↑Tue Sep 28, 2021 7:18 pm Thanks. In order to get all the various sound and video options like there is in the top 300 pack, would I need to get the huge exopack that has every game in it, then delete all the folders I don't want, then run the script? Or if I just find the game somewhere else, will the TDL script create all the various sound and video options for it?

Nah, there's no script that clever The TDL script just adapts your zipped collections to the TDL launcher format. All the game settings need to be done manually - at least in case of individual games pulled from the net. Maybe if you pull games from eXoDOS itself they're already adjusted.

I don't actually use the 300 pack myself so can't say 100% sure how it works regarding the settings. The TDL unpacks all the games into cache.dir, and so if you make any config changes that's where they will be saved. It's probably the same with the 300.

For small collections I think it could be actually better to skip the TDL and just make a vhd with unpacked games which boots to Dos Navigator or a similar program. TDL is cool, but I prefer to launch games old school style, feel a bit more in control this way. So I use it only for my big by-year packs, to check stuff out.

If you want the already-set up games then yes, I suppose you'd have to get the big pack and then copy games from its cache directory.

Thanks! I do like the command line approach as well for nostalgia reasons, but I also like all the sound and video options provided by the 300 pack. They make it very easy to try the Roland MT-32, Sound Canvas, Adlib, Game Blaster, etc. without having to run the setup every time, and it seems to always just work where it doesn't always when trying to do it on the command line. There are modes that I didn't know existed like the talky mode in Monkey Island. I think I will just get the huge Exodos collection and see if I can get a few select games to work and then once I figure it all out, make the perfect VHD with just the games I care about. I also like the demos like Second Reality and it would be nice to have everything in one place, or multiple VHD's as I suggested above. I will probably check out the Sierra/Adventure collections that flynnsbit mentioned as well. They may suit most of my needs of what is missing from the top 300.

Mr. Encyclopedia wrote: ↑Mon Sep 27, 2021 11:04 pm I'm also having this problem, Every CD-based game I attempt to play fails with with the same error nizce reported. Furthermore, I can say that going into the OSD, mounting the CD image again (literally just selecting IDE 1-0, navigating to the same image, and selecting it again) causes the error to clear and lets me play the game normally after a moment.

It seems like it might be a problem with imgset, it isn't mounting the image properly despite the image being listed in the OSD as mounted prior to me mounting it again myself. I'm curious to know if mounting the correct image via the OSD fixes it for nizce like it does for me.

I just got it working when I tried placing the cd folder in /media/fat/ao486 and not /media/fat/games/AO486.
Think I read somewhere that I should put the 300 pack in under the games/AO486 directory but I might be wrong.

Perhaps the imgset command defaults to /media/fat/ao486.

You could also try and see if that solves your issue too.

nizce wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:05 pm I just got it working when I tried placing the cd folder in /media/fat/ao486 and not /media/fat/games/AO486.
Think I read somewhere that I should put the 300 pack in under the games/AO486 directory but I might be wrong.

Perhaps the imgset command defaults to /media/fat/ao486.

You could also try and see if that solves your issue too.

Yes! This worked for me too. I've talked with some folks on the discord and it seems like our MiSTers use /media/fat/{whatever core}/ as the working folder for roms and images instead of /media/fat/games/{whatever core}/. There must be a setting to define this and for whatever reason our MiSTers are looking in the root directory instead of /games like most other people.

Also, flynn, I also resolved the problem I was having with the updater by changing the ini file from "/media/sdcard" back to "/media/fat". I had changed it anticipating it would be required, but this ended up breaking the updater.

Mr. Encyclopedia wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:17 pm

nizce wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:05 pm I just got it working when I tried placing the cd folder in /media/fat/ao486 and not /media/fat/games/AO486.
Think I read somewhere that I should put the 300 pack in under the games/AO486 directory but I might be wrong.

Perhaps the imgset command defaults to /media/fat/ao486.

You could also try and see if that solves your issue too.

Yes! This worked for me too. I've talked with some folks on the discord and it seems like our MiSTers use /media/fat/{whatever core}/ as the working folder for roms and images instead of /media/fat/games/{whatever core}/. There must be a setting to define this and for whatever reason our MiSTers are looking in the root directory instead of /games like most other people.

Also, flynn, I also resolved the problem I was having with the updater by changing the ini file from "/media/sdcard" back to "/media/fat". I had changed it anticipating it would be required, but this ended up breaking the updater.

After some more digging into why, it seems like if you have a ao486 folder on your SD-card under /media/fat it'll use that by default. And if it doesn't exist it'll look under games/ and see if it finds it there.
So I simply removed it(/media/fat/ao486) and then it automatically used the AO486 directory placed under games/

yeah, you can't have any other ao486 folder anywhere or it breaks a lot of things.

I am working on setting up my own VHD's based on the "ExoDOSConverter for MiSTer AO486 (PC DOS) Setup from Scratch and first look!!!" video. I watched the previous video that uses Metropolis to find the games you want. Is there a way to use Metropolis to filter the games you want to a folder, and then use the ExoDOSConverter on that instead of the entire ExoDos collection?

yeah I think you could use Metropolis to get the games list and export that to a text list and then import that list into the Exodos converter. The names would have to be exact. it might be easier to grab the name from this excel document and just make your own list that you import into the selections screen on exodosconverter:

https://github.com/Voljega/ExoDOSConver ... oDOSv5.csv

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Sat Oct 02, 2021 9:05 pm yeah I think you could use Metropolis to get the games list and export that to a text list and then import that list into the Exodos converter. The names would have to be exact. it might be easier to grab the name from this excel document and just make your own list that you import into the selections screen on exodosconverter:

https://github.com/Voljega/ExoDOSConver ... oDOSv5.csv

Thanks! I am pretty good at DOS, but I am a little lost. I have a working Top 300 DOS setup. In the tutorial, it says you need to run the tdlindexer python script, but I am not sure if I need to. The latest ExoDOSConverter makes a TDL_VHD folder which I assume is all set with nothing needed to do to it. I created a new VHD with Windows and used the guiformat utility to make it FAT32. The issue I have found is that my Total 300 VHD has a D and and E in it, and everything is on the E. My drive only has a D. I assume I need to make multiple partitions to make this work correctly, correct?

I plan to make a bunch of these and I want to do it as painlessly as possible. I am not sure if I should makes drives with D and E on them, or change the Top 300 C: drive so that it can work with games in D:. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edit:
I am making some progress. I edited the TDL.INI on the new games VHD I created and changed it to D:\games for the cache folder. I also made a copy of the Total Dos C: drive into a new VHD and edited the autoexec.bat.

Now I can launch games, but I have new problems:
- Some games work fine, Space Quest III for example. However, if I change Turbo to Slow which this game needs for the intro to play all the way through, the mouse goes crazy. Putting it back to fast works with the mouse.
- Some games have screwed up music, King's Quest VI for example using the CD and MT-32 options. I confirmed it is using the Sound Canvas mode even though I chose MT/32 (it sounds good on my Sound Canvas, but terrible on my MT-32)
- King's Quest V asks what mode you want to start with, but doesn't wait for an answer and launches immediately
- Many programs say "bad command or file name" after you pick which mode you want to launch the game with, and then it launches the game anyway. This may be the reason for the sound card selection problem. Space Quest III is able to change between Sound Blaster and MT-32. I tried Sound Blaster on King's Quest VI and it was mostly silent, but for a moment, it sounded like screwed up chip tunes but not music. Laura Bow 1 didn't have the "bad command or file name" and succesfully plays MT-32 and Sound Blaster.
- King's Quest VI starts the intro, but it says "unable to open movie file" which tells me it doesn't know where to find the CD drive. It is on F:. Maybe I need to edit TDL.ini for that too.

thorr wrote: ↑Sun Oct 03, 2021 1:11 am

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Sat Oct 02, 2021 9:05 pm yeah I think you could use Metropolis to get the games list and export that to a text list and then import that list into the Exodos converter. The names would have to be exact. it might be easier to grab the name from this excel document and just make your own list that you import into the selections screen on exodosconverter:

https://github.com/Voljega/ExoDOSConver ... oDOSv5.csv

Thanks! I am pretty good at DOS, but I am a little lost. I have a working Top 300 DOS setup. In the tutorial, it says you need to run the tdlindexer python script, but I am not sure if I need to. The latest ExoDOSConverter makes a TDL_VHD folder which I assume is all set with nothing needed to do to it. I created a new VHD with Windows and used the guiformat utility to make it FAT32. The issue I have found is that my Total 300 VHD has a D and and E in it, and everything is on the E. My drive only has a D. I assume I need to make multiple partitions to make this work correctly, correct?

I plan to make a bunch of these and I want to do it as painlessly as possible. I am not sure if I should makes drives with D and E on them, or change the Top 300 C: drive so that it can work with games in D:. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edit:
I am making some progress. I edited the TDL.INI on the new games VHD I created and changed it to D:\games for the cache folder. I also made a copy of the Total Dos C: drive into a new VHD and edited the autoexec.bat.

Now I can launch games, but I have new problems:
- Some games work fine, Space Quest III for example. However, if I change Turbo to Slow which this game needs for the intro to play all the way through, the mouse goes crazy. Putting it back to fast works with the mouse.
- Some games have screwed up music, King's Quest VI for example using the CD and MT-32 options. I confirmed it is using the Sound Canvas mode even though I chose MT/32 (it sounds good on my Sound Canvas, but terrible on my MT-32)
- King's Quest V asks what mode you want to start with, but doesn't wait for an answer and launches immediately
- Many or all programs say "bad command or file name" after you pick which mode you want to launch the game with, and then it launches the game anyway. This may be the reason for the sound card selection problem.

Yes correct on the D and E. If you look at my secondary VHD you will see a stub disk for D which then allows for the assign dos command to take over that and duplicate the CD drive from F to D.

Exodosconverter now does all you need for TDLconverter so you don't need to do that if you are using the converter. Voljega added all that to the converter with the goal of the converter creating everything you need to just transfer that to a VHD (that has both the stub D: drive (10MB or whatever) and E: (everything else).

D: is setup because the CD drive is defaulted to D: in eXoDOS and it prevented a change to every launch file.


There are an amazing amount of changes still needed to eXoDOS's setup to get games working on AO486. This is why I ended up with the github repo for just the Top 300 games, with more that 200 changes after the initial image was created. Some game ini files still reference different directory structures, drive letters, etc. You can look at my repo for the specifc games to see what I had to change to get it working with my setup.

I wouldn't put an amazing amount of effort into TDL and the converter as we have something new coming that is better.

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Sun Oct 03, 2021 2:48 am Yes correct on the D and E. If you look at my secondary VHD you will see a stub disk for D which then allows for the assign dos command to take over that and duplicate the CD drive from F to D.

Exodosconverter now does all you need for TDLconverter so you don't need to do that if you are using the converter. Voljega added all that to the converter with the goal of the converter creating everything you need to just transfer that to a VHD (that has both the stub D: drive (10MB or whatever) and E: (everything else).

D: is setup because the CD drive is defaulted to D: in eXoDOS and it prevented a change to every launch file.


There are an amazing amount of changes still needed to eXoDOS's setup to get games working on AO486. This is why I ended up with the github repo for just the Top 300 games, with more that 200 changes after the initial image was created. Some game ini files still reference different directory structures, drive letters, etc. You can look at my repo for the specifc games to see what I had to change to get it working with my setup.

I wouldn't put an amazing amount of effort into TDL and the converter as we have something new coming that is better.

Thanks! That explains a lot. I was also beginning to suspect that there were lots of issues with the eXoDOS defaults. I think I will try just manually configuring every game and running it the old fashioned way for now. I am excited to hear about the new something that is coming. I hope it works with the graphical vmode we talked about previously that provides pixel perfection DOS text on CRT's, but if it doesn't, don't sweat it. Thanks again!

P.S. I edited my post after you started to reply to it so there is more info in there, but based on the problems you mentioned, nothing worth worrying about at this point.

I got King's Quest VI to work by reinstalling it from the CD. I chose the "small" install and it runs almost everything off the CD which is nice because it saves a ton of VHD space. However, MT-32 music is still totally messed up. I wonder if I need to update my mt32pi. I have a pretty old version.

Short question, has anyone gotten sound working for Wing Commander 2, I neither have soundblaster nor MT32 sound on this game. WC1 works fine though so I suspect it is a settings problem somehwere.

Just downloaded this pack from archive.org, updated it with AO486_Update_Top300_Pack.sh, and... it works like a charm! Waiting now for my RPi 3A+ and MiSTer MT32-Pi Hat to enjoy this gift even more. Thank you!

RalphJB wrote: ↑Fri Jul 16, 2021 5:54 am Is anyone else having an issue with Wing Commander 2 having no sound?

Yes I do a handful of other games expose this behavior as well, has anyone resolved the issue? My guess is that some internal game volume
flag is down to zero.

I asked it in another thread, but got no solution to the problem (viewtopic.php?p=35741#p35741)
During the update process the mounted vhd somehow becomes readonly, hence the update process fails. I'm not a Linux guru, don't know what to check and what to change. Would somebody be so kind and take a look at it? Thanks in advance!

I wish the pack had the DOS version of Bad Apple and Pinball Fantasies.

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Thu Nov 04, 2021 4:45 pm I wish the pack had the DOS version of Bad Apple and Pinball Fantasies.

I can add Bad Apple to the Demo Scene section of the Shareware Pack so that it gets pulled down with the next update for that. There are a bunch of demo's in it already here: https://github.com/flynnsbit/DOS_Sharew ... mo%20Scene

Pinball Fantasies doesn't work on the AO486 core, it has graphical glitch problems. Last time I tried Pinball Fantasies it did what Pinball Illusions does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3aPDvtJerE

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Thu Nov 04, 2021 5:52 pm

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Thu Nov 04, 2021 4:45 pm I wish the pack had the DOS version of Bad Apple and Pinball Fantasies.

I can add Bad Apple to the Demo Scene section of the Shareware Pack so that it gets pulled down with the next update for that. There are a bunch of demo's in it already here: https://github.com/flynnsbit/DOS_Sharew ... mo%20Scene

Pinball Fantasies doesn't work on the AO486 core, it has graphical glitch problems. Last time I tried Pinball Fantasies it did what Pinball Illusions does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3aPDvtJerE

Merci... Bad Apple is like the movie Space Odyssey 2001.

Pinball Fantasies was a game that I played with when I was a young teenager. I remember when my parents got me a sound blaster 16 for Christmas. The sound that came out of the speakers was amazing. Even my parents could not believe it.

Thanks for putting both packs together. It has brought back a lot of good memories.

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 4:37 pm Pinball Fantasies was a game that I played with when I was a young teenager. I remember when my parents got me a sound blaster 16 for Christmas. The sound that came out of the speakers was amazing. Even my parents could not believe it.

The original version runs perfectly on the Amiga/Minimig core, if you want to play it!

Edit: Sorted out my first problem and got it up and working. However, the CD based games don't seem to run? I got them all in the games folder of my external hd like the floppies but all I get is an error saying:

No files found D:\**

ADD "/cd/WarcrafD/wctod.cue" TO /GAMES/AO486/CD/. RESTARTING

limi wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 4:55 pm

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 4:37 pm Pinball Fantasies was a game that I played with when I was a young teenager. I remember when my parents got me a sound blaster 16 for Christmas. The sound that came out of the speakers was amazing. Even my parents could not believe it.

The original version runs perfectly on the Amiga/Minimig core, if you want to play it!

I have played it on the Minimig. I like the DOS version better.

blacklistedcard wrote: ↑Sat Nov 06, 2021 5:57 pm I have played it on the Minimig. I like the DOS version better.

Did you run the AGA version?

Arades wrote: ↑Sat Nov 06, 2021 5:10 pm Edit: Sorted out my first problem and got it up and working. However, the CD based games don't seem to run? I got them all in the games folder of my external hd like the floppies but all I get is an error saying:

No files found D:\**

ADD "/cd/WarcrafD/wctod.cue" TO /GAMES/AO486/CD/. RESTARTING

Anybody can help me out what i'm doing wrong pls?

Got this all setup over the past few days, updated to the latest, lots of good stuff in here, thanks for the effort!
I use this on a TV and that is working well too.

The one thing I have not been able to figure out is how to enable gamepad usage (for both the DOS frontend and games).

Is there some config option somewhere to enable this? I've already setup and mapped my gamepad in MiSTer and for the ao486 core.

Thank you for the 300 DOS pack. Any chance this 300 DOS Pack will be updated with the MyMenu launcher or is there a tutorial showing how to setup this from scratch?