(no subject)
I had a cup of tea last night and it kept me awake until 2:30am...
So instead I built a virtual machine running FreeDOS and almost succeeded in getting sound working to play some old games and run old tracker software.
It was a pain to get working, but it was cool to solve the various problems.
I wasn't going to shell out for fully blown VMWare if I had to... so first I tried a vmware "browser appliance". I grabbed the most generic one available I think.
I blew away the old virtual disk, and created a new partition. It seemed to work okay until I reformatted as FAT32ext, at which point the VMware player wouldn't load the machine. Huh.
So three googles later, I found this VMWare Utilities Homepage and specifically, the VMX Builder. Sweet!
So FreeDOS installs after half a dozen false starts, whilst I try to find the optimum settings (ask me later).
Application time!
Hang on... how do I transfer files to a virtual machine with no networking, no floppy disk on my physical machine?
My first thought was to virtual-mount (as vmware is able) a custom-built .iso (using CD Burner XP) as a CD-ROM.
I also thought maybe I could mount the virtual disk using VMWare's utility, but it's now bundled with the (useful!) RegisterWare Server and Workstation products.
But... I didn't want to go there if I didn't have to.
I also had a weird feeling that my filesystem wouldn't be properly recognised by VMWare-Mount.
I didn’t realise that vmware was able to mount a boot disk image (.img) file.
I thought it had it’s own custom floppy disk format. I dug around and screwed-with and remembered config.sys and autoexec.bat stuff. Oh boy :)
No matter what I tried, the bundled CDROM driver (ATAPICDD.SYS) would keep locking on boot with a bunch of gibberish!
I found an alternative: XCDROM... as recommended by the FreeDOS folks themselves. But again, how to load onto the system?
And then, *click*
I tested whether a floppy image would work. So I dug up a floppy image creator… and it all fell into place.
I created a disk image, copied across the new CDROM driver, hacked config.sys and autoexec.bat, created a custom .iso file (>1.44MB), ready to copy across my software.
I configured SET BLASTER to various sensible settings… to no avail.
Although, now that I think about it... the particular piece of software I want to play with is demoscene related, (software that tends to push the boundaries of what’s possible in DOS, blahlahlah.) so maybe it makes use of some hardware and OS quirks. "100% compatible"? My guess is it's the VMware emulated hardware, but it could be FreeDOS I guess.
today's reward? ftp.modland.com
So instead I built a virtual machine running FreeDOS and almost succeeded in getting sound working to play some old games and run old tracker software.
It was a pain to get working, but it was cool to solve the various problems.
I wasn't going to shell out for fully blown VMWare if I had to... so first I tried a vmware "browser appliance". I grabbed the most generic one available I think.
I blew away the old virtual disk, and created a new partition. It seemed to work okay until I reformatted as FAT32ext, at which point the VMware player wouldn't load the machine. Huh.
So three googles later, I found this VMWare Utilities Homepage and specifically, the VMX Builder. Sweet!
So FreeDOS installs after half a dozen false starts, whilst I try to find the optimum settings (ask me later).
Application time!
Hang on... how do I transfer files to a virtual machine with no networking, no floppy disk on my physical machine?
My first thought was to virtual-mount (as vmware is able) a custom-built .iso (using CD Burner XP) as a CD-ROM.
I also thought maybe I could mount the virtual disk using VMWare's utility, but it's now bundled with the (useful!) RegisterWare Server and Workstation products.
But... I didn't want to go there if I didn't have to.
I also had a weird feeling that my filesystem wouldn't be properly recognised by VMWare-Mount.
I didn’t realise that vmware was able to mount a boot disk image (.img) file.
I thought it had it’s own custom floppy disk format. I dug around and screwed-with and remembered config.sys and autoexec.bat stuff. Oh boy :)
No matter what I tried, the bundled CDROM driver (ATAPICDD.SYS) would keep locking on boot with a bunch of gibberish!
I found an alternative: XCDROM... as recommended by the FreeDOS folks themselves. But again, how to load onto the system?
And then, *click*
I tested whether a floppy image would work. So I dug up a floppy image creator… and it all fell into place.
I created a disk image, copied across the new CDROM driver, hacked config.sys and autoexec.bat, created a custom .iso file (>1.44MB), ready to copy across my software.
I configured SET BLASTER to various sensible settings… to no avail.
Although, now that I think about it... the particular piece of software I want to play with is demoscene related, (software that tends to push the boundaries of what’s possible in DOS, blahlahlah.) so maybe it makes use of some hardware and OS quirks. "100% compatible"? My guess is it's the VMware emulated hardware, but it could be FreeDOS I guess.
today's reward? ftp.modland.com