DOSBox for RISC OS

I have recently discovered that DOSBox is available for RISC OS. If you didn't already know, DOSBox is an x86 emulator that lets you run all of your favourite DOS software on a wide variety of platforms - including Raspberry Pi's running RISC OS.

This post will primarily deal with DOSBox running under RISC OS, but it is hoped that my reader will immediately go and grab a copy for her own OS, if not get the wonderful RISC OS installed on Raspberry Pi, like, this minute.

How to install
Simply find DosBox in the '!PackMan' package manager. What are you waiting for?

Getting started
The first thing you will want to do is create a folder on your Pi for all of your delicious DOS programs. The next step is to map this folder to a drive in DOS.

When you first launch DOSBox, you will see the Z: drive. There is not much you can do here. The names of your drives will be different, however on my machine:

mount c SDFS::RISCOSpi.$ (maps the Pi SD card as 'C:' drive)
mount d Fat32fs.RISCDISC.$ (maps my 'RISCDISC' flash card as 'D:' drive)
mount a RAM::RAMDISC0.$ (maps the ram drive as 'A:' drive)

If you need a primer in DOS commands.

To change to a new drive, type drive letter followed by a colon:

A: (will change to drive A)

To navigate to a new sub-directory:

cd directoryName

To move up one level:

cd..

To run a program, look for a .exe .bat or .com file (and type it)

To read a text file:

type filename

To get a directory listing

dir
or
dir /p (paged mode)
dir /w (wide mode)

For more help with DOSBox, type 'help'.


The software
This is the reason you want DOSBox, to run all of that amazing software written before 1990 (before Ant and Dec were a thing and when MTV was actually about music).

I spent this morning raiding my IBM 286 PC for games and apps that I'll probably want to run under RISC OS. Here is some of my DOS software running on my Raspberry Pi:

One of the ubiquitous chess programs for DOS. This one is quite good. I'm going to let it beat me later.

I have no idea what I am doing but I'm glad I get to fly around in a spaceship that looks like it has been drawn by my ten-year-old nephew.

Dangerous Dave, no relation to Rik Dangerous, or Danger Dog.

Well Done, Dave!

Can you defeat the invaders' dastardly 'move right... then move left' strategy?

''Wilbling Wilf was a favourite of mine. Written by now computer security expert Graham Cluely @gcluely. The aim of the game is to guide Wilf through all infinity levels dopping jam from your leaky jam sandwich, whilst not getting eaten by the evil Glumphs!

Intra-Galactic Battles. I often dust this off and have a battle

Intra-Galactic Battles. Did someone say Startrek? It's okay, some of the ships look like they have been copied from Starwars too. Nevertheless, this is a truly awesome game. You choose to build ships from one of four different races and then go toe-to-toe in a slugging match of resource management against the computer.

Yay! ASCII clock and calendar. I don't know why I don't do a blog post about ASCII clocks. Oh, wait, I already have.

There is now even more reason to leave your Raspberry Pi switched on all day. Relax as you watch the virtual fish tank do its thing. Can you see the little snail?

Hello

Problems
As with most emulators, you will find some of your software does not run as expected. I encountered a few programs that would disable the mouse in RISC OS, or cause the whole system to freeze. On the whole, software tended to behave itself.

The sound emulation sometimes goes a lot wrong. Typically adjusting the emulated system speed will fix this problem. You can speed up and slow down the emulation (essential for Wilf) using CRTL+f11 and CTRL+f12.

You will also probably want to drop the resolution of RISC OS. Click on the monitor icon on the bottom right of the icon bar and select 800 x 600 for an authentic experience, depending on your own hardware.

Th...th...th...th...that's all folks!
If you enjoyed this post then you should go and get DOSBox installed on your Raspberry Pi. If you are sticking around for a bit, then you might like to read some posts about Intra-Galactic Battles, or just something completely different.

The A-Z of geek: I is for Intra-Galactic Battles

So I have had a lazy Sunday afternoon watching Star Trek movies. All the references to 'photon torpedoes' and transporter beams put me in mind of a retro DOS game action that I actually spent many hours playing throughout the 90's.

I is for Intra-Galactic Battles

IGB is a strategy game by William D. Hause released back in 1990. Although not endorsed in any way by the owners of the Star Trek franchise, the look and feel of the game places in the Star Trek universe. Four factions battle for control of the game world: The Federation, Klingons, Orions and Andromedans.

The aim of the game is to destroy or capture all of your opponents space craft. This is not a game for people you need graphics and storylines to enjoy a game. IGB is simple great because of the gameplay.

The alien races are differentiated by their method of attack. The Klingon weapons never miss, although their destructive power decreases with distance. The word Klingon is replaced by 'Gorgon' in all game documentation, presumably to avoid a nasty law suit. The Federation weapons have a chance of missing based on the distance they are from their target, however they always do maximum damage for each successful strike. The Orion weapons do minimal damage to the hull integrity of enemy ships but instead murder the crew onboard. Once an enemy ship has been thus 'softened up' a bit, Orions use transporter beams to try to take over control of the enemy ship.

An Intra-Galactic Battles skirmish. The green base has fired a laser at the pink klingon. What is klingon for "All your base are belong to us"?

My favourite race is the Andromedans whose weapons have no maximum value - they can simply be charged up to any level, thus can be significant one-shot killers, provided you have not been destroyed while you wait to charge.

Game play involves management of resources, so that there is a healthy balance between energy used to charge your defensive shields, weapons, tractor beams and engines.

When you first load IGB you will be presented with half a dozen options for scenarios to play out, although you can also select a 'custom battle' in which you can add your own ships at will. You can play with a friend or select 'Computer' when prompted with the question 'Who will control this ship?'. You can also add ships at anytime to the battle either on your own side or your enemies, so an IGB battle can theoretically last forever, although I did find my IBM PS/1 actually ran out of memory during a very long battle.

Play Intra-Galactic Battles in your browser now.

#startrek #dos #retro #games

The A-Z of geek: D is for DOS

This summer I purchased an IBM PS/1 computer.  This machine was originally released 26 years ago in 1990, the year that the Hubble space telescope was launched; Thatcher was replaced by John Major; Iraq invaded Kuwait; the Channel Tunnel between France and England was completed and Deee-lite released "Groove Is in the heart". 

The IBM PS/1 runs an Intel 80286 processor at 10 MHz and has a massive 1024KiB of RAM.  The system has one 31/2 inch floppy disk-drive and a 40MB hard disk.

...So, prepare to type "cd.." because today...

D is for DOS

DOS is the name for a family of command line disk operating systems popular throughout the 1980s and 90s. My IBM PS/1 runs IBM DOS4.01.

An IBM PS/1 in slightly better condition than mine.

The computer does not run Windows. Instead it has a four-quadrant graphical displaying giving access to a fairly comprehensive system tutorial; MS-Works office tools; file explorer and DOS. The display can be navigated with either the mouse or cursor keys.

The IBM Graphical User Interface.

This machine was designed for home users with little experience of computers, and so everything has been made as simple as possible. In fact, you do not need to know any DOS commands to use the system, but seriously, where is the fun in that?

The IBM has a graphical 'file explorer' program built-in. They have tried to make it look like a filing cabinet, and although it looks great, DOS is much more fun.

The first thing that I needed for my computer was a text editor program to edit bat files.  I chose to use a shareware application called "QEDIT" from SemWare. I then created a bat file in the DOS folder. The bat file contains the following two commands:

c:\utils\qedit\q.exe %1
type %1

The first line is the path to the qedit program which allows an optional parameter. The second line passes the parameter to the qedit program. I then saved the file as "c:\dos\qedit.bat".

This allows me to edit any text file, or create a new text file, by typing "qedit <filename>" from anywhere in the command line.

DOS was really a great system because it allowed you to create as many bat files as you wanted. If they were saved to the DOS folder (or another folder that you could specify in the configuration settings) thus expanding the system's vocabulary.

The second job I did with the IBM was to create a 'help' file to allow me to keep track of all of the user-defined bat files that I was creating.

The help file is accessed by the command 'help' (which, of course, runs the 'c:\dos\help.bat' script), or 'help <topic>' which then gets information about the specified topic.  This is achieved with the following code:

@echo off
cls
ECHO Greeting message
IF %1. == . GOTO showall
IF %1. == helptopic1 GOTO helptopic1
IF %1. == helptopic2 GOTO helptopic2

GOTO end

:showall
ECHO SYNTAX: help <topic>
ECHO Help available for the following commands:
ECHO helptopic1, helptopic2, etc
GOTO end

:helptopic1
ECHO help provided here
GOTO end

:helptopic2
ECHO help provided here
GOTO end

:end
ECHO That's all folks!



Well that's about all I've done with DOS on my IBM PC apart from loading several DOS games, and also playing with the version of BASIC that comes with it.

If you find the need to dust off your DOS computer, then there are a load of DOS games archived on various websites, not least, this one.



So, it's video time.

Here is an IBM PS/1 promotional video, with (hilarious) jab at Apple computers.




IBM PS/1 showing boot-up time.


An IBM running Prince of Persia


An IBM PS/1 running Windows 3.0

The A-Z of geek: C is for Crystal Caves

25 years ago this month, hapless space adventurer, Mylo Steamwitz first entered the caves of planet Altair, search for the crystals that he can sell at the Galactic Trading Post to fund his various schemes.  Yes, folks, if you thought C was for Chuckie Egg, then you were wrong....

C is for Crystal Caves

Screenshot from Crystal Caves volume three (used without permission).

Crystal Caves by Apogee software is a platform game for DOS.  The game features sixteen different levels that can be attempted in any order.  The aim of each level is to collect all of the coloured crystals whilst avoiding the various baddies and hazards along the way.

It terms of game play, it feels a lot like Manic Miner of which there have been many clones, but Crystal Caves is the boss.

Navigation is a simple left, right, jump affair, and you can blast enemies with your rocket pistol. There are also moving platforms and lifts as well as acid its and spikes to avoid. Rocks, stalactites and ooze will tumble from the ceiling and a variety of critters will attempt to get in your way: slug-things, rock-monsters, spiders, snakes, egg-bombing birds, robots and triceratops will all attempt to squish you. Poisonous mushrooms sprout everywhere as well as slime pits that need to be jumped. Along the way you will encounter a multitude of objects from fruit to candles.

Puzzles involve opening coloured doors by pulling the matching coloured lever found somewhere in the level. In some levels you must contend with reverse gravity and blackouts. Shooting the air-regulator by mistake will result in dangerous decompression that is fatal.

I'm struggling to take a screenshot on my IBM PS1, so here is a screenshot that has been shamelessly pinched from google image search for Crystal Caves.

One interesting fact is that Crystal Caves contains a bug that, when run on Windows XP, will rather dangerously reset your clock by one hundred years. Apogee released a patch for this bug fifteen years after the game was released, which wins both the award for longest time between a bug being patched and the actual release of a game, in addition to one geek experience point from us.

If this post has in any way excited you for Crystal Caves, then you may be pleased to know that there is a fan website dedicated to it, although it hasn't been updated for several years.

Crystal Caves gameplay video: