Emuverse and some Inception thoughts :)

After seeing Inception yesterday i had some thoughts how emulation actually resembles dreaming on various levels :)

Just some random thoughts:
- emulator in the emulator - recently i tested running DOSUAE on E8Dosbox. It was slow as hell, but had this creepy feeling, seeing Amiga Workbench appear on the screen. Having this, the original piece of S/W, a string of its thought, bits and bytes, a machine code, they are completely disconnected from its 'REALITY', from real H/W, from real CPU, registers, memory, etc. Even worse, even its host (E8Dosbox) is disconnected as it runs on top of some MobileLinux.

- computers that never were - how about writing an emulator of the computer/OS/platform that never was? and even better, writing some apps for it? - an architects role, bend the physics, create totally crazy rules for such computer, and apps that shall obey/live to them

- emulation network - something for Google i guess :) - distributed environment where all legacy applications live, can be searched, run, on every platform/OS that ever existed, interconnecting with each other - an EMUVERSE.

And last one:
- in-game NPCs - playing in Dosbox some oldschool RPGs (like Daggerfall or Ultimas) and meeting NPCs. They will never realize (assuming some little personalization of their source code) that are just projections in 2nd level dream.

Android Dosbox for Moto Charm and Moto Flipout in the works :)

Based on aDosbox, and my previous works for UIQ and E8, Dosbox 0.74 for Motorola Charm and Motorola FlipOut is in the works. It will provide support for 320x240 screens, with paging and shrinking options, customized keyboards, on screen keyboards and such :). Like E8 version below.

Pitty, i dont have any of these devices yet. Any sponsors ? :)

Dosbox 0.73 port for Motorola ROKR E8

To celebrate 1st anniversary of DosboxUIQ, 2nd anniversary of my son birth, and 6th anniversary of my daughter birth - e8dosbox is released :). Most Koli Joco's improvements for S60 and my support for on screen virtual keyboard are piggy backed to E8 version.

More details here:
http://www.mmus.us/forum/showthread.php?t=12417

DosboxUIQ - finally is here :)

Following Kolijoco's great achievement of porting Dosbox to S60 im pleased to announce, that DosboxUIQ (Kolijoco's port rebuild for UIQ3) is finally here.

Its based on Kolijoco's port, and just some minor tweaks were done to make it build and run on my UIQ3 Motorola Z8. An early version of UIQ3 binaries can be found here:
http://my-symbian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39120

I was able to get 4megs of memory and run SimCity, Prince of Persia and Ishar1.

Its currently a bit slow, but picking a dynamic core from S60 version is expected :).

Cheers
tomaswoj

No news as no progress :(

No news, as no real progress ;(. I'm stuck at dosbox CPU internals, and practically had no time to debug it further. Moreover im quite busy with my current corporate assignments :), and also shifting a bit my interests to programming in the large. Anyway, if someone is willing to take it further from this place (at which dosbox compiles using UIQ3 SDK, and in general stars in emulator), im willing to share the source code :).

Real dosbox init in emu :)

This made my day. After resolving memory allocation issue (PANIC ALLOC - simply resolution by setting more HEAP size in *.mmp file for this application, using EPOCHEAPSIZE directive. Once again kudos go to MaxPayne from developer.symbian.com for a hint on this) the app passes real dosbox init (of all subsystems like memory, cpu, ints, h/w, etc.).

So now we can enjoy this gorgeous dosbox shell prompt well known for all win/unix/ppc users (see above). It seems that 'basic' porting of dosbox to symbian/uiq was much easier than i initially anticipated. Now (excluding all the potential changes to be done in the base dosbox code) it is 'only' a matter of:

- proper rendering,

- handling input (probably some virtual keyboard below, as luckily dos game modes are usually 320x200, so 40 pixels left)

- handling io ops - to be able to start any app in it :).

- moving it all to real device.

The future looks bright...

Whole DOSBOX compiled :)

Wow! I managed to compile entire source code (with just some minor changes, and one typo fix) and run the exec in the emulator (WINSCW). I got typical DOSBOX copyright message (from sdlmain.cpp), and that is gonna to use default config. And then Exit to error: Cannot allocate memory of 16MB followed by emulator crash shortly due to PANIC ALLOC :).

But its a nice progress, and a good starting point for debugging. In debug mode dosbox compiles to around 8megs exec.

I disabled FPU, dynamically recompiled core, OpenGL (obviously) but rest of it is almost intact.

The are some problems to compile render_scalers.cpp (src/gui/) in release mode - it simply hangs, but i will tackle that later on.