DOS HDD not recognized?

[Kosh]

I'm fairly new to VB. Loving it.

I made an XP install - no problems. Still figuring out some compatibility issues, but overall going OK.

So I could play some old DOS games, I tried making a DOS 6.22 machine. It seemed to work to a point; but the prompt was the A: drive, even though I didn't enable floppies, and the C: was nowhere to be found. The A: drive was the size of a floppy, unlike the 10GB I devoted to the C: drive. Yet... no drive.

Once I figure this out, I'd like to know if there's a way to enable a video card driver for hardware acceleration? And as for sound cards, can I emulate a more sophisticated version? And where are the port/dma/irq settings? I couldn't see where to access or modify.

[scottgus1]

I'm not certain about the stuff in your last paragraph, except that there are no official DOS Virtualbox drivers (Guest Additions). However, in the 3rd party Applications subforum, one or two programming guys have made their own DOS Guest Additions that may help you.

For the C drive, I recently read a post that said one has to run fdisk on the drive to make it appear.

[Kosh]

Thanks. Yes, I got to thinking about FDISK - it's been ages since I installed a DOS drive, and I was initially thinking VB would have provided a partitioned, formatted drive, but it did not. Also I checked and a 10GB logical drive is way too big for DOS anyway.

So, I used FDISK, made a 2GB partition, formatted with /s, and it worked. I made a C:\DOS folder, copied the DOS files into it from A:, and most seemed well.

Problem now is that my CD ISO no longer appears. I have the same CONFIG.SYS as was on A:, changed the path accordingly, and while the driver seems to load, the CD volumes no longer mount.

Any ideas why not? They worked before.

I also need to figure out about various drivers.

[scottgus1]

All Virtualbox does is provide the hardware, same as those old IBM PC clones did back in the day. You still need to fdisk, finagle the HIMEM and the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys and the CD_ROM driver and all the rest. How to do that is a good subject for a web-search. Configuring an OS is not in the scope of the Virtualbox forum.

I also need to figure out about various drivers.

there are no official DOS Virtualbox drivers (Guest Additions). However, in the 3rd party Applications subforum, one or two programming guys have made their own DOS Guest Additions that may help you.

viewforum.php?f=32

[Kosh]

Thanks. I figured out the problem with the CD drivers; the CD was appearing when I was mounting the ISO for DOS, it was booting to the CD, which loaded the MSCDEX.EXE, which I'd forgotten about.

So things are working - somewhat. Problem is, the performance is very very poor. I get a lot of crashes / freezes, the sound in games is distorted and spotty, and with one game I was using which required CD access, was stalling for 30 seconds at a time.

Is there something I can read or watch to tune it up, for better performance? The games I was referring to ran smoothly on a Pentium 90 with less than 128MB RAM (I don't recall how much was in that machine, but I recall my upgrade from it had 128, and that was a step up).

[scottgus1]

Virtualbox isn't a gaming platform, so game performance may be eh...

CD drive performance might be improved when using the host's physical CD drive by checking the "Passthrough" box when the host CD drive is passed to the VM's CD drive.

I get a lot of crashes / freezes

Are these in Virtualbox's running of the DOS VM? Or in games inside the OS?

Please start the VM from full normal shutdown, not save-state. Run until you see the problem happen, then shut down the VM from within the VM's OS if possible. If not possible, close the Virtualbox window for the VM with the Power Off option set.

Right-click the VM in the main Virtualbox window's VM list, choose Show in Explorer/Finder/File Manager. In the "Logs" subfolder, zip the VM's "vbox.log", and post the zip file, using the forum's Attachments tab. (Configure your host OS to show all extensions so you can find the "vbox.log", not "vbox.log.1", etc.)

[Kosh]

Even if not a gaming platform, seems even a semi-efficient emulator should be more than enough to run Pentium-90 era games smoothly, given the immense increase of power over that era.

For the CD games, I'm referring to ISO images of the original discs. Such as Bioforge, which does frequent CD accesses during play. The game would play smoothly for a while, graphically (even though the sound was all messed up) and then freeze up for long periods. I had the VM lock up a couple times playing Doom, and trying to play Descent only resulted in a general fault error.

In those cases, what I did was use VB to create a DOS 6.22 install, installed the games in question into that DOS virtual machine, then would try running them in that DOS machine.

Yes, I always shut down the power, not a saved state. DOS has no way (that I know of) to shut down the machine, so I just shut it down.

I might want to use a different emulator for other gaming, even though VB has obvious uses for other programs. I think I mentioned I've been happy with my installation of XP in a VM, which runs quite well, actually.

[scottgus1]

There could be other reasons for a VM not working well. Please see the last half of my last post.