dos games, vesa and wine

[Jukka Heinonen]

Enrico Horn wrote:
> I tried my dos4gw games with dos32a and they "work"(except some warning dos32a
> prints) but you have to run these games like this to get an result:
> wine -- dos32a game.exe
> thats is because the stub which loads the dos extender doesnt work and i have
> no idea why.

Neither dos4gw stub loader nor dos4gw itself work. Making these
work would be nice, but since there are free, compatible DOS
extenders available that work rather well with Wine, I'm not 
particularly interested to figure out what is wrong with them. 
I have toyed with an idea of trying to contact dos4gw authors 
(if I can find them) and ask them if they could help, but I'm just 
too lazy for this kind of stuff.

> the games i use all make use of vesa
> they want 640x480x256
> ddraw traces show a primary surface that is 8bit paletted.
> is there any problem drawing this thing?
> where is this done?
> is there a routine that regularly updates the screen with content of this
> surface?
> i have looked in x11drv(can it be that x11drv is in need of a rewrite?) and
> havent found anything but i am not expert at this and just poke around
> randomly where i see an interest.

That mode should work with DOS VESA emulation. It could be that
those programs use VESA features that are not supported or
that VESA emulation is faulty. It is also possible that
those programs are waiting for timer interrupt which is 
not delivered in protected mode (I have a good idea how
to do this, but we shall see when I have time to implement
it).

See dlls/winedos/int10.c and dlls/winedos/vga.c. It is unlikely
that DOS display problems are due to x11drv bugs.

-- 
Jukka Heinonen <http://www.iki.fi/jhei/>