rpix86 version 0.16 released!

March 10th, 2014, 23:00 Posted By: wraggster

Okay, after a bit of a hiatus on the rpix86 front, here finally is a new version of rpix86! I have ported a few features over from my other project, and also managed to spend a couple of days fixing some minor bugs for this version. Here are the most notable changes:

1. Implemented new experimental CD-ROM support
You can now give a new -c (as in CD-ROM) command line parameter to rpix86. This parameter gives the directory on your Raspberry Pi that should be used as the root directory of D: drive. This D: drive is emulated as a CD-ROM drive (when a DOS program queries the type of the drive). For example, if your game is located in /home/pi/rpix86/Games/MYGAME and you have a subdirectory CDROOT under that directory that contains all the files from the CD of the game, you can give a parameter -c/home/pi/rpix86/Games/MYGAME/CDROOT to have rpix86 use the contents of that directory as a D: drive.

Note that ISO images (or any other similar CD images) are not supported, you need to extract all the files from the image to a directory on your Raspberry Pi. I am looking into a possibility of adding ISO image support in the future.

2. Fixed the rpix86 screen copy feature
I had broken the screen copy feature in rpix86 several versions ago, but I had not had much need for that feature myself so I had not bothered to fix it. Now I finally decided to look into this problem. It turned out that I had accidentally moved the screen copy routine to a location in the code after the screen was cleared, which is why all the screen copies had just a black screen. In this version you can again take a screen shot by pressing the PrintScreen button on your keyboard. The screen copies are written into SCR??.BMP files, with the ?? being an incremental number.

3. Ignore the "drop-to-debugger" key press if debugger is not available
I added code to detect whether the current screen size allows running the inbuilt debugger, and if the debugger is not activated, the "drop-to-debugger" key (right Windows key) will not do anything. The built in debugger is meant for my own debugging use, so you can freely ignore this information completely. :-)

4. Improved previous fix for writing to unmapped EMS page
The fix I made in version 0.15 for the Aces Over Europe bug was not a very good one, so I made a better fix in this version. Now writing to an unmapped EMS page writes to normal low memory, just like it works on a real PC.

5. Improved mouse initialization (fixes crash in Fragile Alliance)
There was a minor problem in the mouse initialization routine which left some mouse scaling variables uninitialized. This could cause a division by zero problem in some games that tried to change the mouse scaling immediately after initializing the mouse. This problem is now fixed.

6. Added support for HLT opcode in protected mode (Fragile Allegiance)
Another minor problem was that the game "Fragile Allegiance" used the HLT (Halt) opcode from protected mode, and I had not yet implemented that yet. Implementing it was quite easy, and that fix allowed Fragile Allegiance to run.


7. Implemented a missing EGA opcode (Spacewrecked)
The game "Spacewrecked" failed to run because I had not implemented a rare EGA mode opcode it used. After implementing that the game began to run fine.


Thanks for your continued interest in rpix86, and let me know of any bugs you find in this version! My time to work on a new rpix86 version continues to be somewhat limited, but I will try to work on it at least every now and then.

http://rpix86.patrickaalto.com/rblog.html

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