DOS32A?

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Consequence of Grace
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DOS32A?

Post by Consequence of Grace »

I have a non-Unity tool for editing FALL.exe, but it works only on the FALL.exe that has been patched with DOS32A. The difference is only 1 byte in FALL.exe.

But I have Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit, and DOS32A will not run.

Does anyone know anything about this that could help me?


Cheers!

:)

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pango
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Re: DOS32A?

Post by pango »

Hi,
You should be able to run your program in DOSBox emulator
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Consequence of Grace
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Re: DOS32A?

Post by Consequence of Grace »

I tried that and failed as DOS32A is a 32-bit DOS Extender. I must be doing something wrong.

Any tips?


:)

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pango
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Re: DOS32A?

Post by pango »

They're some infos in DOSBox wiki:
https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/TOOLS:DOS32A
From quick perusal it should be possible to get it to work most of the time...
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Consequence of Grace
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Re: DOS32A?

Post by Consequence of Grace »

Thanks, I'll try that!

:)

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MrFlibble
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Re: DOS32A?

Post by MrFlibble »

A while ago I tried DOS32A in my attempts to optimize Daggerfall's performance in DOSBox. The DOS extender is embedded in FALL.EXE so you need to use a DOS32A command that replaces the embedded extender with a DOS32A one. This is described in the extender's documentation and also here in the UESP Wiki.

However it should be noted that I did not notice any performance gains and at the same time got an impression that there was some detrimental effect on how the game worked.

DOS32A is very certainly needed if you configure DOSBox to use 63 MiB of RAM, and/or also set a high amount of cycles (IIRC). It is required if you allocate huge amounts of memory (like 20 MiB) for cache and tetxure cache in Z.CFG (otherwise the game will crash). However I found all these measures to be an overkill with no real performance gain. In fact I believe that the less your DOSBox setup differs from what the game would expect based on contemporary hardware specs back in 1996, the better. The DOS version of Daggerfal works fine for me with cycles limited to 26800 and the default DOSBox memory setting (16 MiB).

Consequence of Grace
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Re: DOS32A?

Post by Consequence of Grace »

MrFlibble wrote: Mon Nov 05, 2018 11:09 am A while ago I tried DOS32A in my attempts to optimize Daggerfall's performance in DOSBox.
Cheers, thanks for that!

:)

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