ExoDOS Import

[PhuriousGeorge]

That's pretty awesome, crummy games or not lol   Curious, you still in the TX area?  Biggest "known" town to me is Granbury, TX but that won't be for long - just took a gig in Arkansas I'll be at for awhile.

[eXo]

Yea, I'm in Dallas. Been meaning to get over to the video game museum they opened a few years back in Frisco.

[donarumo]

A friend of mine in high school (Around 1988) in the Houston area had an Amiga.  I knew it was a superior system in regards to graphics but everyone seemed to be adopting PCs at the time and allure of DOS was too strong for me, ended up convincing my parents to buy a 286 as our first computer.

It's a small world.  That friend went on to develop Questlord (for android and iOS).  Another friend of ours went on to work at Ensemble Studios in Dallas and eventually became a producer on Age of Empires.  He went on to found Robot Entertainment when MS folded Ensemble.  Completely by coincidence, I also live in the Dallas area and "helped" in getting ExoDOS off the ground by giving eXo a platform to work with in the form of MEAGRE.  To top it off, just a few weeks ago I was playtesting a game at Bethesda (same office as current id).    

The Video Game Museum is a definite must and really gives you a nostalgia overload.  Here is a link to an album of my visit.
 

[eXo]

Yea, it was a real trip. I worked with donarumo online for like... 3 years? 4? Before we both realized we lived in the same area. We finally met up at a starbucks one day. It blew my mind that the one other person I was working with at the time happened to live so close. 

Good call on Ensemble, I left them out when listing local dev studios from back in the day.

[p bizzy]

Hey @eXo, maybe relevant to your interests, maybe not:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/06/05/2130254/70-long-lost-japanese-video-games-discovered-in-a-67gb-folder-of-roms-on-a-private-forum

 

I see they are being uploaded here for the first time (not all there yet), and some of them are Windows 95 CD-ROMs such as the long lost Labyrinthe sequels the article mentions:

https://archive.org/details/@philsalv

 

[Retrofrogg]

How do I change the DOSBOX scalers per game eXo?

[eXo]

13 minutes ago, Dan said:

How do I change the DOSBOX scalers per game eXo?

I'm going to quote what I wrote on Monday:

Quote

To get this, when you run an install on a game, first choose whether you want aspect correction, then choose fullscreen or windowed, and finally choose YES to change your graphics filter. 

Edited June 6, 2018 by eXo

[Retrofrogg]

Sorry eXo I wasn't clear in my question - I meant after the first install had been done. I think I've figured it out though - by editing the dosbox.conf file. I tried most of the shaders and am not convinced they're that great. Not on a par with what is available in MAME anyway!

[eXo]

Remember Dan, not every game supports scalers. So the game you tested on may not have been optimal. 

That said, to change the scaler, run the install file (even though the game is already installed). It will ask if you want to uninstall the game. Say no. It will now let you change options you set during the initial install.

To run the installer on a game that has already been installed, right click the game and choose the "configure" link.

Edited June 6, 2018 by eXo

[JamesBond@ge]

On 6/4/2018 at 10:41 PM, eXo said:

As soon as you said "Amiga" I knew you were from the UK. Growing up in Texas I had never heard of an Amiga until the mid-2000's and I was downloading roms online and I got to wondering what the hell an "amiga" was. Even by the late 80's and early 90's, everything here was pretty much PC focused.......(Truncated)

Great post! I love reading these nostalgic MS-DOS posts in much the same way I love the "Lazy Game Reviews" or LGR channel over on YouTube. The passion in which you guys speak about the platform is palpable. I feel like I missed out but at least I get a little feel for it thanks to your project and DOSBOX.

Speaking of shaders etc, I actually prefer to play a game like Quake and Doom totally vanilla. No source ports, no scaling or supereagle. Just 1920x1080 and some lovely mid 90's slightly jaggy polygons. Too many enhancements, I feel, takes away from how it was originally.

Edited June 7, 2018 by JamesBond@ge

[JamesBond@ge]

On 6/4/2018 at 10:59 PM, eXo said:

In the late 90's when Romero, Hall, and Carmack left to create Gathering of Developers (GoD) and Ion Storm they tapped me to help promote their software around town. Which sounds great until you realize it meant demoing games like KISS: Psycho Circus all the time...lol.

Did you ever get to go inside John Romero's opulent (and some people say, offensive) offices?

[eXo]

For those interested in nostalgia and just shooting the breeze, I actually just started a discord server today for eXoDOS:

https://discord.gg/nY6zagn

Come one, come all. I'll be updating things there a lot more over there from here on out. It's become too difficult to keep up with the various forums I have exodos threads on.

 

edit: I've created channels over there for bug reports, game submissions, announcements, and general chat. Great turn out so far!

Edited June 7, 2018 by eXo

[eXo]

Doesn't work that way. Torrent files are imprinted with the downloaders PID. You have to get your own, otherwise you are using someone else's ratio and putting them at huge risk of being banned.

[harryoke]

made this for the users with Bigbox , hope you enjoy

[eXo]

=)!

[dave76]

Hi all, newbie here.

Not sure if this is still relevant, but here;s how I imported exodos to launchbox.

 

1. Download the images from https://archive.org/details/Win3xO1.0Launchbox7Images. You want the generic raw book zip, or else the torrent, but only the file with in the torrent called Win3xO_1.0_Launchbox7_Images.zip.
Also download from https://archive.org/details/eXoDOS_LB_Images . Again either the generic raw book zip, or else the torrent, but only the file within the torrent called eXoDOS_LB_Images.zip

2. Place the images in the Launchbox image folder. For the win3x images, which come in seperate folders, copy all the folders in the launcher/images/DOS folder. For the exodos Lb images, copy them all in the screenshots folder. If there is no Dos folder, or no Dos/screenshots folder make them inside the laucher/images folder.

3 The latest MEAGRE frontend , version 2.5.2.3, should come packaged with the win3 games. Open it, ckick on the Edit tab on top of the window, and then click on Export to Launchbox. When it finishes, close MEAGRE.

4. Find Launchbox.xml file on your computer , open it with a text editor, find the word "reorganized". You should see a line that says 

 <ImagesReorganizedFor5>true</ImagesReorganizedFor5> 

Change the true in that line to false, so that you get 

 <ImagesReorganizedFor5>false</ImagesReorganizedFor5>.

Save.

5. Open Launchbox. Some of the games will be on the platform PC Booter. Select them and change the platform to DOS.
At this point, half the games have images of their box cover as their icon, the rest have no image.

6. Close Launchbox.

7. Open the folder Launchbox/Images/Dos/Screenshot. Select all the files that have an "-02" in their name [for example $100,000 Pyramid-02.jpg] and copy [or move] them all to the Front folder.

8. Use the freeware program Advanced Renamer Portable, or some other batch renamer, to remove "-02" from all the files in the Front folder. For example, $100,000 Pyramid-02.jpg will become $100,000 Pyramid.jpg

The idea is that the -02 files are usually images of the startup screen of the game. In the absence of a box cover, they make a nice image to see in launchbox as the icon of the game. For Lauchbox to accept an image as the game icon, it has to have the game's name as its file name. Thus the extra -02 has to go.

9. Open Launchbox. In the tools section, click on clean up images. When that finishes, click on Refresh all images.

That's it.

 

[eXo]

Oooooor... Just be a little paint and wait for the next release that comes packed properly with LB.

[Retrofrogg]

Patience is a virtue..... ?

[Voljega]

On 7/29/2018 at 4:56 AM, eXo said:

ooooor... Just be a little paint and wait for the next release that comes packed properly with LB.

Hello eXo, I just have a little question related to you Win3.1 collection, as I'm mainly using your DOS collection on Raspberry Pi (after an automatic conversion I wrote), I would like to the same with ExoWin31

The main issue is that one the Pi DOSbox is only working fine when launching the game fullscreen (otherwise there is no image or the ratio is awfull or it crashes), so I have to use the following parameters in dosbox.conf :

[sdl]
fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=desktop
windowresolution=original
output=texture
renderer = auto
vsync=false
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=mapper.map
usescancodes=true

And I could'nt find any working parameters in the dosbox.conf to launch Minesweeper for instance in fullscreen, even on Windows I can't launch any 'purely win 3.1' games fullscreen (that is games using win3.1 windows and such, but for games like Dark Seed 2 it works)

For minesweeper on windows it seems to work in windowed mode with the following parameters :

[sdl] 
fullscreen=false
fulldouble=false 
fullresolution=original
windowresolution=original 
output=overlay
renderer=auto 
vsync=false
autolock=true 
sensitivity=100 
waitonerror=true 
priority=higher,normal 
mapperfile=mapper-0.74.map 
usescancodes=true 

but whatever how I modified these parameters, even using the one I put a few lines above, there is no way to get the game in fullscreen, the best I achieved on windows is a black fullscreen with no image (I can escape with ctrl+F9)

Do you have any idea how to get that working in full screen ?

 

[breech]

33 minutes ago, Voljega said:

Win3.1 collection

This thread is big enough with just the DOS stuff. Try over at vogons.org.