DS2x86 DOOM Status

January 23rd, 2011, 23:23 Posted By: wraggster

News via http://dsx86.patrickaalto.com/DSblog.html

It has been two weeks since I released the 0.02 version, and I had planned to release the 0.03 version today. However, I have only been working on the protected mode opcodes and features for Doom, which does not yet run, so I decided against releasing a version that has pretty much no noticeable improvements. This weekend would have been a good release weekend, as I need to take a trip next weekend and won't be able to release a new version then either. So, you need to wait for at least two more weeks for the next release. Sorry about that, but things don't always work according to plan.

I have managed to make Doom progress a lot further than what it did last weekend, though. It performs the DOS4GW protected mode stuff fine, and begins running the Doom-specific initialization stuff. I am currently at the machine state initialization (which detects mouse, joystick and other hardware of the system). It uses some new protected mode opcodes that are a little bit more difficult (and error-prone) to add, so I need not to rush when adding them. This is what the Doom startup screen now looks like in DS2x86 (my BIOS output routine seems not to handle the TAB character properly, instead of moving the cursor it draws the font of ASCII character code 9):


I have also gone through the debug logs that you have sent, and have added the problems in them into my TODO list. I haven't actually implemented any of the needed fixes yet, though, as I have been concentrating on getting DOOM to run. There are many unsupported opcodes in the logs which I have added for Doom, though, so many of the games you have been testing will progress further in the version that is able to run Doom. Thanks for taking the time to test DS2x86 and send me the error logs!

I hope I can get Doom and some other protected mode games running during the next two weeks. I also need to add proper unit tests for the new protected mode opcodes in the near future, as I have spent a couple of days hunting for bugs that a unit test would have found immediately. Creating the unit tests will take several weeks, though, and I'd rather get a new version released first and then start working on the unit tests.

Thanks again for your interest in DS2x86, and sorry for the no-release blog post!

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here