DosBox, android, arena and EMS.

Post » Mon Oct 18, 2010 4:56 am

OK, so here goes:

I recently got an android phone, a Motorola Milestone (Known in the U.S as 'Droid'), so I've been experimenting with it and playing around, getting to grips with it. Now, with the sdk being readily available to all, I decided to check if there was DosBox or something similar for it. Turns out http://androiddosbox.appspot.com/ So I download it, install it with a special app installer and get ARENA on my sd card. I began to run it from its folder, but just when it all went well, disaster struck: The device began to tell me through DosBox "Not enough EMS". So anyway, I heard that cpu cycles can be related to that on a quick google search, so I changed DosBox.conf to make the cpu-cycles 15,000. Still doesn't work, complaining about EMS just as much.

I can understand a device such as an Android phone might not be nearly powerful enough to run Arena, but I think it's work troubleshooting to try to get this classic game working on my Milestone. Please, if you can help can you put in some input? I would really appreciate it.

Just for the record, here is Dosbox.conf:
[sdl]output=surfacepriority=highfullscreen=truefulldouble=false #Use double buffering in fullscreen. To set it to true does not work for Android :-(fullresolution=800x480windowresolution=800x480[render]frameskip=1# aspect=falsescaler=normal2x[cpu]core=dynamiccycles=15000[dosbox]memsize=2[mixer]nosound=true[joystick]joysticktype=none[dos]xms=trueems=trueumb=truekeyboardlayout=none[ipx]ipx=false[autoexec]mount c /sdcard/gamesc:


Thanks, Darkmast508.
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Barbequtie
 
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Post » Mon Oct 18, 2010 12:25 am

EMS is referring to expanded memory. If you look at your config you'll see the the memory size is set to 2. I don't remember how much RAM Arena needs, but it's definitely more than two megabytes. The minimum memory requirement for Area is 4 MB of RAM. The solution will be to increase the memsize setting. If you can get it to use something like 8 that might be best.

Assuming the game runs ok, it will be interesting to see if it's at all playable for you. I suspect not. Games like Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM needed heavy UI rewrites to work on touchscreen phones and playing those still svcks compared with a keyboard and more. Arena is much more complex. Let us know what you find.
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jess hughes
 
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Post » Mon Oct 18, 2010 10:43 am

I've played Arena with http://sourceforge.net/projects/s60dosbox/ on my mobile phone (http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-e52 which got a 600MHz ARM11 CPU and use the Symbian OS), and it's not really playable. The framerate is too low even with minimum detail to be enjoyable, although I guess one could suffer thru that if one is hardcoe enough :P

Also, the Motorola Milestone is supposingly faster, using the ARM Cortex A8 CPU at 550Mhz, so maybe it's playable for you :)

Prince of Persia and Civilization worked nicely, though. And I really wish that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown had played better, being able to play that game everywhere would have been awesome B)
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Tiff Clark
 
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Post » Mon Oct 18, 2010 2:28 pm

Ah.... Unfortunately, after taking all advice it still doesn't work - It comes up with a series of strange characters flashing into existence every once in a while.

If anyone does have any further thoughts into this, please do express them - I did set memsize to 4 instead of 8 as 8 would freeze and crash dosbox on launch.

Well, time to try some other games!
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Sarah Evason
 
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