On 05 Nov 2019, Analog said the following...

I got Trade Wars 2002 3.09 working with Mystic and 64 bit kernel!!!

Basically, I installed MS Dos 6.22 (the real stuff) using QEMU. Added X00 fossil driver and SHUTDOWN.COM I grabbed from the internet. I then installed TW2002 v3.09 with DPMI no problem. Then in Mystic, I
just call a bash script that creates a "run.bat" file for the node (standard stuff here). The script then launches qemu and redirects the serial I/O to STDIO (the terminal program you're using).

Nice work. Now with multinode do you plan on trying to spin up multiple instances of DOS? If that's the only option - and to cut down on the worries
of sharing and back doors, maybe think about making it so that it can only be ran on one node at a time? It's not like there's going to be a huge wave of players wanting to play it at the same time anyway. ;)

With that said, since you've been able to spin up DOS successfully, have you thought about possibly trying to run less BBS/door specific and more DOS based games? I mean, if you could actually get multinode to work the possibilities may include setting up a small DOOM or Quake server accessible right from the BBS.

Regards,
Nick

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/02 (Linux/64)
* Origin: _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin) (21:1/200)

On 05 Nov 2019, Al said the following...

That is registered coolness. I wondered if qemu might be a solution but have not looked at it yet. I think qemu can be used on a Pi as well?

I believe QEMU is one of the _only_ worthwhile options for the Pi at the moment.

Regards,
Nick

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/02 (Linux/64)
* Origin: _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin) (21:1/200)

On 05 Nov 2019, Al said the following...

Awesome. On my debian 10 here dosemu isn't available as a package but I see several qemu-* packages. I'm hoping one day to get a menu full of Operation Overkill ][ maps.

Dosemu may not be available in the current Debian repositories, but if you
are able to enable an old repository it should be available. Looks like the last migration of dosemu was for the Britney testing branch back in 2015?

According to their pkg tracker, dosemu hasn't been worked on in ages so has failed their standards due to being outdated, which may or may not introduce bugs in regards to newer packages.

Regards,
Nick

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/02 (Linux/64)
* Origin: _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin) (21:1/200)

Nice work. Now with multinode do you plan on trying to spin up multiple instances of DOS? If that's the only option - and to cut down on the worries of sharing and back doors, maybe think about making it so that

Yes, I have succesfully run multiple instances of qemu with Dos for
multinoding my games. Here's the crux, if you run TW2002 type multinode games, they need access to the game files simultaneously. Since QEMU snapshots all directories you pass into it, this negates the ability of an instance of DOS
to share common files with another instance.

My magic workaround was NFS. The NFS for dos worked beautifully. For anyone interested, here's what I did:

1. Setup NFS for dos, see here: http://www.toughdev.com/content/2018/08/using-nfs-to-transfer-files-between-win dows-and-ms-dos-6-22

Word wrap issue so you'll have to copy paste and cleanup that link.

2. Setup NFS server in Ubuntu. I had to allow all "*" but I don't have external access to my NFS ports so it's safe.

3. Then what I did was mount that share in the dos image on boot. Next, copy all game files for each multinode game to the NFS mount/gamedir. This is the key.

4. Edit game to point to NFS mount for game files. Easy with TW2002.

5. Then I created a clone of the dos.img file (dos image) for each node. This is because qemu will lock the image, so if multiple nodes are playing, they need their own img. It was 10 megabytes so no biggie.

6. The next thing I did was setup my autoexec.bat in each image to call a file on the NFS share "run.bat". This file is created dynamically with a complex bash script called from mystic. I posted it in my tutorial on deadbeatz.org. Basically, it creates the runner for any particular game you want to play.
When the dos image is loaded, it simply runs that file which can dynamically load any game you have in the image. I hope this makes sense.

7. Profit...

That's about it. Pretty complex for running dos multinode in linux but once you get it working, it works fine. I wanted to run FreeDOS instead of Dos 6.22 because FreeDOS has great power management which helps cut down on CPU railing. MsDOS has power.exe you can load, but it isn't graceful and tends to rail the cpu sometimes. However, FreeDOS did not mount any NFS shares. It would run, but no drive was actually present. If I can get this working, I would be much happier with the setup.

Cheers,
Analog

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
* Origin: deadbeatz.org (21:2/123)