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dborth / dosbox-wii

DOSBox Wii
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/DOSBox_Wii
GNU General Public License v2.0
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VGAonly setting doesn't work? #26

Closed GoogleCodeExporter closed 9 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Configure dosbox.conf to have "vgaonly" as the machine mode (as opposed 
to any of the SVGA, VESA, EGA, Tandy, etc. options."
2. Try running DOSBox Wii.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

When you launch DOSBox Wii, it's a black screen. At first I thought it was 
hanging, but when I type "exit" on my keyboard it quits back to the 
Homebrew Channel as it should.

Does the issue occur on the latest DOSBox for Windows?

No.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

DOSBox Wii 1.1 for the, uh, Wii.

Please provide any additional information below.

That's about everything!

Original issue reported on code.google.com by slipg...@gmail.com on 16 Jan 2010 at 5:06

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Hello, I assume you are using VGAONLY setting in order to try to archieve 
better 
speed in some games (I tried that too!) The logic behind this is that it will 
take 
less resources on the Wii to emulate VGA than to emulate SVGA, right?

Well, I share my findings with you:

1) VGAONLY does work! However, for some reason it is not compatible with text 
mode 
(DOS prompt). It will display a black screen. Nevertheless, if you run the 
executable file from your autoexec.bat section (or you blind-type the 
executable 
name in the black screen), the game will run and will display fine as long as 
it is 
not in text mode. I believe this is due to some Wii hardware incompatibility...

2) You won't get any speed improvement with VGAONLY! On the opposite, the video 
will 
crawl!! I believe this is because originally, on the video boards both VGA and 
SVGA 
processors were practically the same. The only difference between the two were 
that 
VGA only contains 256 KB of Video RAM, while SVGA contained 1 MB of VRAM. 
Leaving 
the video setting in SVGA_S3 runs way faster on the Wii than VGAONLY!

3) What actually did work for me, was changing the sound blaster card type from 
SB16 
to SB1. SB1 is 8-bit mono sound, and SB16 is 16-bit stereo sound, so it 
effectively 
reduced the processing load for the sound. I got a slighly speed improvement 
with 
this, however don't expect too much :) I was able to reduce from frameskip=2 to 
frameskip=1. Of course if you set the sound blaster type to none, the speed 
will 
boost but you will get no sound at all besides the PC speaker :D

I hope this results of any help to you.

Original comment by axe...@gmail.com on 12 Mar 2010 at 3:05

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
axel81 knows more about this than I do, can't help you here.

Original comment by dborth@gmail.com on 24 Jun 2010 at 2:47