PC/Geos and Raspberry Pi 3

    Hi all!

    I have tested PC/Geos 4 (Breadbox Ensemble 4.13) with Raspberry Pi 3 and it works great! I have run it is 800x600 with 64k colors, and
    also in 1024x768 with 64k colors and it works very well, with adequate
    speed. I have ran it both in a dosbox window in graphics mode and a
    fullscreen mode from text promt. Both works well. There is one issue, it
    is not possible to play wav sounds, and I suspect it is an issue with
    dosbox. FM sounds in PC/Geos works well. There is a bit of background
    noise, but I had no volume control available in PC/Geos to raise the volume. Maybe some tweaking can be made to the dosbox.conf file, to improve sound and eliminate noise, I don't know. I will continue to test. The good thing is that this is a cheap powerful solution, which can be either a desktop computer or a tablet, even if the tablet solution looks a bit odd, with the "fat" rectangular back of the tablet screen, although, no batteries.

    Feel free to ask any questions!

    BR,
    Hans

    Hi Hans,

    great to hear that the new Raspi is capable to drive DOSBox+GEOS. To get a more objective impression of the "adequate speed" your mentioned could you please post a "Speed" score and some details of the DOSBox configuration (e.g. Cycles setting) used? I thing the sound issue is just a minor problem. I disabled the sound on nearly all of my GEOS installations because I have impression it runs more stable.

    Thomas

    Hello Thomas!

    The Speed value I get is (round off) 200, the exact value varies between 219 and 223, this was measured with the dosbox window in the graphical enviroment. I have tested to run dosbox from the command prompt, but not measured it with Speed, of course I can test that, too. In the default setup, I did not manipulate anything regarding CPU speed, screen size and so on, dosbox was set with the "out of the box" default "auto" value, and reports 3000 cycles in the dosbox window. I have after the testing manipulated the sound value, turning everything unnecessary off, regarding sound, with no effect! There is a level of pink/white noise that is irritating when using earphones, but I think it is a badly programmed dosbox, as the noise performs as soon as dosbox is started. Maybe this could be adjusted with a Soundblaster mixer for DOS. I will try it when I get to that point. Otherwise there is no problem with the FM sound playing in Geos, it sounds correct without any "gurgeling" or distortion, just as on any PC. There is no vaw-sounds playing, when I try to do it, there is just silence. The significant difference from 2 to 3, is that FM sound sounds good without any distortion, and I can use hi-res resolutions with 64k color driver without any lagging.

    The performance should be good for Geos as it is the same as on the tablets I have tested, although the EpiPhany browser in the Pi still "have a bit to walk" to be a good browser compared to Google Chrome, but Epiphany perfroms nicely on this site and also on Rainer's homepage.

    BR,
    Hans

    Well, I have now tested to start dosbox from command prompt without the graphical enviroment, and the Speed value is the same, 200 in the rounded value and 224 in the specific value. I have also changed sound configuration to PC speaker and turned the Soundblaster support off, and the FM sound is improved, the white noise level using headphones is lower, but it is still annoying, and I guess this is a dosbox problem.

    So far so good!

    BR,
    Hans

    Perhaps you should try higer values for the cycles setting manually. "Auto" always sets it to 3000, even if 20000 or more is appropriate.
    Rainer

    Es gibt 10 Arten von Menschen - die einen wissen was binär ist, die anderen nicht.

    Good point! Will try that. I have compared the hardware specs in the
    Raspberry Pi 3 with the hardware specs in the iRulu tablet that I got from
    Frank to work with the Android project, and they are basically the same. So, I guess it was not really a surprise for me. T hink that the Raspberry Pi 3 is the low-end if you want to run PC/Geos on this device.
    I have also switched sound to PC speaker emulation and I think the noise is a bit reduced, but still there. As there is no support for WAV-files, it is sufficient to have just PC speaker emulation, if any sound is needed.

    I will try to run multiple softwares like R-Basic and all the Geos apps to see how the performance is. I still need to get some softwares together that I want to test, among others, I would like to test GeoExplorer (formerly GeoSafari), which John and I worked with quite a lot before Frank went away. I think we did some good work to wash out GeoSafari and renamed it GeoExplorer, as there was copyright issues with Educational Insights, as they did not want Breadbox to use the trade mark "GeoSafari". Educational Insights worked hard to destroy the brand by putting it on plastic toy binoculars and so on. The intention from Breadbox was to use "GeoExplorer" as our version of interactive educational game. Still it can be use for other gaming things, too, in the quiz format, so I think it will be good for us to preserve it for the future. There are still some little things I would want John to correct in GeoExplorer, but I will contact him later on, when things are clearer.

    Hans

    In several versions of the DosBox (Android, Windows, Linux, ...), I have to set the DosBox to "SB16-emulation" and Geos to "SB Pro" (or similar). The Geos-"SB16"-driver always fails. :(
    And I have to use a dos-"mixer"-software as per default the emulated sound-card is set to "fm/midi: max volume" and "digi/wav: off".

    There are two rules in life:
    1. Never give out all of the information.

    Zitat von hanslse

    Jörg, will your setting of the DOS-mixer decrease the (white) noise? The dos-"mixer"-software, is it software from Creative Labs?

    There's also a Geos-version of the mixer-software. But I've only got the unregistered version and my testing period expired a decade ago. ;)
    Yes, you can most likely use the Creative Labs software. But I'm using an alternative version. Is it this one? There's also a "sbvol.arj" here. (Will have a closer look at this when at home.)
    I can't tell whether the mixer reduces the white noise in your case. But in most cases it's only caused by having a mixer set to the maximum (either the one emulated by the dosbox or the one used by the real device - in your case a Raspberry).

    There are two rules in life:
    1. Never give out all of the information.

    Yesterday, I have realized that I have been screwed by a salesmen. I thought I bought a Raspberry Pi 2 some years ago, but it was a Raspberry Pi B+. They sold be a Raspberry Pi 2 box, and so on. I discovered this when I tried to put Ubuntu Mate on it and it crashed at boot up. When checking the receipt, it states B+, so it was correct in that respect. They did not rip me off financially. So my testing with the RPi 2 was with the B+. So I guess the PRi 2 will probably run Geos good, too. It is the RPi B+ that is a bit weak for running Geos. I have to blame myself, as the fault is mine, and I have learned to check this better, the next time. Still, I am also testing a RPi 3 and Geos works well there. I plan to use Ubuntu Mate on the RPi 3 as the Raspberry Pi distrribution contains a
    GUI and so on that is not very pretty. Not an eye candy.

    BR,
    Hans