qemu: SVGA issue in 800x600?
 

Hi

Having a bit of trouble trying to have a descent picture running old games in msdos through qemu. It looks fine as long as I run it in the really low res, but in highest setting of 800x600 with svga setting it looks just horrible:

qemu has some "-vga" settings like, std, cirrus, vmware and so on and I have tried 'em all - none of them look good unless I run the game in 300x200 mode. I have even tried and run with different bioses as found in /usr/share/qemu.

What might really make this work?

qemu runs in i386 mode with "-vga std" here

If genuine DOS games, maybe try Dosbox/Dosemu.

https://www.dosbox.com/

http://www.dosemu.org/

I have tested dosbox already and it was ridiculously slow, (dosemu just segfaulted and I havent given it more time than that) but still seems to be pretty much the same thing. Dosbox looked good in a small window when I run it from the computer it was installed on, but I want/need to run it from a network attached computer, so from the beginning I tried running dosbox through ssh forwarding but it ran slow too and very sensitive for changes, like switching to fullscreen. The virtual environment I have running currently through qemu is as fast as it gets and works just perfectly - only it does not support svga/vesa as it seems.

Duke 3D runs fine here under DOSBox... not slow at all. Their compatibility page shows that it has been 100% supported since ~2004: https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php...=1744&letter=D

The key combo to switch to full screen is Alt&Enter. You have to remember that it is a low-res game, so will look terrible on a modern screen.
So set up an NFS share.

I don't know why it runs slower but it did, 4-5 fps maybe. I found no way to make it run better, only slower still I found it to run so fine and cleanly under qemu just so annoying with the vesa problem there, I am compiling virtualbox atm to see if there is a better driver there. Connectivity over the network is not the issue, I want it to run over some kind of socket-session to other machines, not only the files. VNC was nice but it will likely have be rdp or something because of sound.

I got the feeling that dosbox hade most trouble with scaling it to the entire screen, not only that it was slow but that was why I found scaling the picture over vnc to be far more efficient - otherwise I would have to run my 4K monitor at 800x600 which is even more pain and I don't even know if it would go that low.

But you're talking about single user programs which were designed to run on single user machines.

Of course, you can also do this stuff in a browser these days:https://playclassic.games/games/firs...d-online/play/

Emulated hardware is always going to be slower than emulated software. I do remember the hardware requirements for a smooth experience in DOSBox being quite high 20 years ago, but any halfway modern PC (newer than ~2012) should not have any difficulty. My computer here doesn't even have a discrete GPU and I don't have any speed-related issues.