Re: ZVG Experience - Proper place to post?

The computer I used is a 2.8GHz Gateway Pentium 4 with 4GB of RAM and an
80GB drive, floppy, and a DVD Burner. A friend gave me a Sound Blaster
Live PCI card. I found DOS drivers from a link on this page:

http://easymamecab.mameworld.info/html/snddosdr.htm

I loaded FreeDOS and was unable to get the soundblaster card to install
properly. Having not invested a lot of time in the install I figured it
might be best to try regular MS-DOS. MSDN still has 6.0 and 6.22
available for download but none of the 95s, 98s, or ME because of some
licensing issue. I decided to try 6.22. Getting the OS installed was a
little tricky. I copied the disk images over to a CD and booted FreeDOS
as a "Live CD". Then I copied the files to the hard disk and made the
diskettes with the included utility. Then I installed DOS after
deleting the "Non-DOS" partition with FDISK. The way the BIOS was
reporting only let me create and format a 500MB partition, but I decided
that it really isn't a problem because the machine won't need much space
anyway.

Getting drivers loaded would have been easier if I had a floppy drive to
copy things with but every driver I got had to be loaded onto a CD (I
used re-writable discs) but since I hadn't gotten the CD working yet, I
used the FreeDOS LIVE-CD trick to copy stuff.

Since most people seem to have problems with sound, I tried the
Soundblaster drivers first. This time it worked great. A standard
install seemed to load perfectly.

Next was CD support. I found the OAKCDROM.SYS driver at:
http://www.computerhope.com/download/hardware.htm and instructions on
loading them at: http://www.computerhope.com/cdromd.htm .

I figured I was in the home stretch. I loaded the VectorMAME software
on, loaded some ROMS into the ROMS folder and attempted to start STAR
WARS (one of the games I own a real game of). It was then that I got
this mysterious error:

Load Error: no DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip

What? All of the programs in the folder seemed to be doing this.
Wait. I never set the ZVG port variable. OK - I do that and... No
Love. Still the same error.

A Google search takes me to:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=8586.0 and that leads me
to download csdpmi5b.zip from
http://www.delorie.com/pub/djgpp/current/v2misc/ .

I copy the EXEs from the ZIP into the same folder with VectorMAME and
load Star Wars. It comes up with sound and pressing the right keys
starts a game. I wanted to see if the Menu would load but it needed the
ZVG attached. I attached it and It seemed like it was running. Without
a vector monitor, this was where I stopped. I'll hook it up to my
Tempest monitor and see what happens. I have to move stuff around for
this step.

I'm sure that if I wanted to spend more time on it, I could get this
working better, but it should be fine for the intended use. Now all I
need is an Amplifone picture tube and my boards repaired and a cabinet
to put this in.

-Al-

On 9/10/2011 9:27 AM, Al Warner wrote:
> I have been working on the PC side of getting a ZVG card working. I
> think I'm ready to try it with a vector monitor. I've had some
> interesting problems getting the software to run on my Pentium 4 under
> DOS. It appears that newer PCs left DOS behind and didn't look back.
> I guess my question is, where would be the best place to document the
> issues I had so that others might benefit? I have been an IT guy for
> 25+ years now but this was an interesting challenge to get working.
> If this is the right place, I'll submit a detailed post.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Al-
>
> PS - I hit issues I can't find references to in relation to MAME.
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