DroidDOS - WIP01 coming soon

Uffff, last week was a crazy chase for some kind of stability. First I had to switch to 32bits/pixel (RGBA) from 16bits/pixel, as it seems AVD had some issues (and crashes) on blitting to 16bits. Then i had to switchback (hope that just temporarily) FULL_TLB_SIZE (eats more memory, meh....) to achieve some level of stability for some games (i.e. Ishar 3). But now I got it more or less running. Tested some games & other stuff (that seems to run):

• Ishar3,
• Settlers (although some problems with mouse in moving window mode),
• Battle Isle
• Might and Magic 6 (Swords of Xeen)
• Mario
• Jack the Ripper
• Windows 3.1 (Chinese version)
• Executor (Mac emulator) and VMac
• DosUAE
• Warlords 2

I still cannot make old DOS demo - Contrast by Oxygene to run on the device. But this might be due to more memory consumption. (I have LG GT540/Swift, 600Mhz + 256MB, with approx 60MB left).

So I'm afraid no .apk release by the end of this month. I hope to get mouse and paged/oversize mode running well by the end of next week, keyboard hold/autorepeat (as now you need to press button X times, i.e. the DPAD arrows) . Also implement configuring Dosbox itself with some nice UI, and restarts of emulation from the DroidDOS itself (without restart of the whole app). Once I got it up and running, WIP01 will be released to public :).

Expect some ddms screenshots in the next few days.

Stay tuned.

DroidDOS - what is cooking?

Based on the marvelous works of aDosbox guys, MotoCakers (Z6 Dosbox), Koli Joco (S60 Dosbox), and my own experience (on DosboxUIQ and ROKR E8 dosbox), im now cooking a DroidDOS. A dosbox emulator port for Android devices without a physical keyboard. Its more or less working now, on my own phone, but not yet at the stage to be shared with the outside world. What will be the key enhancements to aDosbox, you may ask. Well, here they are:

• support for mouse (I hope to get both the stylus touch mouse and touchpad like mouse simulation),
• support for onscreen virtual keyboard (with several switchable layouts).
• support for oversize screens (i.e. im targeting HVGA devices, that will have a 320x200 DOS window with 640x400 modes shrinked, or paged/tiled).
• pan window automatically following mouse (in oversize mode),
  
• configurable from DosBox app (RAM, CPU, cycles, oversize mode, button sizes, etc)
• memory optimizations.
• dedicated builds for ARMv5/6 and ARMv7.
  

Stay tuned for more news. I hope to release it to public (free .apk) by end of January.

In the world of DOSn't, DroidDOS...

This is a sibling blog for http://dosboxuiq.blogspot.com. Come back soon...