GEOS-InfoBase-Forum

Sounds great! If we could get a working Basebox for the pi OS, it would be a true alternative.

BR,
Hans

Happy Easter

As of today basebox is built for pi OS as well. Find the raw binary here as usual:

https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos-basebox/releases

For now it is the 64 bit version only. And it is still raw and unpackaged,.... but ready for testing

Best,
Falk Rehwagen
blueway.Softworks

Any special version of Pi OS recommended?

Greetings,
Hans

Good question! The build host is a very fresh raspberry pi installation I've created using Raspberry Pi Image yesterday.

We probably should go for an defined older base. Does anyone know if 32bit or 64bit version is more commonly used on raspberry pi 3/4?

Greetings,
Falk

Well, both pi 3 and 4 supports 64-bit OS. I have tried to run DOSBox-Staging on 32-bits, I get lots of errors. It seems to me that it is the 64-bit Bullseye (ver 11), which works, but I might be wrong? I will do a new clean install this evening to see if I manage to make it work.

Greetings,
Hans

I have now tested Dosbox-staging in Raspberry Pi 3 with the latest version of Raspberry Pi 64-bit OS called Bullseye (ver11). Dosbox-staging installs nicely, but takes some time.
This is my observations:
Ensemble performs sluggish on a Pi3B in Dosbox-staging, a Pi4 is probably a better choice.
In the RPi version of Dosbox-staging, there is only support for 4:3 resolutions the 16:9 (848x480) is removed.
I also get the impression that the 64-bit version of the OS performs a bit sluggish on the Pi3B compared to the 32-bit version of the OS.

Thx a lot! Did you try the basebox from the link above or was it a standard version of dosbox-staging? I'm wondering why basebox should not support the new resolution as on the other platform?

Greetings,
Falk

It was the standard Dosbox-Staging, I have been tested. Will try Basebox soon.

Greetings,
Hans

I have now tested Basebox in my raspberry pi 3, and when I start it I get the following error message:

"error while loading shared libraries: libmt32emu.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory".

When I look for libmt32emu on the internet, I can not find a version for Raspberry Pi (or Debian).

Basebox is not started.

Greetings,
Hans

Hi,

today I downloaded the BaseBox from the link above and gave it a try on the P4-4G. As Hans mentioned it is build/linked against Munt but the libs are no longer part of the official Raspbian 64bit. So I loaded mt32emu from GitHub and it build fine. After that I also had to install the SDL2_net package from the repository before I culd run basebox. I would suggest to remove Munt from the dependencies as Roland MT-32 emulation isn't need for GEOS and when running DOS games it requires the original ROMs that are not freely available.

The DOS Dhrystone benchmark I run gave me a score of ~26. This is less than the includes DOSBox (~29) and compares to the CPU speed of an IBM 486DX2-50. With the optimized build of DOSBox that ships with Pi/GEOS I get the same speed on a Pi3. I assume the dynacore still needs some optimization on the arm64 architecture. It is also possible that the new build system does not choose the right parameters...

Thomas

Thank you for testing and your feedback! Yes, SDL2 and SDL2_net needs to be installed manually, which I assume is an effect of basebox currently pure and unpackaged. The others I assumed to be linked statically, we have to double check. So, as well asfor optimal speed, there plenty room for improvements. .... step by step getting there :-)
Falk