Dear DOSEMU developers and users, first of all thanks for keeping this wonderful project alive :-) I've used it for several minor tasks in the past, I recall how amazed I was when I ran Sid Meyer's Civilization under DOSemu... I've been wondering for some time, if it would be possible to run Symantec/Norton Ghost under Linux. I've been aware for some time that "wholedisk is not supported". To me, this has been a show-stopper - I never even tried Ghost under DOSEMU for that reason. Much to my amazement, I've recently found out that this is not quite true anymore, if it ever was, and I've managed to make "wholedisk" work for me. I can use the fdisk from FreeDOS to partition physical hard drives... I'm attaching a short patch to this message, which adds support for disk drives reporting >16k cylinders to the OS. I've noticed that DOSEMU internally uses "int" variables for CHS, so I've added some ioctl()s to src/base/misc/disks.c to get the LBA size of the disk drive and calculate the correct "cylinders" value based on that, if the 16bit value obtained via HDIO_GETGEO is clearly bonkers... And the IBM/MS extensions seem to work just right with that, judging by the fact that the FreeDOS FDISK reports my big drives correctly :- ) So today I've finally tried Ghost under DOSEMU, and yikes: the VGA screen is all garbled. Ghost is clearly alive behind the veil of ASCII garbage, responds to keyboard - but the user interface is unusable, because you can hardly use Ghost blind-folded. The screen consists of random non-text characters with random foreground and background colours, in 80x25 VGA text mode. As if Ghost was writing pixels to the video RAM, but the VGA hardware was really in 80x25 text mode. And yes, this is the native VGA screen of the machine, not a remote SSH session :-) There was a time when I used to think that Ghost ran in some VGA graphics mode, maybe 640x400x16 or some such - judging by the "graphics mode" arrow for a mouse cursor. Today I suspect that maybe it's just a text mode with a custom font and with the arrow cursor implemented by an on-the-fly font swapping hack I've read about the other day: the four characters overlapped by the graphical cursor are transparently toggled to a few special ASCII codes, whose mapped characters in the VGA font table are modified with every movement of the mouse, to display an arrow when combined with the original/underlying text characters... Native Ghost under DOS runs just fine on bare metal on the hardware that I'm using (Intel 865G). I've noticed someone else's posts from back in 2004, that he was able to run Ghost under DOSEMU and the user interface looked allright. I've tried fiddling with some graphics configuration options in dosemu.conf, but the defaults are clearly all I could hope for / liberal enough. I've tried with $_chipset=svgalib and plainvga, I've tried specifying a range of ports for direct access (along with device /dev/null). To no avail. I've also noticed that, on graceful exit, DOSEMU complains about UTF/non-UTF mismatch between my terminal and the "Locale" environment variables. If I export LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8, the error message on shutdown is gone, but Ghost produces garbled screen output just the same... I've nuked the framebuffer drivers out of my kernel .config. No improvement there... (this is vanilla Linux 2.6.28.6). And that's where I ran out of good ideas :-) Any further hints are welcome... Frank Rysanek
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