Commander Genius with DosBox Fusion out soon! !DELAYED!

All discussion about the Commander Genius project (a Keen interpreter + more).
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gerstrong
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Commander Genius with DosBox Fusion out soon! !DELAYED!

Post by gerstrong »

While working pretty hard in getting Dosbox well integrated and crosscompiled properly with Commander Genius I'm getting to the next step and want to upload a preview version for all of you.

That new version is a big step for all the modders, since CG will be able to run any DOS game for now using a recent SVN version of Dosbox heavily modified by myself. This means, any mod created for DOS will run here with some extra features, more to come in future.

Okay, you could use Dosbox right away, but I'll go the advantages over it later.

I'm sure there will be some limitations though and I still am not sure where this is going to.

We are working on a concept to integrate the Keen games or maybe derivates to be played properly and get an even better experience out of it.

Maybe dosbox fusion will only be used by some people who wants to play the Keen series including mods or maybe it is the next step for DOS gaming, I don't know. We will see that in the near future. ;-)

Anyhow. As soon I get the Windows build compiled I will upload it and you can test and tell me what you think about it. I'm still not sure if I will open it for everyone to the public or to a selected circle of people, because its development resides in early stages and it is not meant as any release yet. It is expected to be buggy, although I think it runs pretty well. A lot of so far planned features are still incomplete in that version.

So what are the advantages right now, over Dosbox:
  • Game Launcher: Like most of the previous Commander Genius releases, there is the game launcher, but now you can choose your engine, CG Keen Engine or Dos fusion. You won't need to configure shortcuts or special stuff to get your DOS games properly running. The Game Launcher also will let you choose the EXE or BAT you want to run. So you won't have to ever type any DOS command again! I think especially for beginners and smartphone users this is a step forward. The game launcher will grab any dos game and let you choose the exe or bat, even with non Keen games. Yeah it now acts as a dosbox frontend, but there is more. You still can launch the dosbox shell from the Game Launcher if you want to though.

    Dosfusion menu. While dosbox is open and running by pressing the menu button (usually ESC) you get another menu which you can call anytime you want. It has only two options so far but more will come. The first one is to bypass the menu button event. So if you tried to access the game menu instead of this menu, just press that button and you are good to go.

    The second option is the key mapper which provides dosbox. I took that code and tried to maintain it into the same resolution. So you can already map your dos key events to any gamepad device or even other keys like you know it from Dosbox itself. Different than in Dosbox the resolution wont change anymore because we have another graphics engine running under hood. Other than that it works the same as you know it from dosbox.

    The graphics engine is the one of CG. So filters like ScaleX and OpenGL rendering are working pretty fine with that implementation. You can stretch the window at your wish and fool around with the aspect corrections as you desire. I'm not sure about the performance so far, but at least on my system Keen runs pretty well and loads fast, at least as I remember it from the era.

    SDL 2.0: Maybe not that important and it also covers the previous point, but this code will be compilable and runnable perfectly under SDL 2.0 which I think will boost dosbox even further. I guess for most of the users it is a minor thing right now, but for future devices we are going to need that update, pretty sure I am, it will happen.

EDIT: I'm sorry, but I will have to delay that version for now. I got some job difficulties and must focus on other stuff. I also plan some vacations. After all that hard work we had I need a bit of rest. But don't worry I'll be back.

Dosfusion in Commander Genius runs great as far as the latest commit on Github, but there are some bugs I want to fix first before we make that public. I also want to write the original DosBox Authors about because they deserve to know it. They made that possible.
Last edited by gerstrong on Sat Jul 26, 2014 7:38, edited 1 time in total.
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tulip
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Post by tulip »

Looking forward to test it.

If you are willing to help me once more setting up the github project and codeblocks I am willimg to try again doing some minor coding for the interface. (i have been doing a bit of C++ reading, understanding and modifying at work so I'd try my luck again)
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gerstrong
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Post by gerstrong »

IMHO Windows is not the best DevEnv to start on, but of course I will help you. Let me try to get it compiled on Windows first. In case this fails for now because of Dosfusion we might turn it off until I get all the dependencies together working.
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Post by Levack »

Will the Keen 6 demo be supported?

I can hardly wait! :)
gerstrong
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Post by gerstrong »

Well, it runs on Dosfusion, I think that is enough. For our engine to support. I guess this won't happen soon.
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