New in This Version

• IMGMAKE will choose LBA partition types for 2GB or larger disk images, but the user can also use -chs and -lba options to override that choice. The CHS or LBA partition types do matter because it affects which version of INT 13h is used by Windows 98/ME to boot up and, if drive C: is in compatibility mode, at all times. (joncampbell123)
• PC-98 256-color mode will also trigger the auto mode of “render on demand” for performance reasons because per-scanline raster effects are very unlikely in that case, as will MDA and Hercules machine types. (joncampbell123)
• When the DOS IDLE API is enabled (by default), limit STI+HLT to occur on INT 28h only once after any call to read the CON device or call to BIOS INT 16h to read the keyboard. This fixes stalls and sluggish input problems with programs that like to call INT 28h often like the Pacific C compiler PPD IDE interface. (joncampbell123).
• Hercules InColor machine type: Fixed attribute and RAMFONT handling of 48K RAMFONT mode and added planar text rendering. (joncampbell123).
• Write BIOS data area fields for number of rows, char height, etc. for MCGA machine type in addition to EGA/VGA machine types because IBM technical references suggest it’s there for MCGA as well. This also resolves an issue where with the MCGA machine type, INT 10h failed to print any text to screen whatsoever. (joncampbell123).
• Render on demand (Staging calls it “lazy rendering”) now defaults to “auto” and allows an “auto” setting. The auto setting will turn it off for standard VGA modes and will turn it on for SVGA modes where per scanline raster effects are very unlikely to occur. This may provide a performance boost for DOS games in SVGA modes and the Windows desktop (joncampbell123).
• CGA 320x200 4-color mode is now rendered using the M_EGA render code for EGA/VGA machine types to better reflect real hardware. (joncampbell123).
• Fix bug where setting doublescan=false for anything other than the VGA machine type would break CGA graphics modes. (joncampbell123).
• Fix video debug overlay calculations of source video mode for CGA graphics modes. (joncampbell123).
• CGA 640x200 2-color mode and MCGA 640x480 2-color mode are no longer rendered as M_CGA2 for EGA/VGA machine types. The reason is that at the hardware level they are really just IBM standard tweaked versions of the EGA/VGA 16-color modes with additional bits for the interleave emulation and can be properly emulated with the M_EGA renderer. M_CGA2 is still used for the CGA and MCGA machine types for those modes. The DCGA DOS/V mode has been carefully made into it’s own render mode instead of part of the M_CGA2 case. (joncampbell123).
• Fixed refcount -1 error and abort when multiple floppies are attached to a floppy drive and the “Swap floppy” mapper shortcut is used at least once (joncampbell123).
• Hercules palette selection now provides a “dark gray” color mapping to match the green, amber, or gray palette selection of the user (joncampbell123)
• Fix Hercules vs MDA attribute handling of “dark gray” background color when hardware blink is disabled. (joncampbell123)
• Added RAMFONT emulation to Hercules Plus machine type, fixed code to allow Hercules Plus text mode to draw farther than the first 4KB of RAM if RAMFONT enabled. (joncampbell123)
• DOS kernel: Fix programming mistake that allocated perhaps a bit too much DOS kernel memory for the “List of Lists” info block. Fix the sizes of the info block and other structures to make sure specific kernel structures are placed at fixed addresses because later Microsoft software for MS-DOS checks those values. (joncampbell123)
• Serial port: Add multiplier: setting as requested to enable faster than 115200 baud rates. (joncampbell123)
• Fix mistakes in CPUID emulation that threw a #UD exception for specific cases where EAX was not recognized by particular CPU types. (joncampbell123)
• Fix RTC clock emulation to correctly signal IRQ8 interrupt for both periodic tick and update-ended events. Prior to this fix, only periodic tick events were reported even if the bit was set to enable update-ended. (joncampbell123)
• Fix serial and AUX PS/2 mouse emulation to not send relative motion unless mouse captured, to make it consistent with the BIOS PS/2 mouse emulation (joncampbell123)
• FAT driver: Major performance boost is possible by eliminating unnecessary code that re-reads the entire directory when looking up or changing one particular directory entry. (joncampbell123).
• CMOS registers: Fix code to allow getting and setting time, fix year vs century registers to work properly. (joncampbell123).
• BIOS INT 1Ah: Fix functions to get and set time and date instead of faking on read and ignoring set. Use the CMOS registers. (joncampbell123).
• DOS INT 21h: Fix date and time functions to call the BIOS for time instead of trying to fake it only at the DOS level. This includes allowing INT 21h to change the date/time using the BIOS. (joncampbell123).
• DOS shell: Make TIME actually use INT 21h to set time instead of directly modifying the BIOS timer tick count in the BDA. (joncampbell123).
• Increased PIC event queue size, there are corner cases especially with Windows XP that can occasionally overrun the queue. (joncampbell123).
• Updated IBM PC keyboard emulation to correctly encode Pause and Print Screen key scan codes when shift, alt, and ctrl are held down. This makes it possible to type “Alt+SysRq” for programs that expect it, including SoftICE. (joncampbell123).
• NE2000 emulation: Looking at recent Bochs source code, ne2k.cc appears to have downgraded the “IMR write, reserved bit set” message from BX_PANIC to BX_ERROR. Update the same in DOSBox-X so that Windows 2000 no longer crashes the emulator with E_Exit() when probing the NE2000 hardware. (joncampbell123).
• INT 33h mouse services: Add “Get General Driver Information” function for Microsoft Word 5.5 (joncampbell123).
• INT 33h mouse services: Render cursorType == 2 (graphics cursor) as if text cursorType == 0 if the current mode is text mode. Microsoft Word 5.5 always calls functions to set text AND graphics cursor regardless of whether the actual mode is graphics or not. This fix allows the cursor to show correctly as the block cursor it wanted in text mode instead of a moving hardware blinking cursor. (joncampbell123).
• Fixed S3 XGA emulation bitmap rendering to correctly handle 8/16/32-bit pixel transfer I/O and update comments to reflect the 32-bit byte aligned transfer mode of the Trio chipset. This fixes incorrectly drawn radio buttons and 16x16 icons in Windows NT 3.5, Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0, and Windows 2000. (joncampbell123).
• Fixed keyboard emulation so that upon the keyboard reset command FFh, the keyboard does the reset process and THEN sends back bytes 0xAA (power on/reset OK) and 0x00 (interface self-test). This resolves the issue where Windows NT 3.1 pauses at startup and does not resume booting until you press a key on the keyboard. This also resolves the issue where Windows NT 3.5 keyboard and mouse input stops working completely if you press a key on the keyboard. (joncampbell123).
• Add Hercules InColor emulation of MDA vs CGA attribute select, and make sure it obeys the blink setting (joncampbell123)
• Change Hercules/MDA text output to render 9 pixels per char if the char9 setting is on, to match the 9x14 character cell that those cards emit to the screen. The user can always turn it back off to get the 8x14 text they’re probably accustomed to in other DOSBox forks. (joncampbell123)
• Render output fixed to never double pixels vertically on render if the machine type is emulating VGA and the Doublescan option is enabled, in order to help resolve SVGA text mode issues reported by ThomasKjoernes (joncampbell123)
• Add InColor CRTC registers and add code to emulate the planar bitplane operations. Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0 renders correctly now. (joncampbell123)
• Update Hercules InColor code to render the same 64-color EGA palette as machine=ega. (joncampbell123)
• Correct machine=hercules text rendering flaw that prevented the bright attribute (bit 3/7) from working, making all text output the same normal brightness. (joncampbell123)
• Add expected data structures and signatures to VGA ROM BIOS at C000:0000 if machine type selects ATI emulation (joncampbell123).
• Add ATI machine types, which at this time, is just a placeholder for development to go in that direction over time for those machine types. (joncampbell123)
• Added “machine=hercules_plus” and “machine=hercules_incolor” as stubs to be developed on going forward to emulate the HGC+ and InColor cards. Note that InColor will require the MCH_HERC case to generate 64-color EGA-like output going forward even if the documented stratup state still emulates the MDA-like monochrome attributes. (joncampbell123)
• SDL2: Stop checking for compiler flags that make it an error to declare variables after statements in a function or any other terrible sins that would offend old C89 standard compilers. DOSBox-X is never going to compile for a C standard that old. Furthermore this check is preventing compilation on ARM-based Macbooks for some reason, though not Intel based Macbooks.