MS-DOS on the Amiga #DOScember

i'm sure most of you will be familiar with a bit of software called win uae that's an amiga emulator for your windows pc but since we're in the middle of december how about a pc emulator for an amiga i found a little bit of software online called pc task that claims to do just that so that's what we're going to do today let's see if we can emulate a pc on this omega 1200 pc task comes as two adfs and the first thing we need to do is write those to a couple of old floppies so this is my main omega 1200 we're using today it's got the aca 1233n accelerator in it 128 mega ram and that 03 processor clocked at 40 megahertz also running os 3.9 on this machine but pc task supposedly works on any version of a meager operating system and yes my real-time clock battery has obviously died it's not keeping the time settings anymore so for writing these adfs i use a little bit of software called ts gui this is incredibly simple to use just select the disk drive you can either create an adf from the disk that's in there all you need to do is enter here where you want to save it and click this to file but we're doing it the other way around writing file to disk let's browse to our adfs which are on dh2 and then this drawer and there we are let's select the first one and write file to disk and what do you know we have a bad disc so believe it or not both of these discs are bad just one of the problems i suppose of aging floppy disks they don't last forever and the ben let's try these ones so select dfo as our adf selected there file to disk that's much better both desks i've wrote correctly now put the first one back in let's get pc task installed i'm going to install it on that dh2 and in the app store which programs do you wish to install pc task or pc task turbo let's install them both sir a bit of good old-fashioned disc swapping do you wish to install the leave slow fast program this program is useful to get more memory when you have a machine with 512 chip on 512 fast ram it sounds to me like it's talking about an omega 500 i don't think that really applies to us here on the 1200 we have any amount of memory in this machine i'm just going to click no do you wish to install the hard file.device this is needed if you wish to access a pc drive which you have created for pc task from omega dos i suppose we'll install that do you wish to install the ms-dos utils directory this directory contains some useful utilities which will come in handy why not and that is it so it should be in here and there it is read me first so from what i'm seeing here i get the impression that pctask is expecting us to have perhaps a slightly beefier amiga than what i have sitting on the bench i don't think we're going to be installing windows be that windows 3 3.1 or 3.11 or whatever because i don't think our little amiga is anywhere near powerful enough using a mouse with windows it doesn't really apply to us super vga modes under windows i would say there's no chance we're getting into any super vga modes third-party graphics cards don't have any of those in my amiga yeah just a generic readme file let's just jump in to the software so presumably what it's doing here is it can make our drive df0 drive a for the emulated computer on df1 which i don't have would be drive b so let's get rid of that hard drive c on d suppose we'll have to create a hard disk file enter name dos seems as good as any to me and what will make it 40 megabytes so i sort of expected that to fill that in there for us it didn't um dos that's what we called hard file right processor 286 or 8086 i think we'll just start with that graphics adapter that's on cga i can do ega vga super vga super vga 1meg 2meg mda let's just leave it on cga for now advanced video options so this is where we're going to set the screen mode that the amiga would be in it wants to use pal 640x256 let's just let it do that don't really need serial or parallel but let's emulate sound on com2 mouse why not priorities i'm just going to leave that as it is conventional memory 640. extended memory we have piles and piles of memory and this amiga so let's give it a total of what 8 megabytes so that would be no seven five five two that's right doesn't it plus six forty maybe eight megabytes i think we'll see if this configuration and um start this looks pretty cool so pc task version 3.1 copyright quite an old program isn't it 92.95 my chris hems this does say it's a commercial product but to the best of my knowledge anyway it has been released free to the amiga community right processor 8086 memory extended memory zero strange did we not set extended memory drive as dfo drive b unavailable drive c is dos hard drive d is unavailable so what's it looking us to do you should insert a bootable system 720k or 1.44 meg if you have a high density drive i don't have that so we need to find a bootable ms-dos disk unbearable 720k ams dos disk that's not supplied with pc tasks if you have a pc you can use it usually create a disk blah blah blah right so we're going to need to try and find a 720k bootable ms-dos disk and it just so happens that in our little box of disks i just happen to have this ms-dos 3.3 720k disk this is an old aloe very software library disk let's see if this will work now normally the amiga just will not read that and certainly if we look here dfo unreadable let's run pc tasker and let's say if it will boot off that disk there we go so it did try to read there on nothing press a key oh that's reading there we are ms ms-dos version 3.3 enter a new date this is friday the 18th of december oh no it's american isn't it month first and year and time is currently it's getting lit and there we are microsoft ms-dos version 3.3 can we list the directory of the floppy yeah no problem i am impressed just how simple that was to get working right what are we going to do i suppose we have that hard file wonder can we fdisk it right can we create a dos partition prime right you want to use the maximum size yep that was quick system will now restart right can we access that c drive volume and drive c has no level um what can we do check desk c non-bootable dos desk of course it is because we have not formatted it format c and let's copy system across right format complete and what it's telling us we have about 30 odd megabytes available don't really know why it's not giving us the full 40 megabytes that we allocated unless of course our pc task is taking some of that for its own use 33 megabytes is still loads for what we're going to be doing today right see formatted and there is command.com let's see if i can boot to it so we'll remove that disk rate omega and delete to exit out of the software let's just run it again and let's see if it will boot yep put it upstream away i am absolutely astonished by just how simple this is to set up so what are we gonna do i suppose i need to get some software across onto this machine but i'm going to have to write 720k dos disks so i suppose i'll need to use some more of my old omega demo disks um we'll write them on one of my other machines need to go get some software though back in a minute so i just have another old omega demo disc and we're going to be writing them using the hm systems menstrual workstation 286 but we need to format that disk first of all because it's an omega disk i can't read it on this pc so format a and it is slash f colon 720 and another bad disc that's quite a few out of that box i bought a box of old omega desks off gumtree a while back and uh seems quite a few of them are bad let's try another one and another one what is going on here third time's lucky finally good disk okay i think we only really need one disk and there is one thing i want to copy across first of all and that is lem60 the benchmarking tool let's just copy the executable because that will give us some idea of what speed our emulated pc is running at and then we'll get an idea of what sort of software we can put on it right let's run pc task and see what sort of performance we're getting in fact you know what let's copy that lm60 executable across to our c drive and i've created a little folder called b marks benchmarks right let's see what this runs like that's not particularly fast and this computer performs like a four megahertz a t at least our sound emulation is working obviously emulating a pc speaker and just coming out of the left channel so cpu type oh look at that move the mouse and our cpu performance takes a bit of a dive cpu type nec v20 that must be an 8086 clone of some form and cpu clock finally it reads that as 8 megahertz i really don't understand why but computer performance 4 megahertz i think the long and short of this is that any software we're going to try and run here it's going to have to be very early pc stuff let's just try this actually pc task turbo i wonder is this any faster so all the same settings yeah i suppose it is marginally faster about what point four point five of a megahertz quicker at least now when we're moving the mouse about and staying above four just out of interest you change that to the two at six processor yeah it's more or less exactly the same marginally slower video performance is more or less identical okay let's turn off that sound well because that is kind of annoying right so software we need to look for is going to have to be very early pc stuff so games nothing better than that i'm going to pick a few stick them on our virtual hard drive and we'll see how they run while looking for some software to try on our emulator i actually stumbled across a 720k version of ms-dos version 5. and it's actually a commodore release of it quite fitting for this little machine so just installing that now and that should give us a slightly more familiar dos looking environment it's a new day the sun is shining so let's try out a few old schemes on our amiga so i've settled on this setup here we're going to go with the 286 processor and that's just so that we can have the extended memory and for the graphics adapter ega i think is just the nice balance for what we're trying to do ms-dos version 5 distributed by commodore is installed and i've got a few games tetris off-road foul play cauldron alley cat impact those are all older games maybe not so much impact but certainly those first few and then a few other ones just to see if we can push our luck a wee bit with this system duke that's the first duke nukem commander kane won on commander king four and the monkey island demo i've never actually played the monkey el demo but let's start at the top of our list with tetris and this is the original tetris the one out of russia copyright academy soft ccas ussr moscow and i think we'll go with the easiest level man this is running fine so if anything we have created a pretty good original tetris emulator not much to say it's tetris right what else i forgot funny how it changed the attacks to blue have it off-road oh and we have different versions here now we can try and run i think we'll just start at the top ibm pc xt so this is essentially a moon patrol clue no sound in this version of the game because this is just like a demo version and i blew up but it's running really well for what it is and um the scrolling is nice and smooth the background does flicker a wee bit but it does that anyway on um even my 286 system all very good so far what else have we got foul play this is like a frogger clue so we're going to have music absolutely oh what's this string formula 2 complex not address blah blah this game does not seem to work hi boat uh alicott running fine in fact it's over here it's maybe running a little too well really who has electric heaters and a fish tank and i got bald bad dog let's see if we can get a mouse yeah game is running really well so think of anything what we've created here is a pretty decent xt clone inside our omega 1200 but for what it is look i am super super impressed now the other older game is cauldron or black cauldron should i say that maybe seems a bit slow our graphics are not the best to say the least what's he doing glitching out right let's just see if we can even walk in the door come on what is it f6 i think yep open the door one other options do we have i can try changing the graphics mode yeah that maybe looks a bit better doesn't it i would say that's more cga the other one was trying to do ega but um this wasn't working right we could try changing the sentence of the graphics adapter that we're trying to emulate maybe make that vga and see if that improves what we're looking at here never really played this game so don't really know what i'm doing but it does seem to be run fine so how about something a little more taxing impact this is like a breakout clone and we can run impact c for cga version or impact e for the ega let's try impact e hey that looks good oh yeah so not without problems when we die there what i think is supposed to happen is your paddle is supposed to go through the screen like that but then it's supposed to clear that again you know there is a slightly more recent version of this pc task software this is version 3.1 and i did find a version 4.4 but it only seems to want to emulate a 46 cpu and that's the reason why i didn't bother trying it here because let's be honest there's no chance we're going to accurately emulate 46 on this amiga check nick him i can't see it run on this well it's loading that sort of works oh dear is it slow it works it does sort of that's completely unplayable and i dare say the problem is that the graphics are not getting updated fast enough let's see if it blows up there we are every frame of animation perfectly detailed one by one i know you're not going to get me doing a chick nick impersonation i'll leave that to lgr i've got a bit of commander keen let's try commander keen one ega card detected and graphical corruption in fact that looks very familiar to the problem that we had with the commander king games on the 286. the game i suppose is rolling here it's just um we can't see what we're doing so that probably goes to show that the graphics implementation here in this emulator is just not perfect let's finish off with a bit of monkey island there oh well the monkey and demo anyway which i've never actually played as the man himself all i ever wanted was to be a parrot guy brush 3 brood this is really going to be pushing our luck here though it's bound to be looking for a considerably faster machine than what we are emulating here yeah this is going on a snail's piece but i'm i'm surprised it is wrong i mean it's running just really slowly oh that's that's so awesome it really is oh my goodness hi hi awesome done shall pass this is so painfully slow let's go to the scum bar can we get in can we make it into the scum bar oh i've asked it to scroll lavender there it goes i need to open the door come on then we go eventually very cool i'm genuinely very impressed that this is even running look let's be honest here this was just for a bit of fun but suppose that's it if you want to emulate an xt class ibm you can do it sort of on an amiga 1200 with an o3o accelerator yeah this was just for a laugh really but it can't be done and the emulation is actually really good if anyone has used this pc task software before and perhaps with a more powerful amiga please let me know how you get on with it i dare say this software's intention is for a business environment maybe with an amiga 2000 something like that and giving you the ability then to run ms-dos applications not games but if you want to run some early games such as alicat here it does work fine well that's it for now thank you very much for watching if you enjoyed this video i would appreciate a thumbs up as it does really help the channel why not subscribe if you haven't done so already and i'll see you next time it's crushed you

Channel: CRG

Views: 6,233

Rating: 4.9887323 out of 5

Keywords: Amiga, PC-Task, pc task, A1200, MS-DOS

Id: VIjRT3yWTDA

Length: 34min 25sec (2065 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020