GP2 Forum

Did anyone ever try FreeDOS for gp2? Its a full operating system not emulation like dosbox. I wouldn't mind trying it if I can figure it out

Funny you should ask, I currently have a project where I'm trying to build a DOS PC to test GP2 and ICR2.

The PC is old enough to support the original MS DOS 6.22 (it's a workstation from 2006) but there are still big issues and they're all about the sound.

Internal Realtek sound is not supported by DOS so you need a sound card. I have Sound Blaster Live! PCI card, (no old ISA slots on the PC) . Based on my research it's pretty much impossible to get it to work in FreeDOS. There are no working drivers.

This is why I went for MS DOS. Creative has drivers for this sound card for MS DOS 6.22. They are emulation drivers, that should run the card as Sound Blaster 16, that is supported by DOS. The drivers load ok and DOS recognizes the card but it gets assigned on port 1000, which is NOT found by GP2 or any other games because standard ports for Sound Cards in DOS should be 220, 240 etc.

Trying to change the port in autoexec.bat or in cmd doesn't do anything. I don't know if the emulation somehow fails or if my bios somehow overdrives the port assignment.

I guess the next step is to try Windows 98, which should have better support. I wanted to avoid that but at the moment other roads look like dead ends.

Even if there are alternative ways to get sound, I still need the sound card to work because it has a game port. The whole idea is to use my old Thrustmaster wheel from 1998 with this rig.

FreeDOS is nice because you can boot it from USB, it's got better support for modern hardware etc, also GP2 runs just fine. However, you have to disable sound

Long story shot: Everything is incredibly hard

Nice, I'd love to see how it compares with dosbox emulation. It might be a reverse placebo but dosbox never felt 100% right to me. I could be totally wrong though.

Some people seem to be reporting that QEMU and VirtualBox VM's have soundblaster emulation which is compatible with FreeDOS. Knowing now that the game works I might pursue the QEMU route and hope it works. First I need to figure out how to actually use it.

Did you happen to try SBEMU at all?

GP2tifoso28 wrote: ↑

17.08.2025, 14:11

Nice, I'd love to see how it compares with dosbox emulation. It might be a reverse placebo but dosbox never felt 100% right to me. I could be totally wrong though.

This is what I'm after as well. I always felt a slight input lag on DOSBox, that's no longer there when you run the game natively on x86GP2. That made me wonder if the lag is from DOSBox emulation or controller input. So I'm very curious to see how it is with no emulation in between.

Same thing with IndyCar Racing 2

GP2tifoso28 wrote: ↑

17.08.2025, 14:11

Did you happen to try SBEMU at all?

Not yet but I will. I found out that the Sound Blaster does not work because my pc doesn't have a proper southbridge. However the game port might still work. So if I'd get the Sound Blaster game port working and then sound with SBEMU, that would be it.

Fingers crossed, but so far absolutely nothing has been straight forward so not too optimistc

Hopefully you get lucky with it . I was happy with ECE when I used windows but after I switched to Linux I found that ECE was discontinued and completely removed from all the repos. I found the source code for the Linux version but its way above my competency level to compile it.

I checked your video about dosbox staging which like ECE runs the Sim at the proper speed but on Linux its only available with snaps or flatpak (which I don't like) so I'm pretty keen to give FreeDOS a try instead. I already got the windows variant of ece running in wine but it feels off to how I remembered it. Worse yet its a dosbox window inside a pseudo-windows wine window inside a wine window inside Linux. I can't figure out Wayland and xorg is on the verge of being completely phased out by many of the mainline distros. it turns into a headache real quick especially when you don't know what you're doing.

Worst case scenario I'll have to use the staging flatpak. I'll try it out when I get around to it, hopefully FreeDOS with QEMU or SBEMU will do the trick for me . The only other downside is I don't think the common utilities will work (gp2edit and so on)