Phase 0 complete: DOS game boots to VPX link protocol on Windows 10

Baseline boot test under DOSBox-X confirms the emulation architecture
empirically. Key findings:

- Borland 32RTM/DPMI runtime works under DOSBox-X (risk retired).
- BTLIVE ships a version-mismatched BTL4.RES (1.0.1.2 vs EXE 1.0.1.4);
  BTRAVINE (1.1.0.6) is self-consistent and matches this repo's source
  (BTL4VER.HPP), so it is the development image.
- With the matched image the game boots through the resource check and
  BTL4Application construction, polls the RIO on COM1, then reads the
  VPX link at port 0x150, gets 0xffffffff, and fails rcv_protocol with
  'length 65535 too big' — the exact VR_COMMS.C path the plan predicted.

Adds emulator/baseline.conf (repro) and emulator/PHASE0-RESULTS.md.
Working binaries (dosbox-x/, image/) are git-ignored.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

This commit is contained in:

Cyd

2026-07-02 19:33:34 -05:00

co-authored by

Claude Fable 5

parent f7ebde2e0b

commit f680ed0585

4 changed files with 160 additions and 0 deletions

.gitignore

View File

@@ -1,2 +1,9 @@
 # Developer hard-drive dump — not part of the release tree
 /sda4/
 # Emulator working files (downloaded binaries, game image, captures)
 /emulator/dosbox-x/
 /emulator/image/
 /emulator/*.png
 /emulator/dbx_*.txt
 /emulator/screen*.png