Files

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CydandClaude Fable 5 e13575d3ac Phase 2: FIFO transport working + RIO validated on real hardware

RIO (Phase 5) validated with real hardware: with a physical RIO on
COM1 and serial1=directserial realport:COM1, the game's 1996 RIO
driver talks to the board — the 'RIO never came back' error is gone
and expected activity was seen on the RIO board.

VPX FIFO fast path decoded (OUTSW.ASM + capture): after i860 boot the
render protocol pumps 16-bit words to a FIFO data port seen as
0x154/0x155 byte writes, payload starting with the 4-byte action. The
device now extracts FIFO message actions (confirmed vr_init=0 with the
args string, vr_create=1 with node type 0x2D) and echoes replies with
handler-specific overrides from board source VR_REMOT.C (init/statistics
reply action = 1).

Blocked on one unknown: velocirender_sync checks the init reply against
a constant that is neither 0 nor 1, so the Rel 4.10 board differs from
the DPL3 dev source. Needs the Rel 4.10 LIBDPL source or disassembly of
BTL4OPT.EXE at the format string (file offset 0x107772). Device has a
VPX_INIT_REPLY experiment hook for candidate values.

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

2026-07-02 23:41:49 -05:00

README.md

Phase 1 complete: captured VPX boot conversation from shipped binary

2026-07-02 22:46:20 -05:00

vpxlog.cpp

Phase 2: FIFO transport working + RIO validated on real hardware

2026-07-02 23:41:49 -05:00

README.md

VPX device — DOSBox-X integration

Our original source for the emulated Division VPX link adapter. Kept here under version control because the DOSBox-X source tree itself (emulator/src/, ~490 MB) is git-ignored.

vpxlog.cpp — Phase 1 logging device. Impersonates the INMOS C012 link adapter at I/O base 0x150, answers status reads so the game keeps transmitting, and logs every access to $VPXLOG. (Phase 2 will grow this into a responding transputer-monitor + i860-loader + frame-stream renderer, or fork into a separate vpx.cpp.)

Applying to a DOSBox-X source checkout

Tested against DOSBox-X v2026.06.02, MSYS2 mingw64.

Copy the device in:

cp emulator/vpx-device/vpxlog.cpp  emulator/src/src/hardware/vpxlog.cpp

Add it to the hardware build — in src/src/hardware/Makefile.am, append vpxlog.cpp to libhardware_a_SOURCES (we inserted it after glide.cpp).
Call the init — in src/src/gui/sdlmain.cpp, declare void VPXLOG_Init(); next to the other *_Init() prototypes and call VPXLOG_Init(); right after GLIDE_Init(); in the machine bring-up sequence.

Build:

cd emulator/src
./build-mingw-sdl2 --enable-debug=heavy

Output: src/src/dosbox-x.exe.

Running

set VPXLOG=C:\VWE\TeslaRel410\emulator\vpxlog.txt
emulator\src\src\dosbox-x.exe -conf emulator\capture.conf
python emulator\analyze_capture.py

With VPXLOG unset the device is inert and the build behaves like stock DOSBox-X.