So Oracle released VirtualBox 5.0.0 and I thought I'd try running Blood on it.

The good:
Blood running at 125 FPS at 1280 x 1024 is kinda nice =]P

Didn't have any problems installing FreeDOS 1.1. I just installed everything available and made sure that the hard disk was bootable. Be sure to choose "Load FreeDOS including XMGR XMS-memory driver" at the boot menu and run Blood's setup.exe to reconfigure the sound card with an IRQ 5

The bad
• Having some problems with the midi-audio, so no music just yet. Probably just some setting.
• The old Cryptic.exe Runtime Error 200 has returned. TurboPascal programs would error out when running on computers faster than 200MHz. Successfully patched with PatchCRT.

Todo
• Mount an AudioCD for OST music tracks
• Haven't had a chance to do anything with the network settings to test BloodBath capabilities.
• Not sure if VirtualBox supports Glide emulation.

It would be great to finally break the dosbox bottleneck. I hope you keep us informed on your progress.

Changing from one bottleneck to another.

If it ups the average frame rate, I'll take it.

If you play with Daum's DOSBox rather than the official, you'll get more frames.

More, but not always enough!
If DustyStyx keeps reporting and the audio issues are fixable, FreeDOS shall be a no brainer. DOSBox is great, but Blood doesnt' like it at all.

Aye. Seems to me that the Build engine hates DOSBox. I'm having some troubles with Duke3D in there as well.
Only problem for me though, FreeDOS is a pita to install. Sure, you can run it in VirtualBox but you still must install it proper.

Well, the nice thing about VirtualBox is that we can distribute a harddrive image that is preconfigured to run Blood. You'd just have to move things over from your GoG distribution or original CD.

Sorry for the delay in audio updates. The SourceForge and the FreeDOS website hosted on it has been down all weekend and I forgot to bring the ISO home with me.

That's really neat though

Finally got FreeDOS installed on my home laptop.
For some reason FreeDOS.org has been down for a few days, but I found the FreeDOS iso (fd11src.iso) on an ibiblio mirror

So my laptop has a resolution of 1600x900 which fits the 1152x864 resolution rather well, but the in game cut-scenes end up messing with the video rendering when it switches between resolutions. The other high resolutions (1024x768 and 1280x1024) both seem to transition between cut-scene and game-play just fine.

There is also a FPS hit when running on an AMD A8 APU vs the Intel i5 of my bench workstation. Generally I'm getting 60-128 FPS on the A8 and 125-300 FPS on the i5

I've still not been able to get either the MIDI or AudioCD tracks to play. The SoundBlaster 16, MIDI issue seems to be an old one that has yet to be addressed. I've not fully explored the other Audio Controllers available (IHC AC97, or the Intel HD Audio), but it's getting late so perhaps tomorrow.

Don't worry about taking some time. You are doing more than enough just by sharing your experiences. Thank you! A whole lot.

Yes indeed.

well, music seems to be a bust (both MIDI and CD)
The SoundBlaster emulation is supposed to have some MIDI support, but I can't seem to get it to manifest.

I tried creating an audio CD disc image and then mount that with Windows or some of the other CD image software (SlySoft, Magic ISO), but VirtualBox didn't want to recognize that either.

Playing Blood without music isn't the worst thing in the world, but it did put a dampener on productivity.

So VirtualBox 5.1.0 dropped the other day.

I was really hopeful because the release notes said that they had reworked the audio. Unfortunately, no. Noooope. Nada!

Not only is MIDI still broken, somehow they broke something else and normal sound has a really bad echo.

Maybe Oracle will fix it in the future, but stick to the 5.0.x series for now.

Anyway, I put together an OVA of Shareware BLOOD on FreeDOS. If anyone wants to give it a go, PM me.