Hi everyone,
I’m currently trying to get the Abandonware version of Warcraft 2 to run on RetroArch 1.7.2 with its current DosBox core, on Windows 10 64bit.
The DosBox configuration I wrote runs the game flawlessly on the current standalone DosBox executable.
So I decided to install the DosBox core and make a RetroArch playlist file which uses an absolute path to point to the game’s working DosBox configuration.
The core was being loaded and the playlist correctly ran the DosBox config file. And since the config file uses absolute paths, too, all the needed disk paths and iso images were correctly mounted.
So, when ran via RetroArch, Warcraft 2’s executable was found on its mounted disk, and in turn correctly found its mounted CD and started up…
BUT: it then complained about missing VESA /graphic driver support. 
Warcraft could not find a VESA video driver. Type UVCONFIG from the command line before running War2. You will only need to do this once. If you still have problems, try loading the VESA driver provided with your video card or contact your video card manufacturer for a VESA driver.
And when I ran UVCONFIG from Warcraft 2’s folder I got this:
In order for this program to be able to function correctly with your video card, it requires a VESA VBE SuperVGA BIOS implemenation to be installed. Please install the VESA VBE driver that came with your video card before attempting to run this program again.
Your VESA driver will be a program called VESA.EXE, VVESA.EXE or something similar and will be located in your video cards driver utilities directories. If you dont have a proper VESA VBE driver, please contact SciTech Software as we may have a suitable TSR for your video card.
But I couldn’t find a V(V)ESA.exe in the drive paths available to the DOS environment created by the core.
So I tried other suitable settings for the graphics card in the DosBox config file. Normally
[dosbox] machine=svga_s3
works fine, but I also tried vesa_oldvbe, vesa_nolfb, svga_paradise, svga_et4000, svga_et3000 and vgaonly as values for machine.
And I combined those values with each of RetroArch’s video drivers which run on my PC, namely gl, d3d11, d3d12 and d3d9. (I saved RA’s config and restarted RA after every change).
But, I couldn’t get it working.
I even tried Warcraft 2’s whole setup process from within RetroArch (I just fed the already setup game into RA before). And the setup ran fine. The mouse worked. It got music and sound settings right. And it looked really nice with a pixel shader. But it also failed nicely at determining a suitable video driver.
So, is there any way for me to get this up and running? Has anyone here had any experience in getting the DosBox core working with games which rely on VESA drivers?
Or is it just not possible for this RetroArch core to support VESA?
