Hi! a question of raine for DOS

[Tux]

Well in my case this pc doesn't have any isa port, so this was not an option !

What is sure is that it was the end of creative, at this point soundcards started to be merged in the motherboards, except for some very specific uses.

No problem for the delay, this thing has probably been here for years before being noticed... !

I made a few more tests on my end because we still have seal sources to compare, I thought it was just a simple timeout problem with the dsp, but no luck, it doesn't fix anything for now. It's extremely hard to debug some low level stuff on dos, especially when you are used to work with higher level stuff as we are today... ! An interesting problem anyway, I'll probably try again later... !

[Tux]

Apparently it's the irq handler which is never called !

Which is totally insane because djgpp doesn't evolve a lot, I mean the way to install an irq handler has probably not changed at all in the 20 last years, so you can wonder if this code ever worked with djgpp actually ?

It's a total nonsense...

The problem is that it's a critical place of the code of course, so it's not an easy fix... !

[Tux]

I finally understood the problem, at least for my setup : it's just some crappy sb16 emulation software by creative which eats the interrupts when in protected mode (the program itself is not in protected mode, so any protected mode handler is very likely just ignored).

I lost 2 days because of seal, but seal doesn't use its interrupt handler at all in fact, it's here just to be sure sound is updated that's all, it just acknowledges the interrupts without doing anything else.

That also explains why it worked in pcem and not on some real hardware : on pcem the sb16 is directly emulated and not by some crappy software by creative which doesn't know a thing about protected mode !

So to sum up : this card is just badly supported in dos, that's all.

Now I don't know the details of all the configurations out there, if someone can test this on an isa soundcard later, he is welcome to, but normally it should work !

Sorry to have doubted of allegro, it wasn't their fault this time !

[Robert]

I've downloaded both version 0.96.6 from your site, and version 7 from the link in this thread. I copied everything over to the DOS machine. When I tried to run it I got an error.

I downloaded the required dpmi file, and then it (version 6) started up.

My soundcard is a Creative CT2230 (Sound Blaster 16).

i had a bunch of weird errors/crashes/freezes but then I found I had chosen the wrong sound driver in Raine.

After using the Soundblaster 16 driver, got sound but I had to choose "Max Mixer Volume" in order to hear anything.

I tried wakuwak7 it loaded up about halfway the screen went strange and Raine froze. It might be because the machine only has 64MB RAM, which is all that normal DOS supports. How much RAM does Raine need?

mspacmab works ok, but instead of 1 to start the game I have to press V.

 

version 7 (seal) makes almost no sound and it sounds wrong.
 

[Tux]

76 Mb for wakuwak7 (+ the emulator). Theoretically there is a message when you run out of memory, but sometimes the dos prefers to just crash like that, tss.... !

Thanks for the test anyway, it's enough to say the normal version should work in most reasonable setups, with the seal version as a last resort in case of problem.

And if both don't, well give up the dos !

Actually you can have any amount of ram in dpmi in dos, but it becomes a little special to configure if it's more than 256 Mb of ram. It's probably limited to 4 Gb for the 32 bits limit, but you'll never need that much. I have tested with 512 Mb using PCem, and it works !

[Robert]

This machine only has 2 memory slots, so I added a 128MB simm, which the bios recognised (total of 192MB).

But trying to run wakuwak7 still blew up halfway through loading (file 000-lo.lo)

First attempt caused the computer to reboot, 2nd attempt did the same as earlier (screen goes weird and computer froze).

Seriously though, I doubt I'll ever use the DOS version for anything apart from doing tests for you.

I'll be here for another 2-3 days, so let me know if you want any other tests done.

[Tux]

18 minutes ago, Robert said:

This machine only has 2 memory slots, so I added a 128MB simm, which the bios recognised (total of 192MB).

But trying to run wakuwak7 still blew up halfway through loading (file 000-lo.lo)

First attempt caused the computer to reboot, 2nd attempt did the same as earlier (screen goes weird and computer froze).

Seriously though, I doubt I'll ever use the DOS version for anything apart from doing tests for you.

You might have a hardware problem then, I just tested with 128 Mb and 192 Mb on pcem (virtual pentium2-300 gigabyte motherboard), and the game runs fine in both configurations (slight cracking of sound during neogeo intro though, sound sync is a lot worse in dos than in windows or linux, and it's even worse if using seal).

Yeah you need a fast cpu to handle that much ram otherwise it becomes a real pain.
What dos lacked : hardware accelerated drivers, maybe it could have been done but microsoft preferred to kill it. It's better to leave it dead now, unless being obliged to use it, there are much better alternatives now...

But thanks again for the tests !