Mr Jim wrote:

I like to steal games instead of paying the people that worked so hard to produce them. Since I'm an unregistered user I probably didn't see the clause in the user agreement that forbids these kinds of inquiries. That was silly of me and I promise I'll never ever do it ever again.

*ROFL* 😁

Snover the admin strikes again!

As a note, if UNIVBE does not work for you, then you may wish to try a program known as univesa. It seems to work on occassion. To use it, simply switch to a full-screen command promt in Windows, then start it with univesa, then run the program. If the screen goes wacko after you start univesa, the prompt is still running, just start the game - it should work. Good Hunting

UNIVESA works in WINDOWS 2000/XP?

I don't think so!

You must prove this!

Tell us more!

BESIDES, if it even does work, UNIVESA does not support most new video cards! The original version only supported:

1    - ATI Technologies 18800, 28800
2    - Ahead A & B
3    - Chips & Technologies 82c451/452/453
4    - Everex
5    - Genoa Systems GVGA
6    - OAK Technologies OTI-037C, OTI-067, OTI-077
7    - Paradise PVGA1A, WD90C00/10/11/30/31
8    - NCR 77C20/21/22E
9    - Trident 88/8900
10    - Video7 V7VGA versions 1-5
11    - Tseng Labs ET3000, ET4000
12    - AcuMos AVGA2
13    - S3 86c911/924/801/805/928
14    - Advance Logic AL2101 SuperVGA
15    - MXIC 86010 SuperVGA
16    - Primus 2000 SuperVGA
17    - RealTek 3106 SuperVGA
18    - Cirrus CL-GD 5422 SuperVGA

And, if you are referring to this, this man does not know what he is talking about!
http://linetap.com/www/drg/SPCamo-SPinXP.htm

And UNIVESA is made by the same company as UNIVBE, and is the OLDER version! So there!

Schadenfreude, it is quite possible that 'Unregistered' had not read the entire thread and thought we were discussing a DOS-based version of Windows.

A side-effect of "casual posting".

I recently found a nice walkaround for VESA 2.0 incompatible DOS-Games, :>
the Glide Wrapper dgVoodoo supports Glide DOS/Win and VESA 2.0 Emulation, I tried to get Hight-Res Mode in Tie-Fighter with this and it works very well.

The only Thing that troubles is, that it must be ran via a Batch-File coz it won't start out of VDMSound's Autoexec.bat Emulation...

Sry for my bad English, I'm out of school for a time now...

Sorry to bump such an old thread, but I'm interested in knowing if anyone has recently been able to run Tie Fighter Collector's CD-ROM (DOS) with General MIDI music. It seems that the starter of this thread was able to, over three years ago.

For the past few hours I've been trying various combinations of VDMSound 2.10 configurations to get it working, but it always hangs after the "DOS4GW Protected run-time" text or when testing music in the sound setup. It shouldn't be a hardware problem, because it occurs on two very different configurations (dual-core Pentium + Radeon 9550 + integrated audio vs Athlon XP + GeForce 6200 + SB Live!) and System Shock works just fine with VDMSound's General MIDI. My operating system is WinXP Pro SP2.

PS. DOSBOX is still too slow (or Tie Fighter too heavy or my computer not fast enough) to run Tie Fighter at the high resolution mode smoothly.

edit1: The high resolution mode works fine with a GeForce 6200 without Dosbox. With an ATi Radeon 8500LE I just got a garbled mess.

edit2: This is weird. I can get the game running with MIDI, albeit a bit randomly. It usually doesn't hang at the dos4gw text screen when the following conditions apply:

* run the game through install.exe
* "Enable basic VESA support" is checked
* "Try to reduce CPU usage" is unchecked
* The "Try to reduce CPU usage" slider is at the right edge (Med. usage)

If I run the game through tie.exe with the same settings, it hangs. Same happens if I run it though install.exe, but with VESA support disabled or CPU usage lowered. When the game hangs at the dos4gw text screen, CPU usage is 100% until I kill the process.

This is problematic, because setting "Try to reduce CPU usage" to Low usage is crucial for unstuttering sound, music, animation, and input.

If I disable General MIDI from the game setup, none of these cause any problems! I can run the game though install.exe or tie.exe, "Try to reduce CPU usage" works fine, VESA support doesn't need to be enabled, etc. 😕

I compared the logs generated by VDMS. I ran the game with working settings, then I ran it after switching on "Try to reduce CPU usage". The only difference is that the MIDIplayer garbage collector thread is created a tiny bit later () on the non-working configuration:

@I - 08:41:10.694 - MIDIPlayer
Garbage collector thread created (handle = 0x00000168, ID = 3448)
@I - 08:41:10.744 - VDMServicesProvider
Created DOS process (0x105b, 'C:\WINNT\system32\KB16.COM')
@I - 08:41:10.744 - VDMServicesProvider
Created DOS process (0x11d9, 'C:\GAMES\TIECD\INSTALL.EXE')

compared to

@I - 08:41:38.323 - VDMServicesProvider
Created DOS process (0x105b, 'C:\WINNT\system32\KB16.COM')
@I - 08:41:38.333 - VDMServicesProvider
Created DOS process (0x11d9, 'C:\GAMES\TIECD\INSTALL.EXE')
@I - 08:41:38.333 - MIDIPlayer
Garbage collector thread created (handle = 0x00000168, ID = 3580)

The non-working configuration terminates at:

@I - 08:41:42.913 - VDMServicesProvider
Terminated DOS process (0x2acd)

while the working configuration goes on from that with:

@I - 08:41:14.918 - MPU401Controller
MPU-401 Switched to UART mode
@I - 08:41:15.053 - MIDIPlayer
MIDI-out device opened (handle = 0x020954a8)
@I - 08:41:25.647 - MPU401Controller
MPU-401 reset
... and so on.

I've attached both logs to this post. I hope someone else has some insight into this. 😢