Hey dave,

I have exactly the same problem with the exact configuration!!
I am just happy/sad to see that I am not the only one experiencing this problem on this configuration.

I hope these fine people can help us out.

If they give you the fix without letting me know, would you please mail it me at Equinox@mailbox.co.za.

I posted my problem same time you did.

I apologise for being weird.
Thanks
Clinton.

Hey Clinton,

Hmm... Sounds interesting. However I want to make it clear that I do have a VIA KT333 chipset on my MSI motherboard, and I mostly have problems with the graphics - not the sound.

I doubt I'm having a hardware problem, and I'm not sure about your problem. I'll let the question be answered by the more experienced people on here. 😀

David

Oh I see.

I have the AMD761 Chipset. I worded my thread wrongly then, cos I have jerky games too, unplayable to say the least. The sound in games is not that bad, only in impulse tracker ( a music creation program ).

I also doubt its hardware problem, maybe just incompatibility with VDMS.

All windows based games & stuff works great.

We'll await the reply.
Cheers Mate.

Clinton
South Africa

Try using SPEEDSET. It should go a long way toward resolving your problem.

Hey,

Thanks for that but I already had a slowdown program. This didn't turn out to work any better. Also, using speed setting 90 wouldn't work, speed setting of 85 would give a 200 error but a setting of 80 worked, at least in Jazz Jackrabbit.

Here are the games that struggle:

Keen 4 (and 5 maybe, haven't checked yet) : uses "IBM VGA standard", is there anything to do about this? Very jerky, especially graphics. All kinds of combinations with inbuilt "VESA support" toggle and the VESA support by the emulator fail to provide any better results.

Jazz Jackrabbit I (and II i guess) by Epic Megagames - also uses special resolution, something like 320x150? Not compatible with this emulator anyhow. Jerky, both sound and graphics.

Descent I - runs either terribly fast or jerky when slowing down.

Descent II - runs almost fine but when turning is slow and jerky.

Micro Machines 2 - starts TERRIBLY slow with music and sound disabled (otherwise it wouldn't start at all). Closes /locks up after a while.

Scream Tracker 2 (demo) - Closes /locks up after a while.

If you have any hints, I'd be glad to hear them. Thanks again! 😀

Best regards,
David

Clinton wrote:

Oh I see. […]
Show full quote

Oh I see.

I have the AMD761 Chipset. I worded my thread wrongly then, cos I have jerky games too, unplayable to say the least. The sound in games is not that bad, only in impulse tracker ( a music creation program ).

I also doubt its hardware problem, maybe just incompatibility with VDMS.

All windows based games & stuff works great.

We'll await the reply.
Cheers Mate.

Clinton
South Africa

Impulse Tracker should work just fine (out of the box) with the default VDMSound settings and everything, even on 120MHz machines (tested by yours truly). Just make sure to use "Run with VDMS" or, if using your own .pif file, turn "Idle Sensitivty" to lowest possible. Also, updating your soundcard drivers may or may not help (some drivers simply suck, and are unable to perform properly with the low latency thet VDMSound provides/requires). If you don't care too much about video/audio sync you can also increase sound buffering from 75ms to 750ms from LaucnhPad (or, if not using LaunchPad, edit VDMS.INI).

V.

I've Jazz Jackrabbit 1 (demo version) and Xmas Jazz to run smoothly with VDMSound. First, install the 5/2002 update for VDMSound. If you use the VDMS launchpad (recommended), under the "Performance" tab, check "Try to reduce CPU usage and set it to "Low Usage". Then, in Jazz Jackrabbit's soundcard set up, select the highest quality sound the gives you smooth performance. Also, for these games, don't use a slowdown utility. If you look around, you'll find a program (I use tppatch) that patches old turbo pascal programs to fix the divide by zero error that otherwise occurs on faster machines. No need to slow the computer down.

"edeldeb",

Thanks a lot! That sure helped. I don't know about the other programs yet though. About Jazz, the graphics still messes up on the bottom (320x40 area or so which is mostly equal to the graphics on the top of the screen). But apart from that, it runs very smooth now.

Although the tppatch.exe didn't help I found a similar program which is a TSR.

http://www.johndaileysoftware.com/download/in … 1&terms=220GWAR

"TP7P5Fix Turbo Pascal Runtime Error 200 Fix" is the file I used.

Cheers,
Dave 😀

Mate, unless that games takes up only half of the screen, it can't run at that resolution. (Monitors would puke it out.) If it's running at half-screen, it's because you haven't got the VESA checkbox on, and the program opened in a window to start. (Though that should only happen with ASCII games...)

In any case, edelbeb, thanks for the tip! I'm gonna go find that program and add it to Deep Thought's database.

I've got the same problem, on both my AMD Thunderbird 1.4Ghz, and my P3 600. Although it's working, it feels slow. Like the timing is off. The weird thing is if I alt-tab out, the timing goes normal for a few seconds, and then slows down again. So far, all that I've tried, really, is Lost Vikings and Star Control 2.

Unregistered wrote:

I've got the same problem, on both my AMD Thunderbird 1.4Ghz, and my P3 600. Although it's working, it feels slow. Like the timing is off. The weird thing is if I alt-tab out, the timing goes normal for a few seconds, and then slows down again. So far, all that I've tried, really, is Lost Vikings and Star Control 2.

For SC2 you have to use SPEEDSET (see thread on this forum). This Alt-tab in/out speed variation is symptomatic of an inherent Windows limitation with respect to DOS timer emulation. SPEEDSET can make that less visible.

V.

I hope you didn't read my post too quickly and realized it runs at 320x200 or so, but only the last 40 rows on the screen are messed up? Or it is running on 320x160 or similar... It's quite hard to tell. I just know it uses some uncommon resolution and it has worked fine before, of course, in DOS and Win3/9x. 😀

Dave

Dave, there are no "uncommon" resolutions.

VALID RESOLUTIONS (on a standard 4:3 monitor -- 16:9 and other strange ratio'd monitors use different resolutions, and excepting ASCII, which is just weird):
320x200, 320x240, 400x300, 512x384, 640x400, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x768, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1600x900, 1600x1024, 1600x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2048x1536. In the future there will be resolutions HIGHER than that, but there's nothing LOWER than that (except on older, non-PC systems -- Amigas, Commodores, Apples). "Sorry." I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps you should take a full-screen DOS screenshot using SnagIt 6 to find out what the resolution actually is (though I'm not sure the full-screen DOS capture mode works with either DPMI-enabled games or Windows 2000).

Snover,

Sure, I get your point. But again I do not know what kind of graphics it uses. I just remember that when I run it before from DOS it didn't use all of the monitor. And the picture looked more detailed... Talking about Jazz Jackrabbit here. Well, I might be mistaken, but I'm sure it didn't use all of the screen. It is possible that it used a 320x200 resolution and only used a 320x150 area of the screen, but again, I am not sure about that.

Anyhow, the real problem is that the graphics messes up on the bottom. That field is supposed to be the status bar I think, but there's no status bar there, just some iteration of graphics already seen on the display, with more or less garbage.

Also another game, Crystal Caves, from Apogee Software, has the status bar invisible. There's just a black line there. And if that wouldn't be enough Epic Pinball also has the exactly same problem (and jerks too).

I know there are some "real" SVGA emulators out there, such as UNIVBE, but are there any good free ones? Some games just want to struggle...

Dave

That's really odd, Dave. I've played Jazz Jackrabbit just fine on my box.
Perhaps you should get the patch from Epic that fixes the 200 runtime error instead of using tppatch (or related utility).

...unless what he's experiencing is related to the video chipset. I know some games crapped out in NT (*and* DOS) on my oild ATI Mach64 but work just fine on my Matrox G450, so if the games are using weird video modes then it's possible that the graphics chipset will make a hell of a difference.

V.

Snover wrote:

That's really odd, Dave. I've played Jazz Jackrabbit just fine on my box.
Perhaps you should get the patch from Epic that fixes the 200 runtime error instead of using tppatch (or related utility).

Hey, Vlad, register, dammit! 😉

All I know is that for the past few years I've run on nothing but nVidia GeForce cards (my first was a GeForce256, my next (current) is a GeForce3Ti500. Maybe I'll get a GF4 4600. Maybe.) Anyway, if you're using an exceptionally outdated video card, get a GF3. Nothing fancy, just the "plain" version. They're pretty cheap -- $119 or less.

MX440 shouldn't be too outdated... 😉 DDR memory too (edit: on the graphics card of course... doh! 😀).

And I do have newest drivers.

So I don't know... Anyhow I'm using XP Home if that explains anything.

Dave

P.S. Didn't find any working patch for Jazz Jackrabbit I or II. With the one patch that is supposed to work, I just get an error saying "the patch program couldn't find a suitable version of Jazz Jackrabbit to be patched" and won't let me enter any path or anything, just quits after that.

I could be wrong, but newer video cards lack support for some older fonts and modes used in some DOS games. My GeForce Ti200 works fine with Jazz Jackrabbit, but some fonts are fouled up in SimCity (original DOS - no sweat, I picked up the Windows version cheap) and some other games, and it does not correctly support the VESA mode used in Cyberia 2. Sounds like the MX440 does not fully support the VESA mode used in Jazz Jackrabbit. Anyone else out there with a MX440?