First post, by ripsaw8080
- Rank
- DOSBox Author
Hi,
I recently purchased Glidos to play Tomb Raider from an original CD, and have been raiding mostly free of problems... just the occasional hang in the NTVDM process between levels. I think Glidos works pretty well, overall, for something that allows a game produced almost a decade ago to run on modern PCs. However, I ran into a show-stopper, and the short version of the story is that the redbook emulation in Glidos causes a crash for me later in the game. I realize this problem may not occur for everyone on every system config, but the cause does seem rational at face value, and I'm probably not the only one who will run into it. The testing I had to do to determine and verify this was complicated, so I warn you that this is a long explanation. I'll try to be as economical with the verbiage as I can.
My system is a P4 3.2ghz, 1gb RAM, Radeon 9800Pro 128mb, Audigy 2 ZS running Windows XP SP1. I'm using the 1.33rc5 version of Glidos and VDMSound 2.1.0 -- I also tried Glidos 1.32 and had the same problem.
There is a point during the game in Tomb Raider where you have a showdown with Larson in the last room of the Sanctuary of the Scion. Just as you enter this room, the ambient CD audio cuts off and stays off until you've moved on to the next level. At least it SHOULD stay cut off. With the redbook emulation in Glidos, you can hear it cut off as you enter the room, but it fairly quickly starts up again. This results in the audio track playing over the end-of-level screen and as the game starts to play the FMV called CANYON.RPL between levels. I guess playing redbook audio and a 30mb movie file from the CD at the same time is too much to ask, because the game crashes before the FMV starts. However, if the movie file is in disk cache the crash doesn't occur... more on that later.
I started the Glidos server with redbook emulation enabled, and instead of launching the game from there I manually opened a command window and issued the same commands as the Glidos batch file; this way I could see the game's error message after it crashed because the command window stays open. The message was "ERROR: Cannot initialise FMV player".
Using the manual command window again, I added SAPUCDEX to the startup commands with the redbook emulation in Glidos disabled. The CD audio cut off at the right point and stayed off until the next level started, and the crash did not occur. This jelly was not easy to pin to the wall because if you get past the crash by disabling redbook emulation, the crash does not subsequently occur if you immediately test again with the emulation enabled -- even though you do hear the CD audio mixed with the FMV audio. I had a hunch this was due to the FMV file being in the disk cache from the earlier success with emulation disabled. I put this to the test by ensuring the cache was cleared by restarting the OS before testing with the emulation enabled or disabled, and this supported my hypothesis.
To boil all of this down: it appears the redbook emulation in Glidos is missing a cue to keep the CD audio shut off at the particular section of the game that I described above, and the CD audio playback is causing the movie file to be unreadable from the CD unless that file happens to be in the cache (which it normally wouldn't be). SAPUCDEX does not miss the cue, whatever that cue may be.
I can provide a saved game file of the point in the game where the issue arises if necessary; and please let me know if there is something I can clarify from my description of the problem. Thanks.
