Glidos wrote:

Anyway, I have plans for 64bit. For ages I've been planning to add DOSBox support to Glidos, and I might have the time in the next month or so. It looks like I just have to add VDD support to DOSBox, and it'll all just work. I think it's worth the effort so that people can use the TRX textures and the stereo anaglyph support under 64bit OSs.

This is great news!! I wait with bated breath!! I haven't used a 32bit OS in a long time and I'm simply too lazy to dual boot, so I'm really looking forward to this. If you need any voluteers for testing than please count me in.

Among the many drawbacks of using TR1 in DOSBox is that you don't get to enjoy the music in the game. Will this feature still be available if you follow through with what you propose?

sean_skroht wrote:

Among the many drawbacks of using TR1 in DOSBox is that you don't get to enjoy the music in the game.

wrong

you can hear TR1 cdaudio track music in 0.73
and you can in 0.72 as well as long as you mount cdrom with -noioctl switch (under Vista 32bit)

gidierre wrote:

wrong

you can hear TR1 cdaudio track music in 0.73
and you can in 0.72 as well as long as you mount cdrom with -noioctl switch (under Vista 32bit)

So what you're saying then is that DOSBox supports the Tomb Raider Audio Pack that you can download from the Glidos website. Yes? If so, how? I didn't think it did.

You do realize that the music that was incorporated throughout the playstation version is missing in the PC version. The only thing that was included on the PC version was the main theme and ambient background sound effects.

I was reffering to the Audio Pack feature in Glidos and whether it will still be available if Glidos is made to work with DOSBox. I probably should have mentioned that in my other post.

My hope is that by adding VDD support to DOSBox, Glidos would run unchanged, so all the features would be as if running directly under XP's virtual DOS environment.

You may be able to get the extra audio tracks currently under DOSBox, but you'd need to burn a new CD with the extra tracks (and use the patched Tomb.exe of course).

sean_skroht wrote:

So what you're saying then is that DOSBox supports the Tomb Raider Audio Pack that you can download from the Glidos website. Yes?

not at all, it doesn't
I was only talking about the cdaudio tracks in the tr1 cdrom and nothing more.

I thought I would mention:

Just for the heck of it, I tried seeing if Glidos would work in Virtualbox on Windows 7 x64. Predictably, it didn't (though I still try whenever there is an upgrade).

However, the new version of Parallels (a virtualization software for the Macintosh) just came out, so I downloaded the demo (20-day limited), put it on my mac, installed XP, then Glidos, and it worked! The sounds, the textures, everything. And it's extremely smooth.

So if anyone has a mac and wants to run Tombraider 1 without using boot camp, just get Parallels 5. I'm going to try it with VMWare fusion (another virtualization product) when it comes in the mail.

Edit: Oh yes, I forgot to mention: there's the weird issue when you start that certain keys on the keyboard don't work, such as the enter key, so you can't start the game. However, if you let it play through the opening movies and then let it go to the demo, all the keys work and you can start the game. Probably something to do with the keyboard integration with Windows and the mac.

Amazing news. Nice one Slube.

Just in case it helps with your experiments: as far as I know, it's not actually Glidos that fails under x64; it's VDos32. Would your set up have run VDos32 under Virtualbox or just Glidos?

Also, under Parallels, where you using VDos32, or was TR running directly as a DOS program?

Would your set up have run VDos32 under Virtualbox or just Glidos?

Both. I'm confused about VDos32. Don't you need to run VDos32 to play Tombraider under Glidos?

Also, under Parallels, where you using VDos32, or was TR running directly as a DOS program?

It was with VDos32. I just installed it according to the instructions.

There are various bits to the whole Glidos package, each with their specific purpose.

Glide2x.ovl: when the Glide version of TR runs it expects to find a graphics card driver to which to send Glide commands. 3dfx always distributed a driver with their cards, and it would be a file with name Glide2x.ovl. The Glidos version of Glide2x.ovl, is a replacement for that driver. The replacement - rather than driving a graphics card - sends the Glide commands on to a special interface that a Windows program can pick up.

Glidos.exe: is the Windows program that picks up the Glide commands and renders to the screen accordingly.

VDos32: TR is a DOS program and hence can't run directly under Windows. XP has a special system called ntvdm that can run DOS programs. ntvdm doesn't manage to run TR under Vista, and sometimes it doesn't work so well under XP. VDos32 is a highly restricted replacement for ntvdm. It allows a particular type of DOS program to run under any 32bit version of Windows. But it uses techniques that aren't supported in 64bit Windows.

If you use some sort of virtual environment, you may have support for DOS programs and not need VDos32.

Thanks for the info. Yes, I was definitely using VDos32 in Parallels.

This is interesting. I went back to Virtualbox on XP, and turned off VDos32. When I ran the program, I got the error:

Offset: 0000b9b6.

However, when unticked the box that says Enable Glidos's VESA emulation, I actually got the Edios title screen for a second before the screen went black. Pretty exciting!

I wonder if it would work in Windows 98?

Well, that was less than successful. I tried installing windows 98 in virtualbox, but it errored out. However, "Windows 98 does not come with a driver which will work with the VirtualBox graphics card," according to the faq, so I doubt I would get a good result with it even if it did install correctly.

I can verify this also works on a macintosh using VMWare fusion, and while the controls don't seem to have a problem in the beginning the way Parallels did, it seems a little slow, though it's certainly playable.

I used VDos 32- it wouldn't work without it.

This is amazing stuff Slube. I wonder if any of these options would lend themselves to being prepackaged for download. A lot of people would struggle to set things up I think.

Do you mean packaging one of these products with Glidos?

I don't think it would be such an issue - if someone has a macintosh and wants to play games without rebooting, they probably have VMWare Fusion or Parallels anyway, so once that's up and running with the Windows system of their choice, installation of the program is exactly like on a PC.

Also, VMWare Fusion and Parallels are commercial products, as are the operating systems, so they have to be bought separately.

Incidentally, I ran Glidos on VMWare fusion under Windows 7 instead of XP, so that may have been why it's slower.

Vmware Player 3 supports 3D Acceleration the same as Workstation.

Don't think there's a ver of Vmware player for Mac tho.

I was unable to get Tomb Raider to work in VirtualBox, and while I'm certainly not an expert on the subject by any stretch of the imagination, I got the impression there were some components missing in its OpenGL implementaion that were required by Glidos. I'm not sure, maybe someone could shed some light on the subject.

But I did test out Glidos and Tomb Raider in VMWare Workstation 7.0 (for Windows) with Windows XP installed and it ran ok (used VDos32). Although 3D acceleration is much improved over VMWare Workstation 6.5, frame rates still drop considerably when you get to very large areas of the map. They can drop as low as 14 -15 FPS with a Core 2 Quad 6600. A mate of mine has a Core i7 920 and found that frame rates dropped down to about 24 FPS in those same areas while maintaining 30 FPS in most other areas. It was far more consistently playable for him than it was for me. Running Glidos and Tomb Raider in a virtualized environment is less than ideal but it'll do until Glidos can be made to work with DOSBox in a 64 bit OS.
I could dual boot but im not gonna setup a 32 bit partition just for Tomb Raider, which is the only piece of software that I have left that still doesn't work on a 64 bit OS yet.

It seems to me that VMWare Fusion and Parallels are just farther along than VirtualBox. They have been refining DirectX for a while now, whereas it still seems pretty experimental in Virtualbox. Eventually, I expect that VirtualBox will progress to the point where it will run fine. I'm already running other games on it, such as Age of Empires 1 and 2.

I have to disagree about virtualization being less than ideal. I think that's the best way to play Glidos - it has a tendency to kind of take over the computer, and I've noticed that if you minimize it, you can't get the video back. However, on the mac, I can minimize it, suspend it, and go in and out of fullscreen without a problem, so it's much more convenient.

As far as performance goes, it's staying at 27-30 fps (at least around Laura's home) and running very smoothly on a Mac Mini - 2.53 GhZ Core 2 duo, and the graphics are Nvidia Geforce 9400 256MB, so not anything amazing.

I think that because of the power of modern computers, as long as the virtualization software is advanced enough, that's the best way to run it, and I think that really points to the future of legacy software - no matter what new operating system comes along, as long as there's a program that's a good, faithful recreation of the old system, these programs should continue to run.

Correction from what I said before -

Using VMware Fusion, the game will boot without Vdos32, though the menu system is messed up, and I don't think the game runs. It is, however useful for remapping the keys, which is important because the Alt key, used for jumping, doesn't work reliably - not a keyboard issue, but I think a software one. It works for everything except the jumping while running, which of course, is pretty important! I changed jump to spacebar, and moved some other keys around.

OMG! VirtualBox is open source. That opens up all sorts of possibilities.