Thanks for another awesome release (running on Win7 x64)! Nice to get everything back up to par as it was on WinXP.

Alright, so after a thorough review I've encountered the following.

In Tomb Raider, the FMVs possess an audio skip (plays fast for a split second, giving a squeaky effect) every 30 seconds or so. The game also tends to hang for 5 seconds when entering the inventory screen. Other than that it was a solid experience.

As for carmageddon, I've been suffering some other issues. I'd imagine this is completely with how DOSBox handles mounting disc drives. When I play the game with the carmav.exe it always asks for the disc even though it is present. Obviously using voodo2c.exe alleviates this problem, but then I don't get to view its FMVs. Since the disc is still not present as far as DOSBox is concerned. Ironically, when I go through the process in DOSBOX (w/o using glidos) the game plays fine w/ FMVs (granted I could only get it to work with hires.bat), any of the other executables encountered a dll problem/error.

None of these are really that big a deal, but at the very least I'd like input in regards to the 5 second hang with TR.

Agent_Orange89 wrote:

Alright, so after a thorough review I've encountered the following.

In Tomb Raider, the FMVs possess an audio skip (plays fast for a split second, giving a squeaky effect) every 30 seconds or so.

Not sure what that is. The audio for the FMVs go directly through DOSBox. Could be your system is struggling a little, although I'd sort of doubt that.

The game also tends to hang for 5 seconds when entering the inventory screen.

5 secs is a long time. Is that just in Direct3D mode? psVoodoo can be a bit slow on LFB reads.

Other than that it was a solid experience.

As for carmageddon, I've been suffering some other issues. I'd imagine this is completely with how DOSBox handles mounting disc drives. When I play the game with the carmav.exe it always asks for the disc even though it is present. Obviously using voodo2c.exe alleviates this problem, but then I don't get to view its FMVs. Since the disc is still not present as far as DOSBox is concerned. Ironically, when I go through the process in DOSBOX (w/o using glidos) the game plays fine w/ FMVs (granted I could only get it to work with hires.bat), any of the other executables encountered a dll problem/error.

I think that's because of the way Glidos chooses which cd drive to ask DOSBox to mount. What might fix it is to find a file on the CD and use its path in the config under "Path to CD check file" (got to from the "Adjust..." button, under the "Executable" tab). Note you should leave off the "E:" part of the path. Look at the Tombraider setup as an example. Pick a file that isn't likely to be also on another CD. Hopefully that will make Glidos ask DOSBox to mount the CD drive where that file can be found.

Alright, I finally got around to toying with everything.

Firstly, as for TR, switching it over to OpenGL remedied all my issues. No more FMV skips or inventory screen hangs. So everything is well!

And in regards to Carma, I still couldn't get it to detect the cd even with defining a file on the cd for it to check. However, I worked around it by simply copying the FMVs to the cutscene folder in the game directory, why I didn't think of that before is beyond me. So everything works as it should in this game now, I just simply use the voodo2c.exe as I did originally so it doesn't check for the cd.

Thanks for the help, and keep up the good work!

Agent_Orange89 wrote:

However, I worked around it by simply copying the FMVs to the cutscene folder in the game directory, why I didn't think of that before is beyond me.

Handy trick. Thanks. I shall do the same.

I recently installed Win7 64-bit on my rig and I couldn't resist installing TR1 with Glidos 😀

Well done Paul, Glidos 1.47 works very well with Dosbox version downloaded from your site, mp3 audio tracks and new textures installed too, no graphical problems, almost perfect gameplay 😀

Could you just give us some hints about advanced graphical options in Glidos (those in Display and Extras tabs), which of them should be toggled on for TR1?

Ones that aren't obvious:

Inhibit mode change: rather than change the screen mode to fit the selected resolution, use a subarea of the screen in it's current mode. This is good for widescreen monitors because it allow the use of a 4x3 subarea.

Forced textur smoothing: use bilinear interpolation on all textures.

Managed textures: lets Direct3D do it's own control over copying texture onto the graphics card. Useful on cards with insufficient onboard memory.

The "Extras" I can't remember too well, but I remember it is only the shadow hack you want for TR.

Why special version of DOSBox? Can you briefly explain how special it is?
Is it maybe possible to use the DOSBox I already have installed, and maybe use different preferences? I assume it works that way, but if you have it somehow specially compiled, then I understand.

There are three quite significant changes. One allows the Glide2x.ovl driver to communicate with the main Glidos app via Windows named pipes. The other two changes allow DOSBox to receive input even when the Glidos app is the active window. Sorry, no chance the usual release of DOSBox will work.

Aha. I see.
Are you using an old version of DOSBox or move to new one when it's released?

The last build of the Glidos version was quite a while ago, so there may have been several updates to DOSBox since then. Is that what you mean?

I think so 😀
Since they (I believe) improve compatibility and/or performance all the time, there might be a benefit in using the latest version. Just my amateur opinion though.

Maybe, but all the games that Glidos supports work well with the version I'm using. I'm not really sure there's a lot of point in updating, unless to solve a particular problem.

Oh, another thing I should mention. It isn't as though you have to use the Glidos version of DOSBox for all games. The installer puts it in a specific place for use by Glidos. You can still use the vanilla version of DOSBox for other games.