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DOSBox CDROM difficulties...

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First post, by Sephiroth

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I have noticed that several games do not function properly with the current (v0.70) version of the emulated CDROM. I also note that the CDROM does not spin up when you search it, which may be part of the problem. If the directory structure is cached or something and it never gets spun up, games that used copy-protection don't get the chance to scan for bad sectors or whatever.

The two games in question are Blood and Mechwarrior II. Mech2 simply says it cannot find the game CD. The thing is, the CDROM doesn't spin up when you try to run the game, so it isn't scanning the CD, it's simply erroring out. Blood will start and get to wher eit plays the first demo, and when it should start playing CD audio, it instead ejects the CDROM and DOSBox itself dies. Not sure why, because the game runs with MIDI music just fine, but the CD audio REALLY helped set the mood in that game.

Has anybody else managed to get these two games working? Redneck Rampage which shares the Build Engine with Blood runs fine and plays the music fine. Mech2 installs fine, and many other games ahve installed and/or run fine. I will toy around with it some more, but it's being problematic.

486 Launcher v2.0 is now under development!

Reply 1 of 5, by MiniMax

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Are you having the same kind of problems with Blood as these guys:

Re: Dosbox 0.70 is out!
Blood 1 is completely playable now
Re: wow !!!!!
REQUEST: DOSBox Game Browser

??

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Reply 2 of 5, by Sephiroth

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The problem isn't running it, it's the CDROM support. As I said in my prior post, running the game is flawless, but that's with MIDI music, which wasn't that great in Blood. The CD audio is MUCH better and when the game attempts to play audio in Blood, it ejects the CD and DOSBox itself dies, telling me that DOSBox doesn't like some command issued to the CDROM. I could probably slip by with a no-cd crackf or Mech2 as well, but then I wouldn't get to listen to that brilliant music.

486 Launcher v2.0 is now under development!

Reply 3 of 5, by Freddo

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In my experience, it's better to run CD games in DOSBox with CD images rather than with the real CDs. Which is why I ripped all my DOS games into iso or bin/cue files (depending on the game using CD audio or not) and then use the imgmount command.

Reply 4 of 5, by doomer

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As Freddo said it's always better to use cd-images when playing cd games in dosbox and for cd-audio games, the imgmount command for mounting is the best.
I had cd audio problems with Alone in the Dark and when I made an image and mounted it with dosbox's imgmount command all problems disappeared.

Reply 5 of 5, by Sephiroth

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Well, I don't plan on filling my drive with 600MB images to play my old games, and since this is the only problem I have had with DOSBox, I'll just do without Mech2 and Blood until DOSBox has better CDROM support. I tried other emulators prior to DOSBox and they were by far MUCH worse, containing hundreds of bugs. This is the ONLY issue I have with DOSBox, and it's nothing.

QEmu doesn't properly emulate sound hardware, and several games lock it up. BOCHS was just horrendously slow, but it seemed to emulate every last detail of a system. DOSBox has proven to be VERY fast, reliable/stable, and it appears to have proper SB16 emulation. Best of all, it supports IPX and serial connections, and you can adjust the speed for individual games instead of having them run at all kinds of different speeds. I'll be awaiting the next release of DOSBox!

486 Launcher v2.0 is now under development!

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