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First post, by microfishd

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Hi all!

We have two laptops. They both are Win7Pro 64bit downgraded from Win10 Pro.

On mine (#1 for this conversation), one of the things we installed was D-Fend Reloaded (normally for Vista and up--to user profile). I also have McAfee (Preinstalled 30 day trial), Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free (currently in the 14 day free trial of Premium with on-access scanning, start when Windows boots, etc--unchecking the "protect MBAM from malware" option made no difference--error had already broken it?), and Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit (also in the 14 day free trial of Premium).

On #1, at 1:28 PM (local time) Dosbox went fullscreen successfully. Later, (at 9PM)--without knowingly changing anything other than travelling to a different "home" wifi network, updating MBAM to the latest definitions and Steam auto-updating on Windows boot and maybe hitting the "Insert" key which has been remapped to now be "Pause/Break"--when I tell Dosbox to go fullscreen, it starts the process to go fullscreen, crashes to minimized, and eventually exits Dosbox. It is the exact same problem as mentioned here Updating to the newest D-Fend Reloaded did no good.

Since I had made a bunch of changes since my last macrium Reflect backup (a few days before) I entered Safe mode and system restored to when Dosbox worked (1:28PM).

The other laptop (#2 for this conversation) has exactly the same problem, except that the bug started occurring after updating some Lenovo Drivers (and MBAM?). In order to fix it, I had to run System Restore. At the time that #2 didn't work, #1 did. After making some changes and getting Dosbox to work on #2 (removing MBAM via revo, and than Malwarebytes Clean uninstall, and maybe something else), Dosbox on #1 did not work.

Obviously, I can't keep restoring my Macrium backup whenever I want to run a Dos program in fullscreen.

Dosbox graphics is set to Graphics>Surface (Graphics>Overlay does not seem to work).

Please provide guidance and suggestions! I really, really want it to work!

These relatively pricey (for us) Lenovo laptops should be able to run a program that our (cheap in comparison) Lenovo H215 tower (OS: Win7 Home Ultimate 64bit) has successfully run for years (though without MBAE installed). Just checked, the H215 still opens Dosbox fullscreen.

Thank you!

PS:
D-Fend is the same installer I have used previously on several PCs--"D-Fend-Reloaded-1.2.1-Setup.exe" downloaded in 2012.
GPU= Intel HD 530 and nVidia Quadro M2000M (4GB) D-Fend runs by default under the iGPU; switching to the dGPU made no difference that I could see.
CPU= i7-6820hq
16GB DDR4

Event viewer on these laptops says (under System:) "Event ID 245: win32k application dosbox locked the primary surface"--when it works it finishes that quote "...surface 1 time(s)"; when it does not work (crashes) it says "win32k application dosbox locked the primary surface 2 time(s)"
On the H215 (D-Fend Reloaded installed for 3 years) under EventViewer>application it says ID 9010: "A request to disable the Desktop Window Manager was made by process (DOSBox DOS Emulator)", but >System says nothing about the win32k application.

Is it something where adding an exception for dosbox or D-Fend to MBAM or McAfee would solve it? Will it resolve itself when MBAM ends its trial?
Thanks!

Last edited by microfishd on 2016-11-29, 19:44. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 6, by Jorpho

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So are you suggesting DOSBox runs fine in a window, i.e. that is not fullscreen? Are you pressing Ctrl-Enter to make DOSBox "go fullscreen" ?

microfishd wrote:

It is the exact same problem as mentioned here

That thread is eight years old, is referring to the DOSBox installer, and seems to make no reference to fullscreen. Did you link to the wrong thread..?

Reply 2 of 6, by microfishd

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Sorry, it is not a problem with the installer, however I found it by searching for my Event viewer message. 😐
I have edited my post to add new info.
Dosbox runs perfectly fine in windowed mode. When I hit Alt-Enter to go fullscreen, it cycles full-screen, than blinks than crashes to the taskbar, and by the time it tells me that Windows has switched to the Basic Color theme (setting Windows Color theme to Basic ahead of time makes no difference), it blinks again, and dosbox (minimized) closes. I can accelerate this by clicking to "un-minimize" Dosbox.

PS D-Fend Reloaded is running Dosbox 0.74.0.0
I also edited Intel graphics control panel to tell it to keep program's aspect ratios (vs override all program's aspect ratios)

Reply 3 of 6, by Jorpho

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What happens if you download a standalone version of DOSBox, extract it to a convenient folder, and run that instead?

You can try the latest EmuCR build from http://www.emucr.com/search/label/DOSBox . (Make sure you click the correct download button.)

I am inclined to believe that changing the graphics output to opengl will solve the problem, but I do not know how to set that in D-Fend.

Reply 4 of 6, by microfishd

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Hi!
I downloaded, but have not yet tried, the latest DOSbox build.
Thank you very much! Opengl seems to have done the trick! (instead of Output>surface)
I took a video of how it had been under Output>Surface=

Filename
1--with output=surface.zip
File size
2.87 MiB
Downloads
138 downloads
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

What you don't see is that right at the end (the screen catcher doesn't pick it up) the
"blink" at 00:12 also appears to the human eye at 00:18-00:19 (when I clicked on DOSBox on the taskbar)
Than, I changed it to Output>OpenGL, and took the following videos, one with just DOSBox, opening and being put into fullscreen, and the other showing an actual game.

Filename
Dosbox screenvids.zip
File size
4.16 MiB
Downloads
110 downloads
File comment
Output>Opengl
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

While this does solve my problem by providing a workaround (:D !), it doesn't seem to answer (to me anyway, though I freely admit I don't know any coding) why updating MBAM, MBAE, and Steam would wreck the setup that has worked on our desktop PC for about four years and worked on here for a day (literally, I first ran D-Fend Reloaded's DOSBox late Sunday afternoon, and by Monday evening it was not working).

Also, what is the difference between opengl, openglnb, ddraw, surface, and overlay; especially, what is the difference between opengl and openglnb?

Again, thank you very much!

Reply 5 of 6, by Jorpho

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Usually when things suddenly stop working for no discernible reason, it's because Windows quietly updated something in the background while you weren't looking, unless you have disabled automatic updates completely. This is unlikely to have anything to do with MBAM, MBAE, or Steam.

Regardless, output=surface is known to be problematic in newer versions of Windows, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

microfishd wrote:

Also, what is the difference between opengl, openglnb, ddraw, surface, and overlay; especially, what is the difference between opengl and openglnb?

There is already much information available for the Googling.
Re: Help with Output setting

Reply 6 of 6, by microfishd

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Jorpho wrote:
Regardless, output=surface is known to be problematic in newer versions of Windows, for reasons that are not entirely clear. […]
Show full quote

Regardless, output=surface is known to be problematic in newer versions of Windows, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

microfishd wrote:

Also, what is the difference between opengl, openglnb, ddraw, surface, and overlay; especially, what is the difference between opengl and openglnb?

There is already much information available for the Googling.
Re: Help with Output setting

Thank you very much!
I had in fact set Windows and Lenovo Update to "notify but don't install." Ah well. Since it works I am not going to complain!
Sorry for not doing any research before asking, but thank you very much for the link!

Is there any way to set this thread to "answered"? Thanks again! 😀