VOGONS


First post, by SirGraham

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In the the CVS builds (earliest that was tested is from July 3 2005 and latest is from February 1 2006), when you start the hardware configuration from the INSTALL.EXE menu in the three Microprose adventures (Return of the Phantom, Rex Nebular, Dragonsphere), the program will freeze (although not completely, you can press Esc to return to the menu). It does not happen in DOSBox 0.63 (tested with same DOSBOX.CONF). This is apparently a hardware detection issue, because when I disabled mpu401 in the CVS build, the configuration program worked (although with a little delay during detection). In 0.63 it works smoothly without disabling mpu401.
(By the way, how come 0.63 requires different DLLs than the CVS builds?)

Since this thread is about the Microprose adventures, I thought it would be appropriate to bring up an issue in Return of the Phantom. This is not a regression, it happens in all versions.
When the main menu of the game comes up, there's supposed to be an evil laughter. For some reason, this sound effect is completely corrupt under DOSBox (listen to attached WAV), while the other sound effects are fine. I tested both CD and floppy versions and it's the same in both. Both versions don't work with VDMSound by the way.
Incidentally, when I tried to install the CD version under DOSBox I got this weird message:

install0003pe.png

I didn't know how to overcome it in DOSBox (I mounted a C: drive, not only the CD-ROM drive), so I ended up installing the game on a different computer with Win98 and moving the files to my XP machine on which I'm running DOSBox...

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Reply 1 of 19, by rcblanke

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Don't know if this is related, but I saw something similar with Mixed-Up Mother Goose SCI VGA; The game somehow also reports 0k free disk space and therefore cannot be started. It works in ntvdm though.

Regards,
Ronald

Reply 3 of 19, by avatar_58

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rcblanke wrote:

Don't know if this is related, but I saw something similar with Mixed-Up Mother Goose SCI VGA; The game somehow also reports 0k free disk space and therefore cannot be started. It works in ntvdm though.

Regards,
Ronald

Thats odd, it works for me. 😒

Reply 4 of 19, by rcblanke

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avatar_58 wrote:

Thats odd, it works for me. 😒

Thanks avatar, must be an error on my side then, maybe something wrong with mountpoints or something...

Reply 5 of 19, by Qbix

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(By the way, how come 0.63 requires different DLLs than the CVS builds?)

Everybody uses their own way to compile it.
The next official build will have only sdl_net.dll and sdl.dll as did 0.63

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 6 of 19, by Jiri

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I have the same install problem (0 bytes of disk space) as SirGraham with the CD version of Return of the Phantom in DOSBox (including the latest CVS build). Could it be related to this?:
Re: Can't run the install.exe of Amberstar

It is possible to install the game in pure DOS and play it in DOSBox, but without speech:
Having trouble to hear Microprose adventure games' voices

Reply 7 of 19, by SirGraham

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rcblanke wrote:

Don't know if this is related, but I saw something similar with Mixed-Up Mother Goose SCI VGA; The game somehow also reports 0k free disk space and therefore cannot be started. It works in ntvdm though.

Well, I tried the floppy version of MG VGA , and it works fine with speech and all. Under VDMSound, which I assume is what you meant by 'ntvdm', it gives the "unable to initialize your audio hardware" error.

wd wrote:

Tried with midi intelligent mode off?

What do you mean? If you mean mpu401, I said that I disabled it. But in 0.63, it works with this thing on as well...

Qbix wrote:

Everybody uses their own way to compile it.
The next official build will have only sdl_net.dll and sdl.dll as did 0.63

Hmm... well, I just downloaded the already compiled version found here.

Jiri wrote:

I have the same install problem (0 bytes of disk space) as SirGraham with the CD version of Return of the Phantom in DOSBox (including the latest CVS build). Could it be related to this?:
Re: Can't run the install.exe of Amberstar

That sounds very much possible...

It is possible to install the game in pure DOS and play it in DOSBox, but without speech:
Having trouble to hear Microprose adventure games' voices

They discuss the CD version of Dragonsphere in that thread... I couldn't install this one under DOSBox also, the installation kept asking for disk #1 in drive '*', whatever that means. I didn't say anything about it because it also happened to me on Win98, and I wanted to test it on one of my real DOS machines, which I'm too lazy to take out of the closet at the moment 😀
I did use this copy in the past and I'm sure it worked fine (but without speech in the intro, if I remember correctly, but I was told that's how it is). Maybe it got corrupted, I don't know.

Reply 9 of 19, by Jiri

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SirGraham wrote:

In the the CVS builds (earliest that was tested is from July 3 2005 and latest is from February 1 2006), when you start the hardware configuration from the INSTALL.EXE menu in the three Microprose adventures (Return of the Phantom, Rex Nebular, Dragonsphere), the program will freeze (although not completely, you can press Esc to return to the menu).

This freezing in the menu with the CVS builds happens only if I drag and drop install.exe on dosbox.exe. If I run the install from the command line of DOSBox, it works fine (I tested it with the floppy version of Return of the Phantom).

SirGraham wrote:

They discuss the CD version of Dragonsphere in that thread... I couldn't install this one under DOSBox also, the installation kept asking for disk #1 in drive '*', whatever that means.

Probably wrong mounting, I can install CD version of Dragonsphere in DOSBox. But speech problems are same in Dragonsphere and Return of the Phantom.

Reply 10 of 19, by SirGraham

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wd wrote:

> What do you mean?

Ever looked into dosbox.conf?

Oops, didn't think about looking under mpu401...
Anyway, when intelligent=false in the CVS it works smoothly like in DOSBox 0.63... but why does it work in 0.63 smoothly even when intelligent=true? Did you improve this feature in CVS and as a side effect it now interferes with hardware detection in some programs?

Jiri wrote:

Probably wrong mounting, I can install CD version of Dragonsphere in DOSBox. But speech problems are same in Dragonsphere and Return of the Phantom.

You think it's wrong mounting? Can you give some advice on this? Like I said, it also happens to me in Win98 outside DOSBox.
So the horrible distortion happens when Dragonsphere trying to play speech, too? I actually only now tried to see how speech is played in Phantom CD, until now I only noticed the laughter because I focused on the floppy version.
Why does this problem happen, anyway? Very weird, especially considering the fact that speech works fine in Rex Nebular (there's speech in the intro).

Reply 12 of 19, by Qbix

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intelligent mode was improved a lot.
unfortunately it seems that the installers of some games have problems with it.

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 13 of 19, by SirGraham

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Qbix wrote:

intelligent mode was improved a lot.
unfortunately it seems that the installers of some games have problems with it.

Hmmm.... if you disable intelligent midi, will you miss configuration options in the installers that have problems with it? At least in the Microprose installers, I didn't see that anything was missing because of disabled intelligent midi.
What is the use of this intelligent midi anyway? If the Microprose games (and similar games) can use it, you can always re-enable it in DOSBOX.CONF after you're done with configuration.

Reply 15 of 19, by robertmo

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SirGraham wrote:

So the horrible distortion happens when Dragonsphere trying to play speech, too? I actually only now tried to see how speech is played in Phantom CD, until now I only noticed the laughter because I focused on the floppy version.
Why does this problem happen, anyway? Very weird, especially considering the fact that speech works fine in Rex Nebular (there's speech in the intro).

Colonization has this problem too.

Reply 16 of 19, by Srecko

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SirGraham wrote:

Hmmm.... if you disable intelligent midi, will you miss configuration options in the installers that have problems with it?

Not really, it matters only for about 20 games which use this special mode (present only on original Roland MPU-401 card).

Problem here is related to delay which real MPU-401 has between resetting device and calling irq9 when device is again ready (and has status bit cleared on port 331). Current design is to have that happen immediately. Difference with "intelligent=false" is that irq doesn't run.

Hopefully, I will try to figure out something more during this weekend (already had the partial fix before but it broke playback in "princess maker2" and "it came from desert").

Reply 18 of 19, by SirGraham

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robertmo wrote:
These games work in dosbox with proper sound effeccts whey you boot from a hdd image with this line in config.sys: […]
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These games work in dosbox with proper sound effeccts whey you boot from a hdd image with this line in config.sys:

device=c:\dos\emm386.exe frame=e000

- Return of the Phantom,
- Colonization,
- didn't check Dragon Sphere, as I think it has digitized sound effects only on a cd and i think it is not possible to use cd with hdd image in dosbox

Well, that worked, thanks again 😀
Actually, I did try something similar before posting this thread, only I used NOEMS instead of FRAME=E000. The reason I did this is because when I used FRAME=E000 with a different game that had similar problems, The Big Red Adventure (see this thread), it caused the game to crash in a specific point, and it also corrupted the game files so it kept crashing in that point even after I removed FRAME=E000 and replaced it with NOEMS, which is the correct setting for The Big Red Adventure.
For Return of the Phantom, using NOEMS doesn't work because the game don't have enough memory to run, but FRAME=E000 does seem to do the trick. I just hope there won't be any crashings\corruptions at a later point...
Note that for some reason, when I use FRAME=E000, I get the message "WARNING: Option ROM or RAM detected within page frame." What does it mean?