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Silverball "Fantasy" table issue

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First post, by Gadget2006

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Hello,
I'm having an issue with the first table of the Silverball game (the table is called "Fantasy") - after a certain period of time, the game would go into slow motion, the sound would turn off, and the controls would become irresponsive, and the only way to make the game work again would be restart DOSBox.

While it seems like a long-standing known issue with the game (I've found a compat report dating back to 0.6x series with the same problem), I have only found one suggestion of a possible solution (lowering the number of cycles, possibly to 7000, and trying to set core to normal) which does not do anything, the game still hangs the same way (maybe subjectively a little less frequently, but it's debatable).

Is there anything else that is possible to try to do to fix this issue or is the table/game simply not yet compatible enough with DOSBox and nothing could be done? Thank you very much for any advice.

Reply 4 of 7, by Gadget2006

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Qbix wrote:

tried loadfix ?
it could be memory corruption.

Just tried it (at least typing "loadfix" once and getting "64kb memory allocated" before running the game) and still got the same kind of hang, it did not seem to do anything. Doing loadfix twice and allocating 128kb of memory makes the game fail to start because there's not enough conventional memory to run it.

Reply 5 of 7, by ripsaw8080

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That particular table sometimes gets locked into a state where IRQ0 and IRQ1 are masked, and only the vertical retrace is left to control timing. However, sufficiently high cycles (not lower) appears to prevent the condition. With normal core and 10000 cycles, I did not see the problem occur after 10 minutes of play; whereas at 3000 cycles it never lasted that long before the problem appeared.

Reply 6 of 7, by Gadget2006

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ripsaw8080 wrote:

That particular table sometimes gets locked into a state where IRQ0 and IRQ1 are masked, and only the vertical retrace is left to control timing. However, sufficiently high cycles (not lower) appears to prevent the condition. With normal core and 10000 cycles, I did not see the problem occur after 10 minutes of play; whereas at 3000 cycles it never lasted that long before the problem appeared.

Hmm, it's worth trying again, though I'm quite confident that cycles=max (which should definitely be somewhere around or above one hundred thousand cycles) still manifests the bug... But I'll try again with various values (e.g. 10k, 20k, 50k, and MAX) and will get back to you all with another report.

Reply 7 of 7, by Gadget2006

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Yeah, I've made some extra tests and I can confirm that the bug seems to go away at roughly 15000-20000 cycles (at least I've played for about 20 min under these settings and haven't seen the bug yet, while normally the game would lock up within 5-10 min). Setting cycles to above 20000 cycles or to max seems to get rid of the bug as well but it garbles the sound from time to time (but the game is playable either way). If I see the bug happen under 15000+ cycles I'll let you know. Thank you very much for your help! 😁

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