BoS is designed to run at 120 FPS. Enable vsync and you get half speed.

Fair point, but it's odd because when I just play it in compatibility mode without dgVoodoo2, it runs fine, but runs at slow speed with it, even though I have VSync disabled. But this gives me something to point at so I'll experiment a bit more. Cheers!

OK, so after experimenting with things a bit more, it seems I have to set my monitor's refresh rate (normally 144Hz) to 60Hz in Windows and when that's done, the game runs properly. There were very few if any 120Hz CRTs back in the Windows 95 era, so I'm not sure if the game was designed to run at 120fps (I certainly never played it at that rate back then), but it looks like this is the solution to the speed issue. Not a big deal to tell my viewers to drop their frame rate before starting the game. I'm still not sure why I get the persistent "spinning blue circle" at all times when the game is running though. If anyone has thoughts on that, I'd appreciate it. Cheers!

If you run it through dgvoodoo with an app that shows the framerate, you'll see it's running at 120 fps without vsync. And you don't need a 120 hz monitor for that. You played it at that framerate back then too, you just never noticed.

The retail CD 1.3 and the GOG version both run smoothly for me thanks to bosloader, no obvious tearing. There's a crash message after exiting tables but it's no big deal.

This actually reminded me to try out the pincabview mod that lets you play all the Wildfire tables in portrait/cabinet mode: https://vpuniverse.com/forums/topic/5903-pinc … in-your-pincab/

Yeah, I've seen that mod and it looks pretty cool! I don't have a setup to test it on unfortunately.

The GOG version will crash for me when going to fullscreen unless I run BOSLoader in Windows 7 compatibility mode or earlier, but that introduced the major screen tearing. Having to drop my display to 60Hz to make it work with dgVoodoo work is no big deal, I just now have that problem with the persistent spinning blue circle whenever running the game with it.

Are you running Windows 11?

Yessir.

So I went to the GitHub page to look for solutions to the mouse cursor issue there and apparently like 3 days after I decided to try out dgVoodoo for Balls of Steel, the author archived the project as he doesn't have time to maintain it anymore. Fair enough, it's a free project and he can do what he want, but I find my timing positively hilarious.

Oh, he sometimes goes away and comes back after a while. It's not abandoned, he just doesn't work on dgvoodoo all the time.

That's totally fair. Hopefully I can find a solution in the mean time. This might just be a case of needing to try older releases of the software as I've tried pretty much every combination of settings I can think of to no avail.

By the way, you can right click on the banner to reveal some hidden options. Play around with those, maybe try borderless window.
This is probably yet another W11 issue, it has broken compatibility with a bunch of things. I don't get the cursor on my end in 10.

Oh I could totally believe it to be a Win11 thing. Microsoft refuses to give the Windows display subsystem the ground up rewrite it's needed since Windows 7, but they love making little tweaks here and there that break things while adding little of actual use. Thanks for that pro tip about the banner. More stuff I can test!

Parallax Abstraction wrote on 2024-02-22, 02:11:

Oh I could totally believe it to be a Win11 thing. Microsoft refuses to give the Windows display subsystem the ground up rewrite it's needed since Windows 7, but they love making little tweaks here and there that break things while adding little of actual use. Thanks for that pro tip about the banner. More stuff I can test!

If you are talking about the speed, it's not an Windows 11 issue, it's a general issue. The game doesn't want to be synchronised by frames. With DxWnd, I keep VSync OFF and it runs at the correct frames.

Also I don't use BOSLOADER since the game works well without it with EmulateHeap. BOSLOADER rewrites the DDraw architecture of the game in D3D.

I was talking about the issue with the persistent "spinning blue circle" after starting the game with dgVoodoo. That appears to be Windows 11 related. I had messed around with DxWnd as well, but didn't get very far. I might give it a try again. I have VSync disabled in dgVoodoo, but the ball physics still run at half speed unless I drop my screen's refresh rate to 60Hz. Which is not a big deal for me.

When you say EmulateHeap, are you referring to just running BOS.EXE with Windows' internal compatibility mode enabled or by using the Windows Compatibility Kit in particular?

Parallax Abstraction wrote on 2024-02-22, 03:48:

I was talking about the issue with the persistent "spinning blue circle" after starting the game with dgVoodoo. That appears to be Windows 11 related. I had messed around with DxWnd as well, but didn't get very far. I might give it a try again. I have VSync disabled in dgVoodoo, but the ball physics still run at half speed unless I drop my screen's refresh rate to 60Hz. Which is not a big deal for me.

When you say EmulateHeap, are you referring to just running BOS.EXE with Windows' internal compatibility mode enabled or by using the Windows Compatibility Kit in particular?

Sorry I didn't follow you used dgVoodoo2. I wasn't using dgVoodoo2 in my tests. The game engine crashes due to heap issues, but I don't remember which table does it in BOS (can you mention a few?), the tables that used to crash were released with the UPG pack by Valusoft (that game used the BOS engine) and Mok's patch would do the DDraw -> D3D conversion that made things better, in both UPG and BOS.

What does BOS Loader do?

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-02-22, 05:34:

Parallax Abstraction wrote on 2024-02-22, 03:48:

I was talking about the issue with the persistent "spinning blue circle" after starting the game with dgVoodoo. That appears to be Windows 11 related. I had messed around with DxWnd as well, but didn't get very far. I might give it a try again. I have VSync disabled in dgVoodoo, but the ball physics still run at half speed unless I drop my screen's refresh rate to 60Hz. Which is not a big deal for me.

When you say EmulateHeap, are you referring to just running BOS.EXE with Windows' internal compatibility mode enabled or by using the Windows Compatibility Kit in particular?

Sorry I didn't follow you used dgVoodoo2. I wasn't using dgVoodoo2 in my tests. The game engine crashes due to heap issues, but I don't remember which table does it in BOS (can you mention a few?), the tables that used to crash were released with the UPG pack by Valusoft (that game used the BOS engine) and Mok's patch would do the DDraw -> D3D conversion that made things better, in both UPG and BOS.

What does BOS Loader do?

Update: Okay I got a table that crashes: Darkside. On Windows 11 23H2 with EmulateHeap, at least DirectSound mode works. Wave mapper still fails (as Winmm fails)