VOGONS


First post, by dosgamer

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I'm trying to get Day of the Tentacle (CD talkie version) to run on my system:

AMD K6-2 500
Asus TX97
64MB PC-100 SDRAM
Voodoo3 2000 PCI
ES1688F ISA sound card @A220 I5 D1, MPU401 disabled
Roland SCC-1 @ A330
Windows 98SE

To run DOTT, I boot Win98 into command line mode.

System runs stable otherwise (did several passes with Memtest86+).

Normally, DOTT would hang at the splash screen. After slowing down my system (changing CPU clock to 50x2.5=125 MHz, L1 and L2 cache disabled in BIOS) it starts fine, but randomly hangs and locks up the computer after a few minutes tops. CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't work, I have to push the reset button.

Is DOTT really restricted to 486 CPUs?

Coppermine Celeron 800 @ 1.12GHz (8x140) - Asus P2B Rev. 1.12 - 256MB PC133 CL2 - Voodoo5 5500 AGP - SB AWE64 CT4520 - Roland SCC-1 - Intel Pro/1000GT - 1.44MB Floppy - ATAPI ZIP 100 - 120GB IDE - DVD-ROM - DVD-R/RW/RAM - Win98SE

Reply 3 of 39, by K1n9_Duk3

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I'm running the German talkie verion on my K6-2+ 533 MHz laptop right now (from Win98 SE, not in DOS mode), so I'm not sure your crashes are related to the CPU speed. I also had the game running prefectly fine on a Pentium MMX 266 MHz in DOS 6.22.

You should try running the game without ANY sound, that should tell you if the lockups are related to your sound hardware or your CPU speed. You can run the game without speech and sound effects by typing TENTACLE t at the command prompt. I haven't seen a parameter to disable the music completely, so I guess you'll probably need to run the setup utility to do that.

Reply 4 of 39, by dosgamer

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OK thanks, I'll try running without sound.

@jesolo: I did disable both L1 and L2 cache in BIOS while running at 125 MHz CPU clock.

Coppermine Celeron 800 @ 1.12GHz (8x140) - Asus P2B Rev. 1.12 - 256MB PC133 CL2 - Voodoo5 5500 AGP - SB AWE64 CT4520 - Roland SCC-1 - Intel Pro/1000GT - 1.44MB Floppy - ATAPI ZIP 100 - 120GB IDE - DVD-ROM - DVD-R/RW/RAM - Win98SE

Reply 5 of 39, by dosgamer

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OK, I got it! If I run it with "tentacle.exe s220/5/8 g330" it works perfectly, even while running the CPU at full speed. I get voice/sound effects and the sweet general MIDI from the SCC-1.

Note that I didn't have to slow down anything. CPU is running at 500 MHz with all caches enabled. The thing that changed is, I think I had Adlib/Soundblaster selected for music before. The wiki says the Adlib music is garbled on faster CPUs:

http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_C … sensitive_games

Which wasn't the case, BTW. The music was fine, as far as I could tell. The game just hung. But it might still have to do with the Adlib code in the game.

Coppermine Celeron 800 @ 1.12GHz (8x140) - Asus P2B Rev. 1.12 - 256MB PC133 CL2 - Voodoo5 5500 AGP - SB AWE64 CT4520 - Roland SCC-1 - Intel Pro/1000GT - 1.44MB Floppy - ATAPI ZIP 100 - 120GB IDE - DVD-ROM - DVD-R/RW/RAM - Win98SE

Reply 6 of 39, by collector

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Wrong forum. Always ask old hardware related questions in Marvin. This forum is for DOS games on modern systems (as in Very Old Games On New Systems, or VOGONS.)

The Sierra Help Pages -- New Sierra Game Installers -- Sierra Game Patches -- New Non-Sierra Game Installers

Reply 7 of 39, by dosgamer

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Hmm, I guess I got confused by the forum title which says "Getting old DOS games working". Sorry. Anyway, I spoke too soon. It still crashes. When I run it in Windows, instead of the computer getting locked up I get a "This program performed an illegal operation" message and it gets shut down. But, I can run "tentacle t g330" or "tentacle t a" to disable the digital sound and just have music and it works fine. So it's not the Adlib, it's the digital sound that's causing the problem. No idea what to do about this, though, except try a different sound card.

Coppermine Celeron 800 @ 1.12GHz (8x140) - Asus P2B Rev. 1.12 - 256MB PC133 CL2 - Voodoo5 5500 AGP - SB AWE64 CT4520 - Roland SCC-1 - Intel Pro/1000GT - 1.44MB Floppy - ATAPI ZIP 100 - 120GB IDE - DVD-ROM - DVD-R/RW/RAM - Win98SE

Reply 10 of 39, by dosgamer

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Thanks akula65, tried those. Didn't make a difference. Actually had to download the entire 2.5GB LucasArts FTP mirror because I couldn't find them anywhere else.

Edit: oh, there they are *facepalm*. For some reason I couldn't find them even though I searched google for "dottcd.exe" and "dottfix.exe".

After messing around with this far too long, trying various slowdown utilities, trying a different sound card (SBPro CT1600) and generally wasting A LOT of time, I decided to build a new system. GA-6VXE+, PIII-600E, 128MB RAM. Soundcards moved from the old build (ES1688F and Roland SCC-1). Installed Win98SE, tried out DOTT, and guess what? IT WORKS FLAWLESSLY. WHAT THE FUUUUUUU.................................

This is at full speed. Actually, more than full speed, just for shits and giggles, I overclocked the CPU to 6x112 = 672 MHz. Hahahaha. No slowdowns. No caches disabled, no nothing. DOTT works fine, played over an hour. Both in pure DOS and the Win98 DOS box. Why. WHY???

Coppermine Celeron 800 @ 1.12GHz (8x140) - Asus P2B Rev. 1.12 - 256MB PC133 CL2 - Voodoo5 5500 AGP - SB AWE64 CT4520 - Roland SCC-1 - Intel Pro/1000GT - 1.44MB Floppy - ATAPI ZIP 100 - 120GB IDE - DVD-ROM - DVD-R/RW/RAM - Win98SE

Reply 11 of 39, by jesolo

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I had to search a bit around but, eventually found the post where I mentioned the issue I also experienced with Day of the Tentacle: Sound Blaster 16 Bugs and Deficiencies Summary
It's just interesting that you also experienced a similar issue on your AMD K6-2, which could perhaps point to the game not being 100 % compatible with the AMD K6-2 CPU architecture on certain motherboards?

Reply 12 of 39, by Tertz

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dosgamer wrote on 2018-04-18, 19:02:

This is at full speed. Actually, more than full speed, just for shits and giggles, I overclocked the CPU to 6x112 = 672 MHz. Hahahaha. No slowdowns. No caches disabled, no nothing. DOTT works fine, played over an hour. Both in pure DOS and the Win98 DOS box. Why. WHY???

Adlib FM works good on P3 with AWE64 there ? Seems this was the main problem in this game with faster PCs.

In DOSBox the game had issues somewhere above 20k cycles, though real PC may behave differently.

DOSBox CPU Benchmark
Yamaha YMF7x4 Guide

Reply 13 of 39, by mkubiak402

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I just went through the same thing i was trying to run day of the tentacle on my AMD k6-III 450mhz it would lock up on the music "midi" i tried an AMD k6-2 500Mhz same deal.
but on the Intel Pentium 233Mhz works fine.. at first i though it was the 100Mhz FSB making it all strange i was clocking the K6-2 from 233 to 330 with a 66mhz FSB
turns out the Game just wont run with the AMD CPU's

so now i'm running the Intel Pentium 233 Mhz at 250 100x2.5

DOS 6.22 FIC-486-VIP-IO AM486-DX2 66Mhz 64mg
Win98se MS-5169 AMD K6-III+ 450 @ 550Mhz 512mg Voodoo 5 5500.
Win98se GA-6VXE7+ Intel Pentium III 750 512mg Voodoo 5 5500.
Win XP MS-6712 AMD Athlon Xp 2700+ 2gb 6600GT

Reply 14 of 39, by Chaosbreaker

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dosgamer wrote on 2018-04-17, 00:02:

Hmm, I guess I got confused by the forum title which says "Getting old DOS games working". Sorry. Anyway, I spoke too soon. It still crashes. When I run it in Windows, instead of the computer getting locked up I get a "This program performed an illegal operation" message and it gets shut down. But, I can run "tentacle t g330" or "tentacle t a" to disable the digital sound and just have music and it works fine. So it's not the Adlib, it's the digital sound that's causing the problem. No idea what to do about this, though, except try a different sound card.

This problem reminds me a lot of the problem I've had with Might and Magic 3, 4 and 5, where the game would work fine at first, just walking around town and stuff, but whenever I visited a merchant, the game would lock up. Turns out that was a known bug, and easily resolved ( or rather, worked around) by disabling the digital audio, because visiting a merchant would indeed trigger some lines of spoken digital audio.

If I remember correctly, this problem only seemed to occur if you were running the games under win9x in dos mode, rather than in pure dos and I believe I have been able to play them with digital sound enabled under pure dos. Have you tried running the game in pure dos, if you're able to?

Reply 15 of 39, by ltning

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I'm running this on both 386 and 486 PCs and even with the dottcd.exe fix it hangs at seemingly random places. Using an sb pro2 and sbmidi+mt32.

Any ideas? :-/

The Floppy Museum - on a floppy, on a 286: http://floppy.museum
286-24/4MB/ET4kW32/GUS+SBPro2
386DX-40/20MB/CL5434 ISA/GUSExtreme
486BL-100/32MB/ET4kW32p VLB/GUSPnP/AWELegacy

~ love over gold ~

Reply 16 of 39, by keropi

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ltning wrote on 2022-04-03, 14:57:

I'm running this on both 386 and 486 PCs and even with the dottcd.exe fix it hangs at seemingly random places. Using an sb pro2 and sbmidi+mt32.

Any ideas? 😒

try and use IRQ5 for the SB and disable L1 cache before launching
only this combo worked for me on a 486slc system with an ALS100 soundcard

🎵 🎧 PCMIDI MPU , OrpheusII , Action Rewind , Megacard and 🎶GoldLib soundcard website

Reply 17 of 39, by ltning

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keropi wrote on 2022-04-03, 15:37:
ltning wrote on 2022-04-03, 14:57:

I'm running this on both 386 and 486 PCs and even with the dottcd.exe fix it hangs at seemingly random places. Using an sb pro2 and sbmidi+mt32.

Any ideas? :-/

try and use IRQ5 for the SB and disable L1 cache before launching
only this combo worked for me on a 486slc system with an ALS100 soundcard

Thanks, I guess I can try switching my SBPro to IRQ5.. Not sure why that would help. There's no L1 cache on the 386-40 though, so not sure what else I can do there. Turning off turbo seems silly, as DOTT barely runs nicely on a 386 anyway..

It's not even a complete hang (as in hardware hang), any ongoing animations continue, but interaction is impossible and music notes (on the mt32) just hang.

/Eirik

The Floppy Museum - on a floppy, on a 286: http://floppy.museum
286-24/4MB/ET4kW32/GUS+SBPro2
386DX-40/20MB/CL5434 ISA/GUSExtreme
486BL-100/32MB/ET4kW32p VLB/GUSPnP/AWELegacy

~ love over gold ~

Reply 18 of 39, by ratsflif

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I'm having the same problem with Dott on my Pentium 90. Game randomly hangs and I have to reboot the PC. Tried the patches, tried disabling the cache, ran it both in midi mode and sound blaster but will still randomly lock up.

Reply 19 of 39, by keropi

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ratsflif wrote on 2022-04-28, 11:44:

I'm having the same problem with Dott on my Pentium 90. Game randomly hangs and I have to reboot the PC. Tried the patches, tried disabling the cache, ran it both in midi mode and sound blaster but will still randomly lock up.

did try setting SB IRQ to 5?

🎵 🎧 PCMIDI MPU , OrpheusII , Action Rewind , Megacard and 🎶GoldLib soundcard website