From event viewer:

1Event Type:	Error
2Event Source:	Application Error
3Event Category:	None
4Event ID:	1000
5Date:		2/15/2008
6Time:		2:44:21 PM
7User:		N/A
8Computer:	SWAAYE
9Description:
10Faulting application dosbox.exe, version 0.72.0.0, faulting module dosbox.exe, version 0.72.0.0, fault address 0x00095800.
11
12For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
13Data:
140000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74   Applicat
150008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c   ion Fail
160010: 75 72 65 20 20 64 6f 73   ure  dos
170018: 62 6f 78 2e 65 78 65 20   box.exe 
180020: 30 2e 37 32 2e 30 2e 30   0.72.0.0
190028: 20 69 6e 20 64 6f 73 62    in dosb
200030: 6f 78 2e 65 78 65 20 30   ox.exe 0
210038: 2e 37 32 2e 30 2e 30 20   .72.0.0 
220040: 61 74 20 6f 66 66 73 65   at offse
230048: 74 20 30 30 30 39 35 38   t 000958
240050: 30 30 0d 0a               00..    

And a second crash for you

1Event Type:	Error
2Event Source:	Application Error
3Event Category:	None
4Event ID:	1000
5Date:		2/15/2008
6Time:		2:53:55 PM
7User:		N/A
8Computer:	SWAAYE
9Description:
10Faulting application dosbox.exe, version 0.72.0.0, faulting module dosbox.exe, version 0.72.0.0, fault address 0x00095b66.
11
12For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
13Data:
140000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74   Applicat
150008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c   ion Fail
160010: 75 72 65 20 20 64 6f 73   ure  dos
170018: 62 6f 78 2e 65 78 65 20   box.exe 
180020: 30 2e 37 32 2e 30 2e 30   0.72.0.0
190028: 20 69 6e 20 64 6f 73 62    in dosb
200030: 6f 78 2e 65 78 65 20 30   ox.exe 0
210038: 2e 37 32 2e 30 2e 30 20   .72.0.0 
220040: 61 74 20 6f 66 66 73 65   at offse
230048: 74 20 30 30 30 39 35 62   t 00095b
240050: 36 36 0d 0a               66..    

I'm not sure it's at all related, but I notice that the game sort of stutters maybe with sounds playing back. And it feels like eventually one of these stutters crashes it....

And the oddness of how it won't even successfully load a mission in SVGA at all with a full install to the HDD (no cd access at all)... Almost seems like some sort of IO issue.

Maybe you can figure it out when running dosbox using some debugger
(visual studio, gdb or something).

you should write a guide on that. heh.

Well, I decided to see how stable Skynet is with real hardware. So, I built:

K6 III
Alladin 5 -based mobo
S3 Virge
Vortex 2 + SCD15
128mb RAM
Win98SE (ran game under pure DOS 7 though)

config.sys

1himem.sys
2emm386.exe noems
3dos=high,umb
4oakcdrom.sys

autoexec.bat

1aureal dos audio driver
2mscdex
3smartdrv
4msmouse11 mouse.exe
5doskey

And guess what? The game is having the same problems on this hardware as with DOSBOX. The game loads up in SVGA, but it eventually will freeze up. Going to a menu does it, and so does going into a building. The screen refuses to draw again (either half blue or all black) and the system needs a reset.

So, I pulled all cards except video, tried dos32a (bombs out completely when loading from DOS prompt), fail safe BIOS settings, game patch, a Pentium 200 MMX, and two other video cards (G200 and Verite V2200). I even tried swapping the Super 7 board for a 440BX+ Pentium 3. Same issue.

UNTIL I tried the game within Windows 98SE. It worked fine! It was noticeably slower, but it didn't crash at all! I am very confused here.

This game must be coded really poorly. It is incredibly picky. I have not been able to get it to work reliably at all in pure DOS. My only guess on what I could try next would be to drop down from 128MB to 32MB perhaps, but 128MB is the smallest DIMM I still have so that means yet another mobo swap. I have a PPRO with 128MB EDO, so I could drop that to half and try the game. I am really getting tired of putting time into this tho! I have never had this much trouble getting a game to run.

Did you try earlier versions of DOS like v6.22 instead of Dos 7.xx?

DosFreak wrote:

Did you try earlier versions of DOS like v6.22 instead of Dos 7.xx?

I have considered that, but I find it odd that the game would have problems with DOS 7 considering it was made in 1996. I've had so very few problems with DOS 7 that I haven't wanted to deal with locking myself to FAT16. It is worth a try though because maybe if I can figure out what combination actually works, it could help out DOSBOX somehow too.

At the Patches Scrolls website they have an 1,01 update. Have you tried updating the game?

Where can i download this game? 😐

DosFreak wrote:

Did you try earlier versions of DOS like v6.22 instead of Dos 7.xx?

Well, DOS 6.22 did nothing for it. Nor did my treasured PPro mobo with only 64MB RAM installed. Every single combination of hardware and DOS has had the exact same lockup/crash problem with the game. I did see a DOS4GW exception of some sort once on the PPRO (mixed in with the usual half-drawn blue image). It only works in Win98SE so far and it ran a good bit slower/choppy there.

What's particularly interesting (I guess) is that the game refuses to run at all without EMM386. I usually try to just have HIMEM loaded for DOS extender games, but with Skynet I get some sort of file read error as the game is starting up. I thought maybe the installer corrupted the files (it's a protected mode app too!) so I xcopy'ed the contents of the CD to the HDD. Still no go unless EMM386 is loaded. I get the same error with a F5-at-startup (nothing loaded at all) too.

Between that oddness, and that DOS32A won't load the game at all, I really do think this game is a patched together disaster of incompatibilities and bugs. The usual Bethesda work, I suppose, and I should've known from the start 🤣. It's just that I never would've imagined that it could be this bad.

The game works perfectly fine in VGA, but the SVGA mode is seemingly a lost cause unless you run it within Windows! I will maybe try it out with my Tualatin P3 and see if I can make it fast enough there.....

Neville wrote:

At the Patches Scrolls website they have an 1,01 update. Have you tried updating the game?

Yup, the patch does nothing for the problems.

Donut wrote:

Where can i download this game? 😐

on Ebay. Don't ask about pirating here please.

Ok, so it's not stable at all in Win9x either. It is the "most stable" there though, as in I can go in and out of buildings more than zero times (maybe 10 times before it crashes)....

I'm at a loss. I've even tried out different DOS mouse and cdrom drivers. I really think the SVGA mode just plain does not work right.

I was rummaging Google Groups for any sort of historical info on how to make this disaster of code run. It was interesting as there isn't all that much chat about instability. There were people have this same problem though, where the screen doesn't redraw after the game changes resolutions during a switch to the menu or into a new area. There was some talk of it being caused not by the video card at all, but some sort of memory bug. I ran into posts from Todd Howard (that Bethesda guy who's famous for Oblivion now and has been at Bethsoft forever).

Ahh well. This is pretty disappointing...

(btw, an open sandbox Terminator game would be pretty amazing. I would prefer that over Fallout 3. 😀 )

Could somebody please try this game (vga or svga mode, doesn't matter)
on some 386 system? Mobygames specs tell that it only runs on a 486+

A 3D game using DOS4GW under a 386? It will run like drunken snail. That's if it runs at all, it will probably need 8 megs of RAM or more.

swaaye wrote:

(btw, an open sandbox Terminator game would be pretty amazing. I would prefer that over Fallout 3. 😀 )

I suspect most Fallout fans would agree with you there. 😀

It will run like drunken snail.

Doesn't matter.
Also lots of dos4gw games run just fine on 386s.

Strangely, no matter what, if I start this game without EMM386 loaded (just HIMEM), I get a DOS4GW error 2001 (0Dh). I think the same thing happens from a completely clean boot (F5).

According to this page, this is a GPF.
http://www.tenberry.com/dos4g/faq/err2001.html

DOS32A bombs out in the same way, just a bit later in the game's startup process.

hmm interesting. i always had lockup/crash problems with skynet's SVGA mode under DOS/win98 (P3-500, riva TNT).
same as you described swaaye, but i gave up on this for a long time...

on the other side, skynet runs stable with SVGA on dosbox 0.72 for me (tested it today with default dosbox.conf, cycles=max).
my version is a cd-rip (i know, i know...) patched to 1.01 and future shock integrated.

with standart DOS4GW ive played it for around 30 min without a single crash. went indoor/outdoor and also switched from VGA to SVGA ingame often, with no problems.

running skynet with a DOS32A patched exe under dosbox, gave me some different results.
sometimes it starts up normal and sometimes it crashes with a 00h error after the startup process. thats still awesome, because it never worked with vdmsound.

anyway, i have no idea why the game crashes with SVGA for you swaaye. the only differences in our versions (except the ripped videos) could be the cracked skynet.exe, but thats unlikely...

have you tested it with some fixed cycle settings?

Could somebody please try this game (vga or svga mode, doesn't matter)
on some 386 system? Mobygames specs tell that it only runs on a 486+

Ok, I rebuilt my 386 to test this.

Machine specs are as follows:
i80386DX-20, Cyrix 387, 10Megs of ram, Tseng ET4000AX, SB16-mcd(isa card only,) 3x 3-CD changer, 254M Conner CP30254 hdisk(limited to 124M under DOS by BIOS selection.) NWDOS 7, MSDOS 5 with mouse driver loaded only.

And the verdict is that Terminator SN does not run on a 386. When executed with the /v(don't show cut scenes) option, the game will allow me to reach the main menu. If I select new game, I never reach the mission briefing and instead end up with a blank screen and no keyboard response. If I load a saved game transferred from another machine instead, I get the Loading... "screenshot," followed by a dump to DOS with a library error.

Swapping the 386 chip for a Ti486sxl chip(same motherboard) allows me to reach the mission briefing screen on a new game. Apparently the Ti486 isn't 486 compatible enough either though, as I can't get beyond the [/i]Loading... screen with it either. What follows is graphics corruption(which appears to be a DOS4GW error) and a hard lock. The result with a saved game is the same as for the 386.

I also tested with/without sound enabled with no change(other than that the digital audio test in setup also causes a lockup when supplied with the correct settings.)

These results are 100% repeatable here.

This 386 machine otherwise works fine, including digital audio outside of Terminator SN.

HTH

Thank you very much, i was assuming that the entries on mobygames
were correct with respect to the minimum processor requirement.
I also failed to get skynet to run under bochs compiled with 386-only
target support, which supports your testings.

Time to update the game in the compatibility list?

http://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=14 … T&search=skynet

Could it be an issue with the full version? I've tried the demo of T-Skynet from 3dgamers right now (used the 1.00 version).
The demo works almost perfect, even fast at 320x200 and okay at 640x480 on an Intel MacBook (2GHz) / 10.5.2 using "out of the box"/default settings of DosBox 0.72.
Midi didn't work, played with sound Fx only. The switch to 640x480 causes a long redraw phase of the picture (line by line), but after that it runs from quite smooth to acceptable frame rates even in that mode.
While quitting the demo to DOS, DosBox crashes sometimes - couldn't reproduce it, but it seems that the longer I've played (no matter in which graphic mode) the better the chance to get DosBox to crash in that situation.
Cheers, one