Don't use the dynamic core, I guess

"Screamer" used to crash a lot under real DOS with SVGA mode. Play in VGA mode and you'll be able to complete the championship.

The VGA mode can run a bit crazy too, with the car bodies rotating on the wheels more than they should. Screamer 1 is a crazy beast, shame there was never a 3D version of it (well okay there was but just for one card I believe, vetz can say more about that!)

VirtuaIceMan wrote:

Screamer 1 is a crazy beast, shame there was never a 3D version of it (well okay there was but just for one card I believe, vetz can say more about that!)

The short or long story?

Both?

Short story:
S3 Virge exclusive

Long story:
A special OEM version came bundled with the Number Nine Reality 332 card which had the original S3 Virge (325) chip. No official patch was ever released and chances of finding the bundled version seemed very slim. Luck had it that a user named kanyero here on Vogons found an old homemade patch made from the Reality 332 version and posted it in this thread..

Basically the patch adds bilinear filtering to the game, but it is very appearent that it is not very well implemented and that the game was not made with 3D acceleration in mind. I've made short video of Screamer running on the fastest S3 Virge card available (GX2), and still the framerate is not what I call supersmooth. The picture is also quite blurry with texture artifacts (horizontal lines in the road and top of trees most noticable). Running this game on the S3 Virge 325 must have been horrible.

I can also add that the game requires a pretty hefty CPU to run in SVGA mode. A Pentium 133 is not enough (footage at 2:35), you probably need a Pentium 200 (and up) to run it smoothly enough in todays standard. If I go back to the OP question, then no, I can't help much and I haven't seen any crashes with Screamer in real DOS.

Interesting, I had no idea about this vetz. thanks for sharing.

About the OP, from my personal experience Screamer frequently had crashes in SVGA on real dos. The crashing was mainly on the track SunBeach Hill (5th track), where 90% of the time you'll crash on a exact spot on the track (if I recalled, docks part or shortly after), 5% you can get the crash around any other part, and the remaining 5% you can actually complete it - but VERY, VERY unusual. Also, there's a very minor chance to get crashes in other tracks, but again really unusual as well.

Dosbox runs the game flawlessly, but sadly you can't get past this bug, only contacting milestone 🤣. There's a workaround on how to be able to not crash on the suject track (you'll find easily on the dosbox page of screamer), but unfortunately that workaround causes the track in SVGA do not look good at all (missing buildings, trees, etc), therefore looks even worse than just play it on VGA for that track.

It was indeed one beast of a game, it ran pretty good on my Pentium 166 (non-mmx) back in the day. Very impressive game for 1995! Never been a fan of the sequels, they changed from exotics to rally and all, not my cup of t ea.

cheers

Thank you very much. I'm 36 years old, i play this games (Screamer 1/2/rally) since my 18 years and i didn't know how to go further than this damned 5th track... 😒

In VGA, no more problem in Real DOS. Thank you! 😊

Same here, Crash on ddraw

Just played 5th track on OpenGL, works, but I had a tweak I did yesterday : rename MAP5H.DAT to MAP5H.bak and MAP5L.DAT to MAP5H.DAT

I'm very curious about the 3D engine thus. Strange to see those game on Dos...

Wish they would release sourcecode... or someone would dissambled this game like diablo