VOGONS


First post, by VirtuaIceMan

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This below is now FIXED! Go to ZellSF's post below, by clicking here!

I've got a copy of Lotus Challenge, an Xbox port by Kuju, published in the UK by Sold Out Software. It has numerous interesting bugs on Win8.1 64bit, as follows:

1. Installing the game requires you to open the CD and run setup.exe, to dodge all the crappy Sold Out Flash animations menu rubbish. It'll throw an error about something not pointing to the right thing, but it will install.

2. When you run the game's config, don't set Z depth above middle or the game will crash saying your video card isn't good enough (this was the same on my older PC too).

3. There's no sound in the game (though the intro video plays fine). It seems to use HRTF audio from the log file, but is silent throughout

4. If you run the game without any compatibility mode it'll play fine, but you won't be able to load savegames (which are saved to the Documents/Lotus Challenge/SaveGame folder). However if you run the game with Win98 or Win95 compatibility mode then the savegames WILL load... but the cars will never leave the grid at the start of a race! Tricky one!

So yes, a smorgasbord of bugs. The game looks dreadful (as it's 640x480 locked) but that's just a poor porting effort...

UPDATE: the similar engined GT-R 400, by Kuju but ported by In|Fusion Games, also has no sound! So perhaps that's an easier one to look into, as it's more available around the net...

Last edited by VirtuaIceMan on 2015-05-18, 17:59. Edited 1 time in total.

My PC spec: Win10 64bit, i7-4970K (not overclocked), KFA2 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Creative Soundblaster ZXr, 16GB RAM, Asus Z97-A motherboard, NZXT 410 case, ROG Swift GSYNC monitor

Reply 1 of 9, by ZellSF

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You should probably learn to use the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit. Do that, go through the fixes and find out which ones break or fix things.

Reply 2 of 9, by VirtuaIceMan

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I've got that. Might have to do a "see what fixes the save game issue" step-by-step (as I did to fix NFSSE on XP), but the game takes a little while to boot up each time, so I might die of boredom! But yeah, it's probably one thing fixes it, and others break the input.

My PC spec: Win10 64bit, i7-4970K (not overclocked), KFA2 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Creative Soundblaster ZXr, 16GB RAM, Asus Z97-A motherboard, NZXT 410 case, ROG Swift GSYNC monitor

Reply 3 of 9, by filipetolhuizen

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VirtuaIceMan wrote:
I've got a copy of Lotus Challenge, an Xbox port by Kuju, published in the UK by Sold Out Software. It has numerous interesting […]
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I've got a copy of Lotus Challenge, an Xbox port by Kuju, published in the UK by Sold Out Software. It has numerous interesting bugs on Win8.1 64bit, as follows:

2. When you run the game's config, don't set Z depth above middle or the game will crash saying your video card isn't good enough (this was the same on my older PC too).

3. There's no sound in the game (though the intro video plays fine). It seems to use HRTF audio from the log file, but is silent throughout

4. If you run the game without any compatibility mode it'll play fine, but you won't be able to load savegames (which are saved to the Documents/Lotus Challenge/SaveGame folder). However if you run the game with Win98 or Win95 compatibility mode then the savegames WILL load... but the cars will never leave the grid at the start of a race! Tricky one!

These are some important clues.
The Z depth above middle might be 32-bit Z Buffer, which Geforce cards can't handle (if it's what you have).
Regarding the sound problem it's worth to try Alchemy as it places a different dsound.dll inside the game's folder. "CorrectSoundDeviceId", "WaveOutIgnoreBadFormat" and "WaveOutUsePreferredDevice" are some flags in ACT that try to fix sound related problems.
About the savegames, the flag "CorrectFilePaths" might fix loading them. The cars never leaving the grid might be caused by the flag "IgnoreScheduler", which is present in Win9x compatibility mode.

Reply 4 of 9, by VirtuaIceMan

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Just tried all of them (incidentally ToCA Race Driver series run with 32bit Z Buffer (GTX 980)), but no difference.

My PC spec: Win10 64bit, i7-4970K (not overclocked), KFA2 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Creative Soundblaster ZXr, 16GB RAM, Asus Z97-A motherboard, NZXT 410 case, ROG Swift GSYNC monitor

Reply 5 of 9, by VirtuaIceMan

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Looking round the web, other people have reported the lack of sound in Lotus/GT-R 400, and also in Crescent Suzuki Racing, which uses the same engine. No one has any idea of how to fix it, the sound works in XP but not in Win7+.

My PC spec: Win10 64bit, i7-4970K (not overclocked), KFA2 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Creative Soundblaster ZXr, 16GB RAM, Asus Z97-A motherboard, NZXT 410 case, ROG Swift GSYNC monitor

Reply 6 of 9, by VirtuaIceMan

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I just had a go running GTR-400 in WinXP virtual machine (via VMware Player), and the sound worked fine. The game has a sub-folder called "savegame" and in the logfile.txt it has these 5 lines, which are entirely missing on Win8.1:

Found sound device[0]: 'Primary Sound Driver' driver:''
Found sound device[1]: 'Creative Sound Blaster PCI' driver:'es1371mp.sys'
Soundmanager using 128 buffers - no hardware 3D
Features: continuous rate,
Sample rates: 4000 -> 48000

I tried using ALchemy (no difference), putting the es1371mp.sys file from the WinXP virtual machine into the game folder (no difference), tried IndirectSound (no difference), although IndirectSound's log says this:

[[===========================================================================]]
This file is automatically generated every time that IndirectSound is used
[[===========================================================================]]

IndirectSound was loaded statically at process startup
The IndirectSound library being loaded is located at D:\Games\gtr400\DSOUND.dll
Version -- 0.12
The process loading IndirectSound is located at D:\Games\gtr400\GTR400.exe
File version info doesn't exist
IndirectSound is being unloaded because the process is terminating

My PC spec: Win10 64bit, i7-4970K (not overclocked), KFA2 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Creative Soundblaster ZXr, 16GB RAM, Asus Z97-A motherboard, NZXT 410 case, ROG Swift GSYNC monitor

Reply 7 of 9, by ZellSF

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Copy dsound3d.dll from your XP VM's system32 to the game directory (tested with some random GT-R 400 and Crescent Suzuki Racing rips I found).

Reply 8 of 9, by VirtuaIceMan

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Perfect! This works fine, both on GTR-400 and Lotus Challenge, sound is back! I guess the games checked for that dll, which isn't included in newer DirectX.

If anyone else needs the file, you can download it here (unzip it into the game folder for GTR-400/Lotus Challenge/Crescent Suzuki Racing):

The attachment dsound3d.zip is no longer available

My PC spec: Win10 64bit, i7-4970K (not overclocked), KFA2 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Creative Soundblaster ZXr, 16GB RAM, Asus Z97-A motherboard, NZXT 410 case, ROG Swift GSYNC monitor

Reply 9 of 9, by umisery

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A bit off-topic, but any solution to get controllers working properly in this game?