dr_st wrote:

Interesting and thank you for sharing. 😀 No less interesting follow-ups are:

1) What happens if you use EMM386 with different parameters (like RAM)?
2) Why would someone want to have EMM386 NOEMS in their configuration? Can EMS emulation really hurt anything? And if it can, and if you really don't need EMS, then perhaps it's better to use UMBPCI, the real-mode DOS UMB allocator.

Tried with "RAM" but CTCM seems to not be in the best terms if it, freezing the whole thing. Using EMM386 with no additional parameters make everything work fine but I get ~560K conventional RAM (anything set to load on high memory loads on base 640K).

dr_st wrote:

I am quite confident no raw DOS 7.1 comes with any of these. You must have used some customized build where someone packaged these drivers/utilities.

Yep, it was a ISO i found on the internet. I think it was put toghether by a group called CDU (China DOS Union). AFAIK there isn't even a MS-distributed version of 7.1 (besides the one packed on Win9x), although I may be wrong and on top of that I've been away for some time now from old computers, so I'm still catching "new" things up and recapping stuff.

For the record, this little box I'm trying stuff is a Pentium MMX 233MHz, ASUS TX97-LE, 64MB DIMM, AWE32 w/ 8MB exp, ProMotion aT-24 2MB PCI.

EDIT: Update! EMM386 from DOS 7.1 behaved the same as the 6.22 one. Seems like UMBPCI did the trick. Now programs are correctly loading on high memory blocks, Tyrian works and no more CTCM crashes. 😀

Snayperskaya wrote:

Tried with "RAM" but CTCM seems to not be in the best terms if it, freezing the whole thing.

Interesting. I haven't had problems with EMM386 RAM and CTCM. I use EMM386.EXE RAM I=B400-B7FF I=CA00-CBFF AUTO. I bet it depends on specific hardware configurations.

I decided to test the EMM386 suggestion and created a clean DOS boot floppy (from Windows 98SE) with nothing on it. No AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS. Both Jazz and Tyrian worked, no problem!

The only issue is that these programs give you a runtime error if your CPU is too fast. I never got this error on my 486DX2-50, but I get it on my Dell Optiplex GX1 that I upgraded to a P3-700. Luckily, the GX1 allows you to "throttle down" on the fly (Ctrl-Alt-/); my P3-700 basically turns into a 386-33. However, you can "throttle up" once the game has started, as Tyrian is a bit too slow at that speed.

I find Tyrian to be the most sensitive about high clocks. Probably because I played the game almost every day back then 😁

Apparently it happens on almost all games coded in (Turbo) Pascal released on that period.

Snayperskaya wrote:

Apparently it happens on almost all games coded in (Turbo) Pascal released on that period.

It's also easily patched with various different programs. (It's a simple edit to a particular hex string.)

I tried EMM386 with the RAM option, and Jazz worked fine. I am also loading CTCM for my AWE64 Gold, and I selected SoundBlaster sound.

Jorpho wrote:

Snayperskaya wrote:

Apparently it happens on almost all games coded in (Turbo) Pascal released on that period.

It's also easily patched with various different programs. (It's a simple edit to a particular hex string.)

That's cool. I've seen a patch for the timing bug that affects Tyrian on some sites but never tried it. I was on a 754 socket system when I last tried to run the DOS version of Tyrian (I was running XP back than).

Compiling a list of these generic timing bug patch utilities is one of the first things we did here at VOGONS like 12-13 years ago, if I remember right.
Fix "Error 200" (Divide by zero) - by Snover and Stiletto, with thanks to edelbeb