Ok, i'm getting the exact same error with Screamer 2.

I have 3dfx patches for both games.

My system:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7N400-L
CPU: AMD Barton 2800+
RAM: 1gb Geil PC3200 DDR
Video card: Radeon 9800 Pro w/Catalyst 5.6
Sound Card: Soundblaster Live! 5.1 digital
OS: Windows XP Pro

I don't have any other old DOS games which run in Glide handy. But the two I do give me the GliDOS "Read Error"

The send error dialog must be because Glidos is crashing, and then the Read error comes from the DOS side complaining that Glidos isn't there any more.

But why on earth Glidos would crash I don't know. I'd suggest deleting the Glidos folder and reinstalling. Its very surprising how often that cures problems. I would have suspected graphics driver problems, but you say you've installed 5.6. Err, that is from ATI's web site, and not from Windows update?

Yeah Catalys 5.6 from ATI.com.

Still getting "Read Failure" after deletion and reinstalling glidos.

Heres exactly what happens:

It goes fullscreen and I see some text on the screen. It then goes back to the desktop with a black window titled "Glide server". The send error report dialog has the title "GliDos MFC Application". I press "dont send" and it brings up the "Read Failure" message box.

Any ideas?

This is very unusual. It is not uncommon for people to have trouble getting Glidos going, but it is almost always the DOS side that plays up. In this case it is the Windows app crashing. Now there could be a bug in Glidos, but you would then expect a lot of people to report similar problems.

I hate to say it, but reinstalling Windows from scratch is my suggestion. Since I've had only one ( I think) report before of such problems, I think it has to be one of the standard Windows dlls that is corrupted.

Ok, I found the problem. The error report was being triggered in one of the ATI dlls so I looked through all my ATI driver settings and I had a custom SmartShader set for OpenGL. It appears that Glidos diddn't like it. I disabled smartshaders and I can run carmageddon.... albeit without sound and at around 5fps.

Any idea why it's so slow?

Well i'm happy(er) now.

Don't know. Nothing wrong with your specs. Should be fine. Maybe the slowness relates to lack of audio. Have you installed VDMSound?

Yeah, I have VDMS. Should I be launching the game through it? I have tried running carmav.exe normally and through vdms. No sound. I've run carmageddons SNDSETUP.exe file through VDMS. I can't get my soundcard configured without VDMS.

I also have the game running through dgVoodoo and it runs at about 80fps at 1600x1200. It looks stunning for such an old game! hehe. Cant get any sound in GliDos or dgVoodoo.

VDMS emulates a sound card, so if you set a game up with VDMS then you have to run the game with the same settings in order for it to work.

Ok, I got it working. It seems the sndsetup.exe for some reason couldn't write to the S3.ini file which appears to store the sound card info. I ran sndsetup.exe through VDMS and noted down the settings. Then opend up setup.ini and copied the values over to s3.ini. Got sound now 😀

Glad you got that sorted. What about speed? Is it still slow with Glidos.

Strikes me that I haven't tried carmageddon since I swapped from nVidia to ATI. Any game that uses palette tricks will be slow on ATI cards.

You can try setting IgnorePaletteChange to 1 in OpenGLid.ini

On the other hand frame buffer reads are slow on ATI too. Maybe its doing that, although I didn't think it did.

Oh, one more possibility. I notice that in Glidos.ini, Carmageddon is the only game with ControlJudderFix set to 2. Try setting it to 1.

I have found that glidos does not like playing the start up movie on carmageddon from the cd, simple fix forget all that other crap and just try installing a no cd patch for the 3dfx.exe, there's a link around here somewhere, sourced for a russian guy. it worked for me perfect graphics on 1024*768, apart from that annoying banner. its an excellent program but unfortunatly not worth 10 dollars to me.

oh yeah on another quick note earlier you said thet glidos crashing could be the reason for the read error, ou could kill two birds with one stone and speculate thet the error was caused from a read error on a movie file, mabye the format isnt supported or glidos is trying to apply glide to a movie, and thus failing. but I am probably wrong. I am no programmer or comp tech.

http://66.79.179.12/pcgamefixes/CARM3DFX.ZIP

me again here's that link for the no cd patch.