I like sports games, like boxing, basketball or soccer, I even watch my weight and eat just fatless food... I am still overweight so... I guess it doesn't help... xD whatever... thanks for all your replies... you were all a great help...

Regards,
Stevie

I've written an email to Cinemaware explaining about this issue. Hopefully they will release a new TV Sports Boxing package that would contain my loader. Less and less people use real ms-dos these days, so it seems to me quite absurd to release a game that doesn't work using WinXP (nor even using DOSBox alone).

PS - The original loader even gave me problems running it under native ms-dos (probably related to newer/faster hardware).

Hello,

When I run TV Sports Boxing under DOSBox, it plays music accordingly, but there is no sound effects.

Actually, when I select a menu option, it plays a punch sound and that is the last sound effect the game plays.

I tryed with DOSBox 0.70, 0.65 and 0.63.

This happens even if I configre the game to use the PC Speaker instead of AdLib.

I see some people here telling the game is OK for them. Didn't this sound effects problem happen to you guys?

My config is:
AMD Athlon XP 2400+
512MB RAM
MB Asus A78V-X w/ SoundMax integrated audio
GeForce FX 5200 64MB
Windows XP Pro + SP2

PS1.: I tryed running on other computers, too. Same problem.
PS2.: The sound effects play OK if I use a regular DOS boot disk.
PS3.: I tryed both Cinemaware TV Sports Boxing and ABC Wide Boxing and got exactly the same problem.

> it plays a punch sound and that is the last sound effect the game plays.

Could be wrong soundcard interrupt.

Judging from the latest posting, the game seems to be at least "payable" now. 😉 😉

I didn't think it could me an IRQ problem, cause it happens even if I configure the game to use the PC speaker instead of a sound card.

But I tested it tough, and the error happens with all IRQ configurations available.

So, does anyone have this game running without the sound error I mentioned?

Can someone download the game and tell me if the sound effects works for you?

http://www.cinemaware.com/clsgame_tvboxing.asp

Thanks.

Concerning the sound. There's a problem with it on newer hardware. I know for a fact that the PC internal speaker sound worked on a 386 PC where I used to play the game on. On modern PC's the PC internal speaker sound doesn't work properly. This is because of the way the game programs the PIT (Programmable Interval Timer), which is used to produce sound for the internal PC speaker.

I'm a fan of this game and played it alot during the good old DOS days, which can be relived now thanks to the DOSBox team. 😀
Back then I delved into the inner workings of the game itself, since it had quite some bugs. I made a patch that fixes bugs, which includes configuring the PIT properly, so that the PC internal speaker sound is working again.

I'm posting a bugfixes loader as attachment. I was also able to remove the copylock PC protection from this game. Although it runs fine with the crack, I'm still using a version without the annoying Copylock PC protection. I can't post the Copylock PC free version and the bugfix patch for it due to reasons mentioned earlier. The loader doesn't make permanent changes, and therefore you need to run it everytime to fix the sound bug.

It works perfectly now.

Thanks, very much!!!!

-=Slaye]2=- (and anyone that has removed protections from old games): wouldn't it be possible to post a patch only to remove the protection? That would shift the responsibility for actually using the patch from the coder to the user. It's not necessary to post the patched executable itself. Just a thought...

Well that won't make much difference imo. Providing the means to patch the executable or releasing a patched executable myself. Even if I were allowed to release a patch, I couldn't easily release it. I'll try to explain why without getting too technical.

The file is is protected with the Copylock PC protection. The protection uses direct modification of debug and trace interrupts. That means bad news for any patcher that uses the code trace interrupt to check for the instruction sequence that ends the decryption of the executable body in memory. To make things worse it uses the code trace interrupt itself to encrypt previous executed instructions and decrypts the instruction executed next. So only a few instructions are visible at time of code execution. And I haven't even mentioned anti trace techniques yet, which will cause every int01 stepper to fail miserabely when used. Unless you understand how they're used and how to avoid those pitfalls.

To be able to rebuild the executable you'll need a clean unencrypted body of the executable in memory. And you also have to make sure you get that image before any segment relocations are done to patch far jumps/calls in memory, which normally the DOS loader would do. That would mean I'd have to trace through the loader code because of the on the fly de/encryption the loader uses to decrypt the executable. I would have to do that to be able to rip the decryption routines that decrypt the code body.

That just takes way too much time for me and getting the original code body can be easily done using the DOSBox debugger or another debugger that has memory breakpoint and memory dump abilities. That gets the job done in a minute work once you understand what's going on.