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Prince of Persia II

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First post, by PrivatePanic

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Hi

I'm able to run Prince of persia II on VDMSound with complete sound and music. The whole introduction, it runs sweet. Also the very beginning of the game, just like on my old 386 😉)

But then, everytime after I killed the 4th bad guy, the game begins to slow down quite a bit, like it switched to slo-mo-mode. Then, after some more seconds, it just quits itself.

Any Idea what can be the reason? As I said, before the 4th enemy, the game runs smooth and at normal speed!

Thanks,

PrivatePanic

Reply 1 of 37, by Stiletto

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Vlad has a fix for this - a hacked SB16 driver, IIRC. He sent it to me, I did some testing, seemed to work okay but if I ran setup again it would be deleted, so I had to archive it.

Aha! Here's Vlad's notes on it:

Run setup once (just to select the music device, you select any digital one), then overwrite digi.drv and do *not* run setup again (or if you do you remember to re-overwrite digi.drv). The
digi.drv I gave you is the patched SB16 driver. Also, this workaround is more for what looks like a SB weirdness (not emulated by VDMSound but, funnily enough, emulated by SoundFX). I have yet to find the "justification" (read: documentation) that explains this quirk, and "fixing" it in VDMSound may break other games which is why I made a game-patch instead (easier).



I don't think he's made any progress since writing about it, so I'll attach the patch. Unzip into the Prince directory and overwrite when prompted.

Note that this is pretty much a "beta" patch, and all standard disclaimers apply.

It may be worth noting that the original "Where in Space is Carmen Sandiego?" and Carmen Deluxe CD-ROM both used the same version of SETUP.EXE (according to the plaintext hidden inside PoP2's SETUP.EXE), perhaps they also suffer from a similar problem.

BTW, I'm moving this to the VDMSound forum, where I think it should go. 😀

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  • Filename
    digi.zip
    File size
    1.67 KiB
    Downloads
    698 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 6 of 37, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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PrivatePanic wrote:

Yes, I tried DosBox, the game then won't run at all with the errormessage "Couldn't find resource file PRINCE.DAT" ...must be something with the paths, I don't know, the file is there.

Might need to check with Harekiet on this as it's come up in some other games as well.

BTW, I forgot to ask which release of "Prince of Persia 2" this might be. Floppy? The "Prince of Persia Collection" CD? (Hybrid PC/Mac version)

No, I didn't try Emulators, I got none yet.

Well, actually, DosBox is a basic PC emulator; but you might check a place like zophar.net for what's out there.

FWIW, the original seems to run fine both with VDMSound and DosBox.

Reply 8 of 37, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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Snover wrote:

...why not just run the SNES version?

Wasn't sure about how many versions there were. I knew there were 20+ versions of the original, but didn't have a list for PoP2.

It should run fine on the Mac (in high-res) as well, but I've got to find my CD and test to be sure.

Reply 9 of 37, by Stiletto

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PrivatePanic wrote:

mmh, too bad, it doesn't work 🙁 Same behaviour...
But thanks for your answer, tho 😀

Okay, well, it DID work mostly with the floppy disk version. Vlaaadddd???

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 11 of 37, by Fisu

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I didn't have any slowdown problems with Prince Of Persia 2. With WXP and Vdmsound it worked pixel-perfect to the moment I landed on desert island and walked to quicksand. Game froze on that point and I don't know if was random or if the game always crashes in that point. Haven't tried it since.

Reply 12 of 37, by Luciano

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Fisu wrote:

I didn't have any slowdown problems with Prince Of Persia 2. With WXP and Vdmsound it worked pixel-perfect to the moment I landed on desert island and walked to quicksand. Game froze on that point and I don't know if was random or if the game always crashes in that point. Haven't tried it since.

Hello, maybe I have some information.

The same thing happens to me. But, I've tried playing the game without loading vdmsound and the game runs well (in the speakers). It hasn't froze on the quicksand. I've even walked into the mountain.

When I try to play with vdmsound the game sounds great, but froze on quicksand.

Don't know what to do neither.

Reply 13 of 37, by Stiletto

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But without VDMSound, did you have your sound set up in Prince of Persia 2? It should work okay with sound disabled. With sound enabled, though, you should have problems.

Hm - time to do some testing...

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 15 of 37, by Stiletto

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Stiletto wrote:

It should work okay with sound disabled. With sound enabled, though, you should have problems.

No, I'm having problems both ways. Arg!

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 16 of 37, by vladr

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The hack works, just make sure you haven't overwritten it. The quicksand is *the* test. With the hack I passed that without any problems. If you still get bogged down there then the hack was overwritten by the non-hacked file.

V.

Reply 17 of 37, by Stiletto

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I'll try it again later.

Martin Kiewitz recommends a new DMA transfer thingy in OS/2, BTW.
http://en.ecomstation.ru/kiewitzsoft/vdd-vdma.php

Interesting links for later use:
http://www.jeuxvideo.com/btajv99/etajvhtm/00100306.htm
http://www.maccheats.com/oldgames/Prince_of_Persia.html
http://gamesdomain.hol.gr/directd/pc/dos/tools/pp2-edit.html
http://www.phreak.org/archives/The_Hacker_Chr … p4/pp2sav20.zip

Reply 18 of 37, by Luciano

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vladr wrote:

The hack works, just make sure you haven't overwritten it. The quicksand is *the* test. With the hack I passed that without any problems. If you still get bogged down there then the hack was overwritten by the non-hacked file.

V.

The hack works with the quicksand, you're right. And also works with the "movie clips". But, the same thing (froze and crash) happens ahead in the game. In the other levels.

Too sad.

I can't play the game without the sound blaster emulation. It's horrible!

Reply 19 of 37, by vladr

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Crashes are different. The patch fixes a severe slowdown caused by the game's SB driver, but no crashes. The game does react strangely when EMS is enabled, so you may want to disable EMS when playing POPII. In any case, saving often helps (though it sucks to always have to replay from the beginning of the level up to the point where you saved... though I *did* manage a few years ago to hack the POPII save-files sufficiently to restore in any room at any level with any enemies and lives and so on).

Cheers,
V.