This is a strange one. Glidos has nothing to do with the saving of games, so it has to be a problem elsewhere in the system (unless it is that Glidos is driving your system too hard, and lack of adequate cooling is allowing it to overheat). Anyway, you said "Software"; does that mean you have tried the original tomb.exe without Glidos and you still see this problem?

Don't know. I think I've heard of this once before. No problems with other games?

stupid question.
Do you have any free diskspace ?

I have exactly the same problem, but mine is worse. About 80% of the time the game hangs when I simply "exit to title".

I have a Pentium 4 / 3GHz
Radeon 9800 Pro
E-MU 1820m Soundcard (Creative Professional)

I started running the game from a virtual drive and this seemed to alleviate the problem by a fraction but didn't fix it. I have acres of free disk space. When I run the game things do seem to get hot under the collar cos' the fan (which is ordinarilly almost silent) starts to make quite a racket.

No problem with the fan speeding up, so long as it does so enough to keep the temperature down. Anyway, I think if it was heat problems, there would be other symptoms, other types of crash not just the game stalling.

When this happens, is there a ntvdm process taking 99% of the CPU?

JC, how long have you had this problem? Used to be ok, didn't it?

I'm not sure about the "ntvdm" bit...should I check what's happening in the task manager in the midst of the hang?

I never had this problem on my old PC - an Athlon with an NVidea card - it's been a persistent problem on this current machine for the last year.
Sometimes the hang also happens when I do F4 to switch to the original textures. Also, I do get the clicking noise problem that I seem to remember Gambit reporting...the audible switching of screen resolution, most noticable when going through the "Core" title and the FMV stuff when starting the game. I was wondering if this may be related to the problem in some way?

I just went in for a look at the task manager in the midst of an "exit to title" hang: "System Idle Process" was registering 98 - 99% CPU usage.

Its still doing that now that I'm completely out of Glidos so I guess this is normal? Oh - the ambient sound still goes happily through it's loop during the hang, is there any significance in this?

The ambient sound is to be expected if TR crashes. It has either left Glidos running the MP3 version, or its left the CD playing an audio track.

Very difficult to think how Glidos could be involved in this problem. It interacts with TR almost entirely via Glide2x.ovl, and mainly that just picks up Glide commands. If it was Glidos itself that crashed then it could be to do with driving the graphics card wrongly, but its TR crashing and leaving Glidos running.

It could be to do with VESA support. Glidos should help when you have VESASupport: Yes in the ini file, but Glidos doesn't take over VESA entirely. Maybe TRs changes to the VESA palette are triggering the graphics card driver to do something.

The clicks from the monitor are interesting, especially if you get them even in windowed mode.

They don't happen in windowed mode - only Full Screen!

Interesting. Do you have your Glidos resolution the same as your Desktop, and is your Desktop 32bit?

Yes 😎

Have you tried substituting psVoodoo for OpenGlide?

OK - I tried psVoodoo but it actually made the problem worse. The hang still happened but when I did the emergency exit thing my desktop colours were all completely screwed. I rebooted the machine and tried again but the same thing happened.
Playing the game with psVoodoo effected some noticable differences as well: The textures lost some degree of sharpness - distant objects became increasingly blurred and so did angled textures,such as the floor. In a way this seemed to produce a more realistic effect, but I prefer the 20/20 visual clarity I get with the other Glide dll.
One thing I did prefer with the psVoodoo version though is that pickups and objects such as doors could not be seen "through" floors and walls, which is what happens with the first .dll. Pickups in particular have a "glow" to them with the first wrapper, but with psVoodoo they become firmly part of the environment.
After weighing the pros and cons though, since psVoodoo didn't fix the main problem I've decided to reinstate the .dll I started with!
Back to the drawing board Batman!

The lack of sharpness is because use of mipmaps is hard wired on. The peek through is lessened as you say; I might be able to take what I've learnt there and work it back into OpenGlide. "glow" thing is interested. Hadn't noticed it until you said.

Anyway, the important thing is it more or less proves the crashing isn't to do with the way the graphics card is being driven, because the two wrappers are using completely different methods.

Mad experiment. Try setting the resolution different to your Desktop. To be honest that should make it worse, but you never know. This looks like some nasty interaction between VESA and fullscreen 3D modes.

thanks for the reply.

i'm willing to consider that my game is locking up because the version i have is bad. i'm gonna go play it directly using tomb.exe and see if it reproduces the error.

additionally, i've obtained an alternate copy of the game from a different source. if i wanted glidos to use this version instead of the version i have, would it be a simple matter of sticking this new cd into my drive? or would i have to uninstall / reinstall with glidos?

I'd recommend uninstalling and reinstalling everything, including VDMSound. No idea why, but there has been quite a number of occasions when a reinstall has made problems disappear.

Windows MCE is another joker in the pack. Perhaps Microsoft have introduced new problems for DOS programs.

heh. I recently reinstalled Windows XP. I have a list of standard software I install each time I reinstall and this time I really haven't strayed (much) from this list. Bare XP SP2 with no updates since.....

Just noticed yesterday that absolutely NO dos games will work in NTVDM now except for 16bit console commands like "mem". heh. Not really interested in troubleshooting it either but it was nice to test when something doesn't work with DosBox. Oh well....that's what VPC/Vmware/Qemu is for......stupid NTVDM.

But doesn't that mean the install went wrong? ntvdm seems to be working for most people.

All the same, I must try integrating DosBox with Glidos sometime, to prepare for the dreaded Windows 64.

Nah, Install went fine. Most likely I used an updated version of a program I already had and it used that .dll that communicates directly with I/O. Can't remember the name right now but it used to cause problems with MBM and VDmSound until Vlad contacted the MBM author and got it fixed. Something similar is probably happening here. Mabye ATI Tray Tools/ATI Tool/SpeedFan most likely.....

I'm interested to see what gulikoza's next build will look like and if he included his Glide code. Considering that about a year ago he stated that 640x480 TR ran pretty decently I'm wondering how it will run nowadays with all of the improvements in DosBox......gotta go check ykhwong's build and see if he's still including Glide support....

I probably commited a cardinal sin in that I hadn't ensured that I had the most up-to-date display driver. I've gone ahead and done that now and this has forced me to review all the settings - there are quite a few, and since I don't fully understand all the options there is a good chance I might create problems for myself by fiddling with them. I'll try things systematically. one at a time and test the effect.

I've discovered the cause of the clicking - my desktop was running a refesh rate of 85 Herz, setting it back to 60 Herz has resolved the issue. I haven't trialled things enough to see if all other problems have disappeared yet, but one undesirable effect I am now getting is a flicker around the centre of the screen which happens immediately after Lara stops moving or after looking around with the camera.

...just went for another run - exit to title hang happened again!