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DOSBox crashing with Syndicate (might be general error)

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First post, by abelthorne

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Hello,
I hadn't used DOSBox for monthes and just installed it on Linux (Ubuntu "Feisty" 7.04 with DOSBox 0.70).

I have reinstalled Syndicate (first game, without the data disk American Revolt) and it crashes when I lose.

After a mission fails (although I only tried the first two), the animated sequence starts to play and DOSBox quits.
After that, I have a lot of errors output in the terminal (I'm not sure if they happen during the game or when it crashes) :

DOSBox stdout> Illegal write to 8281836a, CS:IP      158:  21f818
DOSBox stdout> Illegal write to 8281836b, CS:IP      158:  21f818
DOSBox stdout> Illegal write to 8281836c, CS:IP      158:  21f818
DOSBox stdout> Illegal write to 8281836d, CS:IP      158:  21f818

Then this error :

DOSBox stdout> Exit to error: DynCore: illegal option in opcode 0xff

Is it a know problem ? a configuration problem ? a DOSBox bug ?

I haven't tried other games yet to see if the crash happens too.

Reply 2 of 9, by abelthorne

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Haven't tried it yet as I was waiting for it to be packaged (0.70 is the current version in the Ubuntu repositories).

I've just seen a guide for running Syndicate with DOSBox that suggested to update the DOS extender. I've tried a more recent version of DOS4GW (2.01a) and there was a slight change : instead of quitting after the animation, DOSBox hanged and kind of crashed the X server while taking a lot of CPU usage.

I'll try to compile DOSBox 0.71 from source to see if it works better.

EDIT : just tried DOSBox 0.71 and same problem.

Reply 3 of 9, by Neville

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You know, it may not be an emulation issue. I remember the same version of "Syndicate" hanging after playing several missions on my old Pentium II with DOS. "Strike Commander" had a similar problem, although it was less frequent.

My guess is that DOS4GW.EXE doesn't mix well with Pentium computers and more than 32 Mb of RAM.

Reply 5 of 9, by abelthorne

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Same crash.

I'm starting to wonder if my Syndicate installation is correct. Maybe I have a corrupt file (although I don't think it would crash that way - now it seems that each time the X server crashes or it might depend of the moment the crash occurs).

Reply 8 of 9, by abelthorne

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I have tried DOS32A and new version of DOS4GW.

It seems reproducable at 100 % but I don't have a savegame.
A few days ago, I reinstalled DOSBox on Linux (last time I used it was about 1 year ago when I was still using Windows) and gave it a try on Syndicate for testing purpose.
I failed at mission 2 and DOSBox quit while playing the animated sequence that followed. I later tried to fail mission 1 and it crashed too.

All I have to do to reproduce the problem is start a new game, start mission 1 and get killed at the beginning of the level.

EDIT : found an answer on another forum : it seems the french version I use is corrupt. People have tried with two french versions and can reproduce the same crash (using DOSBox with Linux / Windows and VMDSound) while it works flawlessly with an english version.

So it is not a DOSBox issue. Sorry.

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