@wd

Lol Another group of programmers that should be blamed/fired.

We created loadfix for that matter. Maybe we should advertise it use a bit more.

Thank you for tracking this bug !

"loadfix -1" makes it possible to play cannon fodder 2 with music and sounds. I wonder why 1kB less is enough.
(it is also not an old game)

cannon fodder 2 works following amount of conv memory:
520k - works with no sound at all
536k - works with sound (without title music)
584k - works with full sound
637k - works with no sound at all
so I guess the game counts to 99 😀

Yeeepeeee!!! WC2 is working! At last I can replay one of my real favorite games, one of the first I got after buying a sound card (anyone remember the sound galaxy sound card anyway? adlib, sb, disney and a fourth card compatibility...).

Btw, it's true that loadfix isn't something we think about immediatly when there's a problem (in the "old times", the problem was to get enough memory anyway 😉 ). It could be more advertised when problems arise...

Again, great, great job everyone working on this project!

Anybody willing to add the loadfix info to the wing commander 2 compatibility report in the database (at dosbox.sf.net)

This is incredible, I waited so long for WC2 to work and all it takes is to run loadfix. Maybe it could've run under Dosbox a year ago.

OK magamo added the loadfix fix to the database, however it's hard to spot after all the "doesn't work" messages 😀

Btw, Alkarion, judging from your avatar pic, I guess you must be quite happy to get it working 😉

Oh yes, I can't wait to fly the Broadsword again. All I have to say is:

Die, Furball!

(But Wing Commander 1 is still my all-time favourite)

Indeed, after all the hassle with this one, it'd be nice if someone could place my latest comment in the compatibility database before all the, now obsolete comments of the game having more issues than a psychiatric ward. 😀

It's not as hard to see as one might think, though. 😀

I have one, rather interesting aside to this whole debacle. Wing Commander Armada seems to suffer from a very similar issue. Try running Armada.exe with 637kb RAM free, it just won't happen (with ems=false)

But after you loadfix out 64kb of ram, (after a restart of dosbox, as Armada dying seems to destabilize things) Armada runs quite nicely... Although I'm noticing something that might be a caveat in the future, possibly for CanadaCow to look at: With Privateer and Armada, if you have ems=false, and ipx=true, neither will run, stating that "A network driver has been found, cannot switch to protected mode safely" Bloody Hillarious, Origin, considering that one of the ways to play Armada is over IPX or NetBIOS LAN... Hmph.

That seems like the first real argument I've seen to possibly enable VCPI support, though I don't know if it would actually make a difference. Of course, Armada seems rather silly anyway, even when ems=false, it still reports that it's Initializing and using EMS... Of course, it's 3am, I believe Armada uses an internal EMS Memory Manager/Emulator if a VCPI Complient EMM is not present?

I only mention this 'cause of Armada, Privateer, as a 1 player only game, one can switch IPX off and there'd be no harm, no foul.

Indeed, that's a strange sentence Privateer is printing out when IPX is enabled 😉 However, the game plays a lot lot more faster already and is almost playable fine on my box. Let's say that by the time I have finished WC2 and its special operations...

Btw, Alkarion, I tend to prefer the Sabre (or sometimes the Morningstar, but it's missing a turret) to the Broadsword or the crossbow :p

I'm glad someone figured this out, I was coming in here to post about it in case no one had noticed, but being new I thought I'd run a search first.

This might sound a bit jaded, but I think that perhaps the Wing Commander games do this because, even on genuine hardware, it was always a battle to get enough free conventional memory to run the games after the EMS was enabled, and perhaps the bug has always existed in the game but no one noticed.

I remember years ago when I first got WC 2 deluxe (picked it up for $10 at Radio Shack one day), getting the game to work on my old system (that had Windows 95's DOS) was impossible. I finally got a guru at Origin to help me add more memory for the program to run by doing some fancy stuff with memory addresses in the config.sys file. Even then I only had about 7 k to spare. 😵

All in all, though, great stuff goin' on here. I like this project even more than I like MAME 😁

> but I think that perhaps the Wing Commander games do this
well it's true that they do this, but it's really not good
to read a file into a memory space that is being used as
a jump table

> it was always a battle to get enough free conventional memory
then it should run with much free memory, shouldn't it?
but it doesn't

> and perhaps the bug has always existed in the game but no one noticed.
they had no possibility to acutally test it, as no dos system
provides as much free memory as dosbox does
but imho it should have been possible to write a correct
heap allocation scheme for the origin people

wd

I like to know, WC2 deluxe has full speech thru out the game?

Wing Commander II: Deluxe is no different than the floppy versions of WC2, Special Operations I+II, and the speech pack. It has speech in the intro, during a couple of cutscenes later in the game, and in the intros to the Add-ons. Most communication inflight is in speech as well. Beyond that; All text.

The first two "Commander" games that Origin made with full speech throughout was Wing Commander: Privateer (Deluxe CD Edition) and Strike Commander (Deluxe CD)

For wing commander 2, when I use loadfix I get the message "You do not have enough memory to run wing commander 2". This is with the default 64kB. When I move it up to 512, I just get a dot, ie:
D:\>wc2

.
D:\>

I am running the deluxe version with speech.

try a lower value
i thought 1 was enough