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Future Conflict - Sound Blaster freezes at mission end

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First post, by MrFlibble

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Recently I found a freeware Command & Conquer clone that was programmed in 1997 by the creator of Adventure Game Studio called Future Conflict. It supports Sound Blaster sound effects, and indeed plays them in DOSBox, but as soon as I complete or abort a mission, the game freezes. If sound effects are disabled or set to PC Speaker, ending or aborting a mission works as expected.

There are no error messages in the DOSBox console or in the debugger window when these freezes happen. They occur both in 0.74-3 and an SVN build from 29 January that I have.

What I tried (without any effect):

  • change cpu core type
  • change cycle value (I set max limit 12010 as this seems to give a decent speed, but tried around 6000 cycles too)
  • change sbtype and then pick corresponding type in game setup
  • change irq
  • change cputype to 386 or 386_prefetch
  • use JEMMEX
  • turn off XMS (game failed to load) and EMS (loaded but no effect on the sound issue)

The original download is available here: fc_101pm.zip

I gather this is the latest version of the game that was released. The supplied readme mentions a sound problem with sound playback stopping during the game, which should be remedied by pressing F6 to reset the sound system. I tried loading a mission and pressing F6 before aborting it, but this, too, produced no effect and the game froze.

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 1 of 6, by ripsaw8080

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The game, or I should say its SB driver, does not unmask the SB IRQ; so prior unmasking appears to be assumed.

I've attached a small program that will unmask IRQ 7, the default SB IRQ, and running it in DOSBox before running the game should prevent the freezes.

Attachments

  • Filename
    unmask7.zip
    File size
    127 Bytes
    Downloads
    61 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 3 of 6, by MrFlibble

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Hmm, I just tried this in DOSBox 0.74-3, the first campaign mission played fine and took me to the level tally screen as expected, but as the second mission started, a sound went into a loop and effectively froze DOSBox in such a way that I couldn't kill it with Ctrl+F9 and had to click on the window close icon which brought the Windows terminate process dialogue.

UPD: I'm trying to replicate this for now.

UPD2: If I load a previously saved game from the first mission, it seems to work fine, but if I start the game, start a new campaign and play the first mission without saving, the second mission freezes as described above.

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Reply 4 of 6, by MrFlibble

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I got some time to do more tests, the game ran fine in SVN with IRQ unmasking, and for now I was able to get to the second mission in DOSBox v0.74-3 too by setting CPU core to simple. Case closed I guess, thanks once again for helping out! UPD: Please see the post below.

Last edited by MrFlibble on 2021-07-11, 11:21. Edited 1 time in total.

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 5 of 6, by MrFlibble

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MrFlibble wrote on 2021-07-02, 20:17:

Hmm, I just tried this in DOSBox 0.74-3, the first campaign mission played fine and took me to the level tally screen as expected, but as the second mission started, a sound went into a loop and effectively froze DOSBox in such a way that I couldn't kill it with Ctrl+F9 and had to click on the window close icon which brought the Windows terminate process dialogue.

I still had further freezes of this kind, e.g. right at the start of a skirmish game when the announcer says "New Construction Options". I ran this in DOSBox with debugger, it crashed but stdout.txt pointed to a DMA segbound wrapping error. So I used JEMMEX in the same way as was suggested for Charly the Clown, and it fixed the freezes.

So for Sound Blaster to work properly, you need both the IRQ unmasking tool and JEMMEX.

UPD: The issue seems to be resolved in DOSBox SVN versions without JEMMEX.

UPD2: It appears that the safest method is to use the SVN build and set ems=emm386.

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