leileilol wrote:

This is Vogons, everyone here at least has two of those.

And starting in MS-DOS mode doesn't help for me

The 486 and Pentium I played it on are both Win98SE systems

now I performed this experiment with a Pentium and the bug is dead 😀
At least for me, it is.

The lack of a Pentium patch that seemed so absurd (while a joystick patch was made) is reasonable.

The reason is it is ~not~ needed really.. as I expected.
The key was the story by
http://www.abandonia.com/vbullet/showthread.php?t=14752

In short, this person has discovered his own old & true 486, but the Slow Bug was ~still there~, to his great surprise.
His trouble was that he has discarded the old cheap ESS card that worked with his old 486.
Without this ESS "cutie", the Slow Bug on the 486 system was just as severe as on a Pentium with AWE32.

That would be the most stupid story of being ESS-happy... 😀 but it pertains to our case.

I took a most 'Old-school-non-compliant' Pentium. It has MMX, P-1 type DIMM 32mb memory, and an obscure VIA
board by ZIDA. Not a ~single~ part similar to the old 486 beauty.

But I have added the ESS. The Terratec Profimedia ESS Gold 16/96, no less. So ~fashionably~ made of all ESS cards...
Having had finished beholding its beauty I prepared a great DOS configuration and a 'perfect' Blackthorne setup.
Only the ~very~ original installation files were used (bthorne.i00, bthorne.i01, install.exe).

Then I have selected the SB Pro for effects and music.

Here we go! no Slow Bug at all. Runs as quick as the Prince of Persia 😀

P.S.
this system is ~not~ Win98SE. It was, but I reformatted it to FAT16 to create a 'purrfect' DOS P1 system.

P.P.S.
the ESFM music is quite beautiful with this card. the Sarlac Castle scene is the true Melody of Evil and/or Spelling Doom 😀
the first level tune is very invigorating... and classically noble at that.

486's and Pentiums are useless for retrogaming imo. For games up to 1992 a 386 is often the better choice. And anything that requires at least a 486 or Pentium will run better on a P2 or P3.

To cover the entire range of PC games from 1981 to, say 2001, you need just 3 machines: an XT 4.77 MHz + CGA, a 386DX + VGA, and a P3.

I've found that later era P2 coupled with a V5, decent amount of RAM and moslo can run most of the older games with no problem either. But, it's not always accurate so having an XT (or Pentium 1 with "Turbo" button) would be useful for those situations.

What about a 66mhz vs 100mhz fsb P2? (clock rate doesn't matter) I asked that question before about compatibility I think...

I have no idea. I have a P2 400 @ 100mhz FSB and it works fine. I just use moslo for the really old titles and I've only had a few games where it's an issue (I can't remember which ones specifically off-hand).

Also, engooooooooo. I'm the dude working on the QDOS port. I should peek at your code and merge some of it's coolness to mine.

GOOD LUCK because I don't think I did a good job commenting some of the coolness! The colored lighting is the hardest part of it all since it was a huge trial & error debug quest. If it weren't for MSVC6's awesome debugger I could've never done it. It's ill commented, but the relevant changes can be found through all those "if (coloredlights)", i shoved it all in that if statement usually since I wanted to maintain the original render as much as I could as well.

You might also be interested in merging some of this
Quake1 with WATTCP built with DJGPP on DOSBox

Also i've used to have MIDI in engoo for dos, but through Allegro. In the end i've gutted out Allegro due to timing issues (it made it locked to 17fps when a midi played), sounded bad (allegro has some of the worst fm timbres i've ever heard), and it leaked a ton of memory, and i'm using ASS for Windows, but unfortunately not for DOS as ASS was originally made for Watcom, and that doesn't exactly get along with djgpp...

Yeah, Allegro sucks ass. I've heard some newer hertic ports that used it on DOS and it just sounds awful.

I don't really care about the dlights or any of that, but I'm interested in at least supporting some newer extensions and v0.8 maps.

I just got done adding in fitzquake (no alpha, but it's stubbed so it won't freak out) and Nehahra is playable, but again there's stubs for show/hidelmp and a few other small things that it wanted.

But... you can now totally play Warpspasm and any other huge majestic map on it!

Also, that link is the my codebase. I found that, started building from it and Jason (the original author) occasionally helps me.

Oh some of my extension support is quite buggy and poorly tested. You'd probably be better off checking out QbismSuper8 for some of that, like alpha.

Remember that some of the Nehahra extensions aren't considered 'standard' so you might want to have support for them through a startup parameter.
For Engoo I've tried my best to follow Darkplaces' extensions list

another interesting but short-lived software source port is GoldQuake, which also implements some darkplaces extensions. You can find it on its SVN here.

Also, god bless MSVS6 debugger. I cheated by 'porting' it back to Windows so I could find a few issues I had with QWDOS (there was some pmove crashes on some larger maps, ended up being related to some magic number retardedness). As much as I love using symify it started getting too hard to debug either port on DOS.

I've been talking to LordHavoc about nehahra stuff. The only real major difference was the parsing of showlmp, it reads at as bytes in Nehahra but shorts for any other protocol, so you have to add -nehahra parameter to set the game mode or something that effect. Again, I just have it stubbed. So you can play the game, but there's no sick explosions with coloured lights and the resurrection thing doesn't show any specialness when you die. But hey, at least it's playable under DOS!

I think Nehahra would need fog support to work well, I liked its use of fog. I haven't figured out software fog but i've been meaning to. I'd think a 256x64 row lookup table generated on the fly via 15-bit or 18-bit lookup would work best.

Also for Nehahra The Game you could have DUMB tooled up to the enigne to playback the tracker music. 😀

That's all stuff I haven't learned yet. Basically been teaching this stuff to myself as I go along. Adding in fitzquake support was pretty easy.

The bitshifting for quake 0.8 do you know what exact file it was in it so I could diff against it to check it out?

model and model_common.c
find fg_quakeold and version91

I also tried to support beta progs but ran into issues so that's dummied out too. Impulsive feature creep was a problem for me 😀 anyway the main diffs between 0.8/9 and 1.xx seem to be the bWriteByte stuff

what is version 0.91? Is this the QTEST? I have three versions of the betas... v0.8 (the fully playable game) and the other two I believe are press releases, and they're mostly the same data-wise. I checked them with some hex compares and there was a string changed in the menu or something to that effect.

QTEST = pretty much too different. don't support this

0.8 = a leak
0.9 = another leak, also known as "prerelease"
0.91 = first official SHAREWARE release, June 22, the official birthday of Quake
1.01 = first official registered release, from July, among other changes, it adds overbrights (introduces BSP29)

Ah okay, I know what you're talking about now. The Prelease/Press Release is the build I'm talking about. PM me your IRC or other contact details instead of derailing the thread, heh.

On the issue of Speed-sensitive games mentioned early in this thread, it should be noted that even several late-90s windows based games are subject to problems with "too fast" CPUs/systems. I don't have a list handy, but WipeoutXL comes to mind (the 256 color software renderer mode seems to run fine oddly enough, but neither the software or hardware highcolor modes seem to be frame limited -so they can run REALLY fast on newer systems).
Sonic &Knuckles Collection runs too fast in windowed mode, but is fine at full-screen. (so not a huge issue)

And a note on Wing Commander I: there's a DirectX based Win9x port of that in the Kilrathi Saga collection that avoids the problems of the DOS original (and can also run faster/smoother than the original), though that's hard/costly to find in hard copy. (it also seems to run fine in most/all 32-bit NT based OSs -up to Vista/7- though it requires 320x200x256 color fullscreen support in DirectX -and some modern drivers seem to have problems with that)

The odd thing about the Kilrathi Saga? Briefings are STILL TOO FAST on Pentiums.