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[solved] DOSBox doesn't work anymore, "Failed to create hardware surface" :(

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First post, by Mr.CyberCat

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Hello, I just upgraded to DOSBox 0.72 a few days ago and have been having lots of fun with the new speed enhancements! Anyway, just a few minutes ago, for whatever reason, DOSBox has decided to stop working, and crashes on startup with the following message, "Failed to create hardware surface."

Here's the detailed diagnostics:

* Motherboard: MSI P965 Platnium
* Processor type and speed: C2D E6400 (2.13GHz)
* Amount and type of RAM: 1GB DDR2 800
* Video board w/ RAM amount and type: eVGA GTX 8800 (765MB)
* Sound board: Emu 1820m
* Operating system: Windows XP Pro w/ SP2
* Game name: N/A
* Description of problem:

Error message shown when trying to start DOSBox 0.72:

Failed to create hardware surface.

(screenshot)
nagjcaabj.jpg

Then crash to desktop.

* Reproducibility of problem: always
* Sound mode used: sb16
* Video mode: 1280x1024x32
* Version of emulator: 0.72
* Steps already attempted:

- Rebooted
- Stopped ZoneAlarm
- Ran Windows Update, installed about 30 updates, some notable ones:
* Network card driver update
* .NET Framework 3.0
* Root certificates update
* Windows Genuine Advantage Validation tool
- Also earlier today I installed the latest version of Google Earth.
- I have read the readme, unfortunately nothing that I could find to match my problem

Like I had said, the odd thing about this is that it has been working perfectly up until now.

Many thanks for any help. 😀

Last edited by Mr.CyberCat on 2007-09-06, 18:48. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 4, by Mr.CyberCat

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Hi DosFreak, thanks for the fast reply!

I experimented with changing the "output=" setting as you suggested and it now seems to run (and play games!) fine under the "opengl" setting (was set to the default "surface" setting previously). Thank you so much! 😁 I have no idea what could have caused the problem.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of effect does changing this have on DOSBox's performance? I actually honestly didn't notice any difference either way in the games I tested but was just curious.

Reply 3 of 4, by eL_PuSHeR

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There could be quite a difference depending on your graphic card / driver, but most important it can make a real difference by enabling you to be able to run DOSbox or not. Some output=xxxx settings do not mix well with certain graphic cards/drivers versions.

Avoid using surface at all costs unless there is no other way. It's very simple and it has no acceleration.

In a nutshell: Most people report that overlay and ddraw are good for ATi cards while nVidia has been always the queen of OpenGL.

Ddraw seems to be a good tradeoff for everyone. But due to the filtering used, it tends to make images blurrier than overlay, for instance.

And now that we are talking about filtering, there is also an unfiltered OpenGL output setting: OpenGLnb

Intel i7 5960X
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Reply 4 of 4, by Mr.CyberCat

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Wow, all right, thank you for the info eL_PuSHeR.

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