the reason why it happend to you, is that verite and 3dblaster modes of the game (when compared to vga mode) don't have visible cursor when typing, so you are not aware of the fact that you can already start typing, you just hit enter and it is saved blank without name, hence invisible next time you enter the menu (also doesn't highlight when selecting as there is no name to highlight, and game only highlights the letters) (game has no selecting rectangle).
before saving the name was "empty" so it was visible and was being highlighted while selecting.
saving process automatically removes the name "empty" and leaves it blank
also the game saves even if you hit esc instead of enter.
so you select "empty", hit enter, and it disappears, you don't know what happens you hit esc, but it is already saved - resulting empty box next time even if you think you haven't saved 😀
also the background changes from transparent to quarter of briefing on first level so hard to notice the name "empty" disappeared cause whole background changed at the same time
lots of tiny bugs and missing features in one save menu 😉

i guess there were also wrapper artifacts/screen blinking when you saved so that only added to confusion 😉

also when you hit esc in 3dblaster or vga mode, it quits to game instantly (game is way too fast for a while)
but in verite mode when you hit esc, game starts (also way too fast), you hears the game, but you still see only the briefing screen for a while (till game speed goes back to normal)

add to that not responsive keyboard of the early wrapper

also when you see the briefing screen appears, your thoughts go to "is that another wrapper bug?"

one big confusion 😉

robertmo3 wrote on 2024-07-06, 05:58:

the reason why it happend to you, is that verite and 3dblaster modes of the game (when compared to vga mode) don't have visible […]
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the reason why it happend to you, is that verite and 3dblaster modes of the game (when compared to vga mode) don't have visible cursor when typing, so you are not aware of the fact that you can already start typing, you just hit enter and it is saved blank without name, hence invisible next time you enter the menu (also doesn't highlight when selecting as there is no name to highlight, and game only highlights the letters) (game has no selecting rectangle).
before saving the name was "empty" so it was visible and was being highlighted while selecting.
saving process automatically removes the name "empty" and leaves it blank
also the game saves even if you hit esc instead of enter.
so you select "empty", hit enter, and it disappears, you don't know what happens you hit esc, but it is already saved - resulting empty box next time even if you think you haven't saved 😀
also the background changes from transparent to quarter of briefing on first level so hard to notice the name "empty" disappeared cause whole background changed at the same time
lots of tiny bugs and missing features in one save menu 😉

i guess there were also wrapper artifacts/screen blinking when you saved so that only added to confusion 😉

also when you hit esc in 3dblaster or vga mode, it quits to game instantly (game is way too fast for a while)
but in verite mode when you hit esc, game starts (also way too fast), you hears the game, but you still see only the briefing screen for a while (till game speed goes back to normal)

add to that not responsive keyboard of the early wrapper

also when you see the briefing screen appears, your thoughts go to "is that another wrapper bug?"

one big confusion 😉

You've solved the mystery!

Ever considered becoming a detective? 😀

@robertmo3, would you be up for some serious testing on your Rendition board?

I need to resolve the vesa mode issue with vQuake.

(not today btw)

vQuake resolution change (mixed up mode numbers):
https://youtu.be/koRk1gcOV5I

One other thing with the last set of Win 11 Windows Updates (June 2024), Interstate '76 (with DxWnd) and Sub Culture don't work properly until virtualization (for virtual machines) is disabled.
[EDIT[ Fixed with July update
Interstate '76 has weird bouncy keyboard input (camera bounces from side to side) and AI cars which move weirdly and Sub Culture has laggy keyboard input (with a 60 fps framerate).

vQuake resolution change works correctly now with the right mode numbers:

https://nirvtek.com/downloads/RReady.Alpha.20240709.001.zip
MD5: 42db63f2135949b047d86ba1703e1ab3
- vQuake mode selection should work correctly with the right mode numbers and through the menu with the right resolutions.
- vQuake at low resolutions the "LOADING" logo might have some corruption. Actual gameplay/HUD should be fine.
- Anyone running "Sub Culture ," "Interstate '76, or "Interstate Nitro" on fully patched Windows 11 with the June updates will need to
disable Windows virtualisation support and reboot (virtual machine/hyper-v support). This is thorugh add remove Windows components and not the BIOS. The BIOS setting can be left enabled. Not disabling this will cause extremely laggy keyboard input and in the case of i76 jittery AI cars and player camera.[EDIT] Not necessary after the July 2024 updates. June 2024 is broken.

This was a bit weird. The game queries VESA mode numbers in the a pattern 0xXXA, 0xXX0, 0x13X, 0x12X and finally in sequence from the smallest to the largest. These are hexadecimal mode numbers and 0xXXA is modes like 0x10A, 0x12A and so on.

And out of these modes it's only interested in 16 bit modes with a resolution lower than 1024x768. With the V2000 mode list 768x576/16 appears in 0xXXA list and 720x480/16 appears in the 0x13X list. For the V1000 list 512x384/16 appears in one of these lists.

The problems appears to be that modes in these lists are queried again when the sequential query comes along. So using the V2000 list 768x576/16 and 720x480/16 are queried twice. These appear to fill phantom slots at the beginning of the list (vid_modes 0 and 1). Using the V1000 list 512x384/16 appers in one of the earlier lists and again when queried sequentially. Making all modes 0xXXA modes causes a segfault., so the game only allocates a small amount of Ram for special lists; it expects a small number of these modes.

My solution was to reassign these mode numbers with values that took them off the special lists so that they only ever appear in the sequential list. The highest res modes (720x576) cannot appear at the end of the list or it will disappear altogether.

This isn't a clean solution, the internal VESA mode numbers aren't the same as a V1000 or a V2000. But it does work. In fact all the DOS games work and the Windows ones shouldn't be affected. Looking at the F1 code leak for help won't work as the resolution setter is in Verite.DLL and there's no source for that, only redline.dll and the core Windows driver components. Having said that VESA mode numbers are designed to be opaque, the actual values aren't supposed to matter. A list of available modes is queried and iterated through until one matching the res/bit depth is found and then that mode number is passed to the VESA mode set call.

There's still a slight problem. Some display elements like the "LOADING" logo experiences corruption. A few stray horizontal lines appear across the screen. This happens irrespective of whether the modified modes are used or not. So It's an unrelated issue, but becomes relevant as the game now starts up at 320x200/16.

I have a question. Is anyone having stability issues with vQuake with DMA mode enabled. I don't seem to. It seems like a very well behaved game, just like vQuake 2.

The random audio static and slowdown is dosbox related; not having enough CPU grunt. Maybe if I port this to dosbox-staging it'll run better.@Raven-05 did mention the CPU emulation is a lot better with staging.

This is a fully tested alpha release which should by next week be live on the Microsoft Store:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/RReady.Alpha.20240711.001.zip
MD5: f2041b91c974b23e1172a1de4452b8a4

gplaps wrote on 2024-05-25, 11:09:

[*] Most addon tracks/carsets do not work and either show "Insuficient memory" for tracks, or "Not a Valid Carset" for carsets. I was able to get a few more basic carsets to load (potentially ones with standard sized texture files). For these addon carsets which feature a more complex 3d shape, the FPS in the game is very low when running with them (10 - 15fps). I have attached one example of these kinds of carsets here in case you would like to experiment with it.

@gplaps, the slowdown with the 95cart2k carset appears to be named pipe related. Dosbox-Rendition streams the DMAed data across a named pipe to Dosclient, which renders it. That's the allowed method of communication between Dosbox-Rendition and Dosclient/RReady.

it seems to be taking a bit of CPU.

A rough Indy Car Racing 2 Setup guide with Dosbox-Rendition/RReady:

https://youtu.be/p5YNRIrFeN8

Hi, I just bought the wrapper from the Microsoft Store. Thank you again for your excellent work on this!

I have been working the last few weeks to understand the mip limits in ICR2 and figuring out techniques to overcome those limits. I have been posting in the ICR2.net forums about my progress. To a certain point, combining multiple smaller mips into larger mips (for example, 256x256) seems to allow for more textures before the game refuses to load the track (or the track loads but garage doesn't load). I still don't know exactly the number, but the game may also be counting the number of subimages within the mip file, and the number is also dynamic depending on the mix of small and larger mip files.

Given that the track loading does not seem to be restricted with regards to the number of polygons, I am trying to make more objects with untextured polys only, which actually makes some building details look sharper. Based on everything so far, I am encouraged that there is at least a theoretical way to make higher-detailed tracks work with Rendition with different modding techniques. Of course this doesn't solve the problem for many of the tracks out there, but the more we learn about the Rendition game, I am hoping the community can start tackling the tracks one at a time - at least the really important ones like Indianapolis.

Thanks @checkpoint20 for supporting the project!

I tried to register at icr2.net, got past the questions but never got an acknowledgement email.

It's great that you've made progress with the tracks. I m not all that great at modelling and rubbish with blender. The game can be set to use 16 mb of vram with the speedy3d mem command that's commented out in indy fast.bat and indyrend.bat (cartfast.bat and cartrend.bat). I don't think this actually makes a difference because the track loading restrictions apply to system ram. The game must have a fixed amount of storage for the levels. Dosbox-rendition is set to use 64 mb of ram. I'm also not convinced the game honours the Speedy3D mem setting beyond 4mb, butI will be testing that soon.

At the moment I'm trying to figure out why high poly carsets chug. It seems to be related to named pipe communications, but I can't get rid of that because of dosbox's license without open sourcing rready. I'm seriously contemplating changing the license. That might be the only solution if I can't fix this. Or it might just be that dosclient hasn't got enough rendition command buffers to chuck texture /vertex data.

The investigation continues. When @Raven-05 gets back, maybe he can look into hacking the game binary to see if the track limits can be boosted.

unfortunately i am only have experience with win32 exe's or dll's. DOS hacking is very limited, soon of all not possible to me at this point.

RaVeN-05 wrote on 2024-07-15, 19:19:

unfortunately i am only have experience with win32 exe's or dll's. DOS hacking is very limited, soon of all not possible to me at this point.

Well, if I can decompress the exe, maybe you can take a look, maybe.

RaVeN-05 wrote on 2024-07-15, 19:19:

unfortunately i am only have experience with win32 exe's or dll's. DOS hacking is very limited, soon of all not possible to me at this point.

Also you can learn. Your vquake underwater resolution hack works very very well.

The help/documentation file is available here:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/RReady%2520Rend … 2520Wrapper.pdf
MD5: 1211b2c22a17c5386d586492c819b889
(Copy it into the RLauncher folder and it will be accessible through the help button. The filename might need the html escape chars replaced with ascii equivalents. Future alpha releases will come with the help file. The st0re release has always come with the help file).

There's a slight performance regression in tdhdemo and tdhdemo2. That will be fixed in the next release.

The high-poly carset 95cart2k can run at a full frame rate by setting

[cpu]
#This is dependent on CPU speed
#as a rough guess I'd say 100000 * base clock speed in GHz
[edit] this is wrong. 400000 means emulate a 400 MHz pentium ii[/EDIT]
cycles=400000

The menus run at full speed as well.

Video:
https://youtu.be/pSUaBOAcvV4

gplaps wrote on 2024-05-25, 11:09:

[*] Most addon tracks/carsets do not work and either show "Insuficient memory" for tracks, or "Not a Valid Carset" for carsets. I was able to get a few more basic carsets to load (potentially ones with standard sized texture files). For these addon carsets which feature a more complex 3d shape, the FPS in the game is very low when running with them (10 - 15fps). I have attached one example of these kinds of carsets here in case you would like to experiment with it.

@gplaps, the high-poly carset 95-cart2k does run at a full framerate if you set

1[cpu] 
2Cycles=400000

400000 works on my Dev machine, something similar should work on yours.

The menus won't be sluggish either.

sharangad wrote on 2024-07-15, 18:26:

I tried to register at icr2.net, got past the questions but never got an acknowledgement email.

I messaged the mod at icr2 forums and he wasn't sure he saw you register. What username did you create and did you send them a PM to activate your account?

checkpoint20 wrote on 2024-07-17, 19:14:

sharangad wrote on 2024-07-15, 18:26:

I tried to register at icr2.net, got past the questions but never got an acknowledgement email.

I messaged the mod at icr2 forums and he wasn't sure he saw you register. What username did you create and did you send them a PM to activate your account?

The account name was sharangad. This was months ago. I think the site said I'll receive a confirmation email from the admin.

Maybe I messed up the answers to the questions. I'll try again.

I'm looking at porting Rendition support to dosbox-staging because that has higher performance CPU emulation (~450 Mhz PIII).\

[EDIT] Did it again. Same username sharangad.