VOGONS


First post, by alfiehicks

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Hi, I've recently swapped the motherboard and CPU in one of my machines (It's now an AOpen MX3S with a 1GHz PIII) and doing so caused a whole variety of issues that I wasn't prepared for. I've sorted most of them out now, but this one currently has me stumped. Quake - and only Quake - has this weird issue where it'll run completely fine, but when I go to exit, it goes back to DOS and prints the usual text screen, but doesn't give me a prompt. The machine isn't locked up, I can still press ctrl+alt+del to restart, and repeatedly pressing any other key eventually causes busy beeps, but they sound more like soft clicks rather than the usual loud beeps. If I do the same thing with Scourge of Armagon (Expansion Pack 2 for Quake) then the results are the same, except it also shows a blinking cursor, but still no prompt.

The results are the same across multiple installs of Quake: this one (which is v1.08), another identical install on a separate drive partition, and on an install of v1.01 that I backed up to a CD. If I run the game in Windows 98 instead, I can still exit the program via closing the window and it quits gracefully with no issues. I'm booting DOS from a floppy disk and Windows from a CF card. I've installed all of the Windows 98 drivers for the board, but DOS doesn't need those, it should just work. I read on another post on here that disabling EMM386 fixed this issue in another person's case, but I'm relying on EMM386 to run the SB16 emulation driver for a Sound Blaster Live.

Another thing : Windows 98 takes absolutely forever to load now that I've swapped out the board and CPU. After the typical boot splash, it abruptly goes back to the BIOS screen (where it verified the DMI Pool Data) but overlays it with a blinking cursor in the top left (overlapping the previous graphics without overwriting them) and just sits there seemingly idling for another ~30 seconds. The HDD light doesn't blink at all during this, so I fail to see what it could be doing. It did not do this before with the older hardware configuration.

I'm beginning to think the board and/or CPU might just have ghosts in it, but this really feels like two separate software issues, so I'm hoping that's the case. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Reply 1 of 20, by alfiehicks

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Update - I was sure I tried this, but apparently not. I disabled EMM386 and ran Quake with -nosound -nocdaudio and it runs and quits fine, so it's an issue with EMM386. I'll have to look into an alternative. Still, if you have any wisdom on the problem, or if you know what's happening with Windows, then that'd still be incredibly helpful.

Reply 3 of 20, by BitWrangler

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Strange, have you tried blind typing any DOS commands like CLS or MODE CO80 to see if it comes back?

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Reply 4 of 20, by Harry Potter

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DosFreak: my message was to try to replace EMM386 in the OP's computer's config.sys file with UMBPCI, as it helped me out with a different problem.

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Reply 5 of 20, by alfiehicks

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BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-13, 04:10:

Strange, have you tried blind typing any DOS commands like CLS or MODE CO80 to see if it comes back?

Unfortunately neither of those seem to work. I tried them both a couple of times and eventually I just started getting clicks from the PC speaker with every keypress.

On the bright side, I figured out the problem with Windows 98 taking forever to load: it was the PCI Ethernet card. Disabling it made Windows load up super quickly. On the dim side, that's annoying because I'd like to do networking.

However - is it possible that could be related to the issue with Quake? As far as I know, that wouldn't make sense to me because I haven't loaded a driver for the NIC, but maybe there's some kind of specific weirdness going on. I might remove it anyway if I'm not using it, and if by some miracle that fixes it, I'll post an update.

Reply 6 of 20, by Harry Potter

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alfiehicks: try temporarily replacing in your computer's config.sys file the reference to emm386.exe with umbpci. UMBPCI can be found at https://dosprograms.info.tt/indexall.htm#utils.

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Reply 7 of 20, by SScorpio

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alfiehicks wrote on 2025-01-13, 11:40:

Unfortunately neither of those seem to work. I tried them both a couple of times and eventually I just started getting clicks from the PC speaker with every keypress.

On the bright side, I figured out the problem with Windows 98 taking forever to load: it was the PCI Ethernet card. Disabling it made Windows load up super quickly. On the dim side, that's annoying because I'd like to do networking.

However - is it possible that could be related to the issue with Quake? As far as I know, that wouldn't make sense to me because I haven't loaded a driver for the NIC, but maybe there's some kind of specific weirdness going on. I might remove it anyway if I'm not using it, and if by some miracle that fixes it, I'll post an update.

Do you keep the Ethernet connected? If not that slowness is waiting on the timeout of DHCP request. If you get it a static IP, gateway, and DNS it will prevent that. It will still be a little slower on startup than no networking at all. But it will be much faster than waiting for the timeout.

Reply 8 of 20, by alfiehicks

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SScorpio wrote on 2025-01-13, 14:23:
alfiehicks wrote on 2025-01-13, 11:40:

Unfortunately neither of those seem to work. I tried them both a couple of times and eventually I just started getting clicks from the PC speaker with every keypress.

On the bright side, I figured out the problem with Windows 98 taking forever to load: it was the PCI Ethernet card. Disabling it made Windows load up super quickly. On the dim side, that's annoying because I'd like to do networking.

However - is it possible that could be related to the issue with Quake? As far as I know, that wouldn't make sense to me because I haven't loaded a driver for the NIC, but maybe there's some kind of specific weirdness going on. I might remove it anyway if I'm not using it, and if by some miracle that fixes it, I'll post an update.

Do you keep the Ethernet connected? If not that slowness is waiting on the timeout of DHCP request. If you get it a static IP, gateway, and DNS it will prevent that. It will still be a little slower on startup than no networking at all. But it will be much faster than waiting for the timeout.

Honestly I'm still learning about networking so I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I have it plugged into a cable that goes directly into a "WiFi booster/Ethernet adapter" that just lets me get it online with the least effort possible. I know I definitely had the machine connected to the internet when the previous motherboard was installed, but I never checked after installing the new board.

Reply 9 of 20, by alfiehicks

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Harry Potter wrote on 2025-01-13, 14:05:

alfiehicks: try temporarily replacing in your computer's config.sys file the reference to emm386.exe with umbpci. UMBPCI can be found at https://dosprograms.info.tt/indexall.htm#utils.

I've heard that UMBPCI (and basically every EMM386 alternative) causes a crash loop with the Sound Blaster Live SB16 Emulation driver, but I could try it anyway when I get the chance.

Reply 10 of 20, by Gmlb256

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UMBPCI isn't an EMM and doesn't support EMM386's port trapping feature that is required for the SBLive!'s DOS driver.

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Reply 11 of 20, by alfiehicks

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Gmlb256 wrote on 2025-01-14, 21:49:

UMBPCI isn't an EMM and doesn't support EMM386's port trapping feature that is required for the SBLive!'s DOS driver.

And supposedly 386MAX and QEMM also don't work with the Live! driver, either. It's dumb that the message it prints without EMM386 is that it "requires EMM386 or similar" when in fact it absolutely will not work with "similar".

I should be happy that it works at all, though, I suppose. Realistically I don't tend to play more than one game per sitting, and I can at least play Quake - plus it works fine in Windows, too. I'll probably swap the motherboard again at some point if I can find a reasonably priced board that supports a 1GHz PIII and has an ISA slot, so I can just put an actual ISA sound card in there and do away with the janky and imperfect emulation on the Live!.

Reply 12 of 20, by auron

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in general, winquake is a much more solid option for hardware that fast, DOS quake tends to have speed issues with fast hardware (certainly when run under windows). and if you aren't even running an ISA sound card and have to mess with emulation drivers, that is another argument for it. only thing is you may need to run it with -dibonly, otherwise it has problems with nvidia cards for instance.

Reply 13 of 20, by alfiehicks

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auron wrote on 2025-01-15, 12:36:

in general, winquake is a much more solid option for hardware that fast, DOS quake tends to have speed issues with fast hardware (certainly when run under windows). and if you aren't even running an ISA sound card and have to mess with emulation drivers, that is another argument for it. only thing is you may need to run it with -dibonly, otherwise it has problems with nvidia cards for instance.

I probably should have specified that when I'm talking about "Quake running fine in Windows", I'm actually talking about Winquake. The DOS version does indeed run way too fast, but it also does actually let me exit the program when I quit from the menu, whereas it doesn't when I run the exact same EXE under actual DOS 6.22 booted from a floppy disk.

And yeah, I'm running it with -dibonly because I'm using a Geforce FX 5600. My goal for this machine is to eventually be able to run stuff from the early 90's all the way up to the Early 2000's, and not feel too anachronistic at either end of the scale.

Reply 15 of 20, by alfiehicks

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Rawit wrote on 2025-01-15, 14:31:

I had this when I played around with Cyrix register settings on my MediaGX build. Some known unstable settings caused this and it improved without EMM386 present.

That's interesting, I couldn't find any examples of this issue with Quake in my searching. What exactly do you mean by Cyrix register settings? I'm not using a Cyrix CPU, but do you think this might be applicable or related to the issue I'm having?

Reply 16 of 20, by keenmaster486

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Yeah this happens frequently for me on multiple machines, and always has, for as long as I've used DOS.

It always has to do with exiting a 32 bit 386 protected mode program. Something about returning to DOS from such an environment has a chance of triggering this behavior. The only remedy is to restart your machine when it happens.

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Reply 17 of 20, by Rawit

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I was playing around with CPU register settings. Cyrix had some disabled/hidden registers that when enabled can improve performance. The no prompt occured with the BTB register. I also had a read/write error on exit when using a PCI SATA device and a CF card. Quake does a lot of stuff on exit it seems.

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Reply 18 of 20, by alfiehicks

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keenmaster486 wrote on 2025-01-15, 17:45:

Yeah this happens frequently for me on multiple machines, and always has, for as long as I've used DOS.

It always has to do with exiting a 32 bit 386 protected mode program. Something about returning to DOS from such an environment has a chance of triggering this behavior. The only remedy is to restart your machine when it happens.

Well, I haven't been using DOS for very long, but so far I've used it on three machines (four if you count this one before I swapped the motherboard) and this is the first time it's happened to me. The way you word it makes it sound like a random chance, but it happens 100% of the time I exit Quake, and other protected mode programs work perfectly fine...

...except for VGBDOS88, a gameboy emulator that does the exact same thing as Quake when exiting. I actually just went through and checked all of the DOS software I've got installed on the machine and that was the only other program that produces the exact same "no prompt" state when exiting as Quake does.

They both use the CWSDPMI DOS extender to achieve protected mode operation, so I assume the compatibility issue is with that. Every other protected mode game I've got uses DOS4GW, and works fine. I'm going to try replacing the version in the Quake folder with the newest version to see if that fixes it.

Reply 19 of 20, by alfiehicks

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OMG IT WORKED!!!! Thank you so much to everyone that replied, I'm so grateful that you imparted some of your wisdom on me, I hope this thread is useful to anyone who comes across it in the future 😀

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