VOGONS


Reply 40 of 46, by davidmorom

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I can finally confirm that Carmageddon (including Splat Pack and the CD swap required for installation), Batman Forever and Chasm the Rift work perfectly.

I have a nice list of non working games I want to retest, as there have been a lot of recent changes and many of them maybe are already fixed. But in the meanwhile, I want to post the list of working games I found. Some of them are already reported, I kept them on the list just for confirmation.

Working games:

Drascula - The Vampire Strikes Back
Dreams to Reality
Eradicator
Exhumed
Fight'N'Jokes
Future Wars - Time Travellers
Grand Theft Auto
Hyper 3-D Pinball
Ignition
Little Big Aadventure -> requires MSCDEX, with SHSUCDX it freezes at "Speech file transfer"
Little Big Aadventure 2
Living Ball
My Friend Koo
Network Q RAC Rally Championship
Pinball Dreams Deluxe
Rayman
Rayman Designer
Rayman By His Fans
Rayman 60 Levels
Project Paradise
Race Mania
Pray for Death
Redneck Rampage
Redneck Rampage - Route 66
Redneck Rampage Rides Again
Rise of the Robots 2 - Resurrection
Shadow Warrior
Speed Demons
Street Racer
Super Stardust
The Incredible Hulk - The Pantheon Saga
Toxic Bunny
Total Pinball 3D
World Rally Fever
Wreckin Crew
XCar - Experimental Racing

Working games with minor issues:

Earthworm Jim -> the game works fine, but the installer fails with the error message "Multitasking environment not supported"
Earthworm Jim 2 -> the game works fine, but the installer fails with the error message "Multitasking environment not supported"
StarFighter 3000 -> the game works fine, but the installer fails with "couldn't locate paths" error
Worms & Reinforcements United -> the game works fine, but the SFX effects seems to crackle a bit (not sure, could be just my impression)

I also found a few eXoDOS images that are currently not mountable, as uCDD rejects them:

FX Fighter
Hexen
The City of Lost Children

And finally, and this is something maybe specific to my hardware setup, cause it doesn't seem to happen on 86Box. I'm experimenting very severe issues mouse related. Almost every game that requires mouse is giving me problems like crackling sound while moving the mouse, sound getting stuck after moving the mouse for a couple of seconds, or totally freezing the computer. I tested several mouse drivers, and the only one that works fine and doesn't show any of these issues is Cute Mouse 2.0a4, any other version of Cute Mouse, Microsoft Mouse, PTS and DRMOUSE show the described issues sooner or later. I'm using a PS2 mouse, and I observed that changing to a serial one make the issue less likely, but it happens in the end. Could be some kind of mouse interrupt handling issue? It would be great if it could be addressed, cause it affects a lot of games. These are some of them and the problems I observed:

Dungeon Keeper -> SFX sound gets stuck in a loop (works fine with CuteMouse 2.0a4)
Gobliiins -> moving the mouse makes sound crackling (works fine with CuteMouse 2.0a4)
Gobliins 2 -> same as Gobliiins
Goblins 3 -> same as Gobliiins
Heroes of Might and Magic II -> SFX sound gets stuck in a loop (works fine with CuteMouse 2.0a4)
Judge Dredd Pinball -> but SFX gets stuck in a loop (works fine with CuteMouse 2.0a4)
Lemmings - Oh No! More Lemmings -> same as Gobliiins. On machine type select "PC Compatibles", otherwise CD-DA music is a bit distorted
Magic Carpet 2 - The Netherworlds -> SFX gets stuck in a loop (works fine with CuteMouse 2.0a4)
MechWarrior 2 - 31st Century Combat -> moving the mouse makes the sound get stuck and the game freezes after selecting a faction on the main menu (works fine with CuteMouse 2.0a4)
MechWarrior 2 - Mercenaries -> same as 31st Century Combat
MechWarrior 2 - Ghost Bear's Legacy -> same as 31st Century Combat. Also, jemmex exception crash when changing CD at installation
Star Trek Pinball -> moving the mouse makes the sound get stuck (works fine with CuteMouse 2.0a4)
XS -> SFX sound gets stuck in a loop (works fine with CuteMouse 2.0a4)

Reply 41 of 46, by vorvek

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Thanks for the testing, I'll go through these games and see if I can find what's causing the issues.

Regarding the mouse problems, looking at how CuteMouse 2.1 and 2.0a4 difer in ways that could be relevant... 2.0a4 hooks int 74h directly, while 2.1 uses a BIOS callback. This means 2.0a4 does its stuff before the user routine runs. Can you run a little test for me?

Compile the latest uCDD version using

python scripts/build.py --resident-audio --audio-period-frames 256

(or download it from this post's attachment) and see if it improves the crackling. It would confirm my suspicions, at least.

Reply 42 of 46, by davidmorom

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Using your test version I get the following results (only tested a couple of games):

Goblins with CTMOUSE 1.9 -> now is perfect, without this test version it has extreme crackling when moving the mouse.
MechWarrior 2 with CTMOUSE 1.9 -> now is perfect, without this test version sound gets stuck as soon as moving the mouse in the main menu and freezes after choosing a faction.

So it seems your suspicions were correct.

Reply 43 of 46, by vorvek

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Great, thanks for testing! I'll see how to turn it into an actual fix (it's a bit of a workaround in that test build).

Reply 44 of 46, by vorvek

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New version: Beta 0.9.4-a2: https://github.com/vorvek/uCDD/releases/tag/v0.9.4-a2

This one went through all the remaining games I had in the PCGamingWiki article. 25 new titles are confirmed working with CD music and sound effects together, so the list now has 106 games. old-games.ru has a more substantial list (around 300 titles) but it also includes expansions and things like that.

The most important change is for the mouse problem reported here (sound crackling, stuck sound effects, or freezes when you move the mouse with CuteMouse 2.1, MS Mouse and others). Many thanks for testing the experimental build. With those drivers, the mouse goes through the BIOS PS/2 handler, and on some machines that handler runs for several milliseconds with interrupts off. uCDD's audio buffer was very short (under 1.5 ms), so it ran dry. CuteMouse 2.0a4 skips the BIOS handler, which is why it worked. The audio buffer is now 4 times longer. Gobliiins and MechWarrior 2 are fine now with the other drivers. The cost is about 1.5 KB more conventional memory (around 2 KB with LH).

Other fixes:

  • Tunnel B1 had no CD music (it sends CD requests with a zero or short header length)
  • The City of Lost Children, FX Fighter and Hexen images didn't mount (their CD headers have small errors that DOSBox ignores). For FX Fighter, rename the BIN or edit the CUE to use an 8.3 file name
  • Hexen crashed at startup
  • MadSpace showed "Fx driver not init properly" and then "not VGA" (its sound buffer is above 1 MB, and a video check failed under the uCDD DPMI host)
  • Earth 2140 showed "Sound Card Initialization Error"
  • The Varginha Incident lost its sound effects (unsupported silence command)

New games in the list: Dráscula (English), Earth 2140, Extreme Assault, Grand Theft Auto, Hexen, Ignition, Iron Man / X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal, MadSpace, Mass Destruction, Network Q RAC Rally Championship, Nihilist, Nitro Racers, Power F1, Redneck Rampage, Roketz, Shadow Warrior, Star General, Syndicate Wars, Tempest 2000, The City of Lost Children, The Varginha Incident, Tunnel B1, X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse, XS and Z.A.R.

Reply 45 of 46, by davidmorom

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I've been testing the new version against the mouse affected games a bit more thoroughly, a there are still issues pending. The crackling that affected real mode games (Goblins 1, 2 and 3, Lemmings...) is fixed, but the sound freezing on protected mode games is still present. The issue seems to have improved a bit, now I have to move the mouse more time, or faster, for the problem to happen. The affected games I'm currently testing for this issue are the following:

Dungeon Keeper
Heroes of Might and Magic II
Judge Dredd Pinball
Magic Carpet 2
MechWarrior 2 - 31st Century Combat
MechWarrior 2 - Mercenaries
MechWarrior 2 - Ghost Bear's Legacy
Star Trek Pinball
XS

While doing these tests, I noticed another couple of things:

  • Goblins 3: the game totally freezes right after you wake up in the boat at the beginning, even without touching the mouse. Could be a regression? I think this worked fine before.
  • MechWarrior 2 - Ghost Bear's Legacy: jemmex exception crash when changing the CD at installation.

Reply 46 of 46, by vorvek

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I've fixed the Ghost Bear's Legacy issue (it actually happened with a few games that change CDs) and I've improved the mouse handling ffor many of the games above (there are actually two different types of issues in the list). However, I can't get Goblins 3 to freeze in my tests. It may be because of some of the fixes I've already run. Can you tell me what IRQ is set in your game’s MDO.CFG? If you are using 128MB of RAM I think there's also an issue with the game (at least a warning).