First post, by cg_chas
I have an image with Dos 6.22 / Windows 3.11 that I boot with DosBox 0.73. I am attempting to get either modem or nullmodem communcations working with Chessmaster 4000 Turbo which I'll refer to in this thread as CM.
The problems are as follows:
Attempts with emulated modem results in a connect, but CM does not see a connection so it times out. The DosBox log shows a connect at 57600.
Attempts with emulated nullmodem results in a connect reported by DosBox, but also results in an overrun: Serial2: Errors occured: Framing 0, Parity 0, Overrun 1 (IF0:0), Break 0. This error appears on the nullmodem server, not the client. Just as the error happens, the CM on the nullmodem server reports that there is no connection and the CM on the client eventually times out.
What I have done so far to gain a better understand of this problem is to install ProCommPlus2.0 and connect using modem emulation and transfer some binary back and forth using the ZMODEM protocol. What I found is that using ZMODEM streaming, there are lots of CRC errors and in effect many resends. When i set the ZMODEM window size to 2k-window, the errors completely disappeared and the transfers worked, but they were still very slow- 1000bps. I noticed also that ZMODEM with QModemPro for DOS was also triggered constant resends resulting in very very slow transfers.
I've been able to get all of my DOS games under DOSBox to connect using any of ipxnet, nullmodem, and modem. (I haven't tested for extended periods of time yet as CM was to be the first lengthy test)
I get the same results on several systems, so i believe software configuration will be the answer assuming this is not a bug with CM or the modem emulation, or perhaps even some windows intervention however, I am using the latest patch 1.4 for CM which supposedly did address modem issues.
I've been tweaking around with the settings at http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/dbdl.html but no luck as of yet.
One last thing, CM supports these BAUD rates: 300, 1200, and 2400. Is there any way to throttle back DOSBox to see if that is the problem?
Any ideas?
Chas
system details below
Here are 2 of the systems i have been testing with:
Motherboards Asus P5E3 Premium and Asus PP-DLW
Processor type and speed Intel Q9400 and and Dual Intel Xeon 2.8
Amount and type of RAM 2GB OCZ/2GB Corsair
Video board w/ RAM amount and type ATI Radeon 4870HD/ATI Radon 9800PRO
Sound board Onboard ADI 1988(SoundMax)/Onboard SoundMax
Operating system WinXPPro/WinXPPro
Game name (and version, if applicable) ChessMaster 4000 Turbo v1.4 under Windows 3.11
Description of problem (be detailed: saying "it's jerky" doesn't help, saying "the player sprites seem to be jerky when I'm pressing any of the arrow keys" does) see above
Reproducibility of problem (always, only once, always but only on a specific level, etc.) always
Sound mode used sb16
Video mode (Software, OpenGL, Direct3D, or Glide, and resolution) software / s3 / vga and 1024x768
Version of emulator (for VDMSound, probably 2.0.4 or 2.1.0; for DOSBox, 0.58+) 0.73
Steps already attempted to solve the problem (please say you've read the README if you haven't, and READ IT IF YOU HAVEN'T!) i've read it and see above