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Jack's Attic

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First post, by exofreeze

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This has been an interesting one.

Jack's Attic is a Win 3.x game. My standard setup for other Win3.x games is 0.74 w/ Win 3.11 installed along with the recommended versions of Quicktime, Video for Windows, and Win32s when needed.

Once installed, the game goes to a black screen after running it's first video check.

I tinkered with the cputype, cycles, and eventually the daum build (which sometimes helps with certain quicktime/win32s issues) and had the same problem across the board. I also reinstalled the recommended version of quicktime in order to overwrite and replace any installed qt files the game added.

My next step was to load a hard drive image with MS-DOS & Win 3.1 installed on it. I used the build which allows me to pass through cd images to the cd drive. Generally this has solved issues with the pickier games for me, with only a few notable issues of games still refusing to work in this mode. Jack's Attic happens to be one of them.

However instead of the black screen, when running it via the hard drive image it pops up saying "An error has occured in your application.: with the title of PROJECTOR. If I chose close it closes obviously, however if I choose ignore like 10 or 12 times it finally goes to a green screen for a moment and then reports:
EMM386 has detected error #06 in an application at memory address 00B8:0BC9.

At this point I ran the debugger. Due to the incessant "Unhandled opcode 63" the logfile tends to explode under win3.x, but here are the last couple of lines with the opcodes removed:

   1764021: FILES:Special file open command 80 file C:\WINDOWS\PROGMAN.EXE
   1955522: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1955685: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1955984: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1956122: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1956348: FILES:Special file open command 80 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\XOBJECTS\LABELDRV.DLL
   1957268: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1958197: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1958437: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1958578: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1958808: FILES:Special file open command 20 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ROOMS\DIR.SYS
   1958900: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1959125: FILES:Special file open command 20 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\QTIMES\DIR.SYS
   1959398: FILES:Special file open command 20 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ROOMS\DIR.SYS
   1959464: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\ATTIC16.EXE
   1959720: FILES:Special file open command 20 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\QTIMES\DIR.SYS
   1960074: FILES:Special file open command 22 file C:\GAMES\KCE\ATTIC\JACKATIC.DXR

There are quite a few calls before that as well, however they are a combination of windows startup procedures and calls to attic16.exe.

Unfortunately, nothing really seemed to stand out in the log file either.

After having tried vanilla 0.74, svn, daum-svn, an hd image w/ MS-DOS & Win 3.1, as well as the debugger I'm at a bit of a loss as to if there is anything else I can try in this particular case. So while it is an extreme longshot, I figured I'd post just in case someone had a suggestion. Thanks.

Reply 1 of 4, by Jorpho

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Perhaps it behaves the same way on original hardware?

It looks like another Macromedia Director application. Random Googling for <"macromedia director" "emm386"> turned up at least one result of something happening before.
http://computer-programming-forum.com/16-visu … ae882ab3d58.htm

In other situations I would be inclined to try a different memory manager, but this is DOSBox. 😒 Maybe if you reduce the amount of RAM to something small, like 8 MB?

Reply 2 of 4, by exofreeze

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Thanks for the suggestion. I gave the low memory a shot and got the same response.

Considering the game is from 1997, it is likely an inherent issue to the game. I should probably set up an actual Win 3.x computer for testing games like this, however I'm not sure I've kept enough old parts around to build a complete machine.

I'll go ahead and chalk this one up to a issue with the game itself. Maybe see if it runs alright in a win95 VM....

Reply 3 of 4, by Jorpho

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Another Google search turns up http://support.microsoft.com/KB/94279 , which suggests this is indeed simply a case of DOSBox not supporting the relevant instruction.

A little more searching suggests that actually, you can load JEMM in DOSBox, and it might even conceivably solve the problem:
Star command revolution/deluxe movie playback
Network Q RAC Rally Championship installer issue
But then again, I don't think JEMM cooperates with Windows at all.

I don't suppose you've just tried giving it a go in XP, have you?

Reply 4 of 4, by exofreeze

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I thought I had replied to this, however it seems I was imagining things.

I am a game collector and a few years back I began attempting to catalog every windows 3.x game ever made by scraping sites like mobygames, eli's software, and several other sources. Once I got a database of games I compared it to my own collection and then began to purchase the missing titles on amazon, eBay, and smaller stores. Currently I own nearly 95% of all windows 3.x games I have been able to identify.

The second part of my goal is to make them playable. I have a stand up arcade as well as several HTPC's in my home. By getting the games running in dosbox, it makes them portable and easy to place on each of these machines. If I have to resort to getting the game running in something like XP, then that means it won't run on my htpcs or arcade as they don't run xp.

So this leads to me spending inordinate amounts of time attempting to get these games actually running within a dosbox environment. Hopefully that explains why I take the approach that I take with my posts here and my focus on getting them running within the emulator.

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