VOGONS


First post, by MrFlibble

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Oldbie

Recently I came across a download of Dracula's Shadow, a Caslevania fangame that was written with Allegro and is known for unstable performance in DOSBox.

I played around with it in DOSBox using different settings, and just like @Crissaegrimm reported back in 2010, the DOS version is prone to crashes at the time of day/night transitions with a SIGSEGV page fault error.

After a bit of tinkering, I was able to get past the day/night cycle crashes, but only in DOSBox SVN Windows build r4482 found here.

For this to work, I took the following steps:

1. I played the Windows version (it seems to work fine in Win10, but has no sound) and made a savegame right after I reach the town and purchase the dagger.

2. In DOSBox, I set joysticktype to none. CPU cycles are limited to 97240.

3. In the game's config.txt, I set video mode to VBE1 and deleted the default joystick selection.

I also put a modified version of CWSPMI.EXE r5 with DPMI 1.0 extensions disabled (attached to this post) into the game's folder.

When I load the Windows-made saved game, the first day/night transition goes perfectly fine and I can play further. I reached the second save point in the woods and saved the game before dawn. Even though the game crashed when transitioning to the daytime palette, I was able to load that saved game after restarting DOSBox, and the transition went fine so I could play even further (but I did not for now).

I had the same success with a different savegame that I made a bit further into the woods, again when I load it and the dawn arrives, the game does not crash and continues as intended.

I'm attaching both the config.txt plus the saved game that I used, as well as the modified CWSDPMI.EXE in a separate archive.

The game itself can be downloaded here. Its original homepage was located here.

Perhaps these observations might give any clues as to how to fix the game for good so it works fine in DOSBox without the extra steps?

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