VOGONS


First post, by plstbr

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i'm trying to play lemmings with dosbox 0.74 and windows vista. when i press F1 to start the level, the display flickers and some component shows the message "no external display connected" (not in a window; a device driver in vista?) that disappears after a second, and the level doesn't start. i tried the options machine=vgaonly with both fullscreen=true and fullscreen=false, and i played a bit with output=, but the problem persists. i guess dosbox is asking the operating system to do something extra nice with the display, that it should be doing itself or not at all.

Reply 2 of 8, by plstbr

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This "Dell Studio 1555" laptop runs "Windows Vista 32-Bit Home Premium Service Pack 1" with an "Mobile Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family" graphics device. There's a display configurator that has a "multiple displays" section, but no knobs to turn there (only "operating mode: single display" and "primary display: integrated display"). I don't feel like playing with source and building .exe files, so I guess I give up. Also, with LemmingsCorrected.zip, the problem persists.

Reply 4 of 8, by plstbr

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I see. The owner doesn't think that her laptop is broken, and she was already alarmed by me typing stuff at the dos command line and editing the dosbox config file ("You're programming something! No, I can see that is programming! Don't you break my computer!"). So no driver updates here. Thanks for caring. 😀

Reply 5 of 8, by truth_deleted

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Perhaps disable the external monitor via the bios, if the option is available. There is also some SDL code to handle extra monitors, just in case that the video driver is reporting to SDL that there are multiple monitors. This is a guess, however, and would require testing.

Another option is to plug in a 2nd monitor, given there is a port for it, and see if it helps. (Also, try setting dosbox/sdl to "windib" instead of "directx").

Reply 6 of 8, by plstbr

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Ouch! The BIOS setup hinted me in on the fact that I didn't press F1 to start the level. I pressed the "change displays multimedia key", because here you don't just press F1 to get F1, but you must use the blue Fn modifier. If you're laughing as hard as I am, your time wasn't wasted... 😀

Reply 8 of 8, by plstbr

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Anyway, once I had a programmable Hewlett-Packard RPN calculator where you could edit both the key mappings and the screen font. I interchanged the "7" and "8" keys in the key map, and then I interchanged the "7" and "8" glyphs in the font. Then I saw with glee how I had turned a calculator into a not-so-obvious mis-calculator. Muahaha.