VOGONS

XMS & Real Mode

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First post, by Aphyx

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Hi again,

Another problem of mine is, that i want to play
Turrican II (well this is actually not the problem),
and this turned out to be an impossible task.
Why ?
Because Turrican II checks wheter the processor is
in Real Mode or not, if it finds out to be in a v86 mode
and quits.
(and a DOS prog is started in v86 mode as soon as
an EMM (Windows,EMM386,QEMM, ..) is loaded )
Sure, i could boot plain DOS 7.0 , without EMS and
everything would be fine...everything ? No, the darn
Creative MS DOS Driver requires EMS 🙁, so no sound
in the game... (and if you ever played Turrican 2, you'll
agree that this IS a major loss).

So my question is : Is there any way (a patch to VDMS, or
an INI tweak) to fool Turrican II (or games with a similar
memory management) and tell it that it is in real mode ?

No offense, but i'd consider such a mechanism a great
advantage if implemented in the next version of VDMS,
because it might allow lots of old demo programs to run.
(e.g. : Crystal Dreams II by Triton, old Future Crew releases
and so on) ... just a thought, so don't feel pushed 😀

cu

Aphyx

Reply 1 of 6, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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No matter how you go about it, titles like these are a headache. For Turrican 2, I would recommend that you emulate the Amiga original. Of course, that means going through the rigamarole of setting up emulation, finding the files,etc... In any case, you should consider it.

Reply 2 of 6, by Harekiet

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Most of the games, demos that require you to only have himem.sys loaded switch to a certain cpu mode, "Unreal mode" like some developers called it. This will only work when the cpu is in real mode so they can never be run under any kind of operating system like windows that changes the cpu to protected mode or with ems simulating programs like em386, qemm.

It's a shame that the sb live drivers need some emm386 functions to emulate the original soundblaster, but nothing you can do about that. Well getting a more dos compatible soundcard would be but okay 😀

Reply 3 of 6, by Aphyx

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Thanks for your efforts, i almost feared that it would
be like that. 😀 Anyway emulating the Amiga is not an option
pn my little computer 😀 Amiga soundemulation takes
to much cpu cycles. Maybe i'll try VMware, ok that'd slowdown my
comp to a slooooow 486 with almost no RAM, but it would suffice for Turrican. btw... isn't it (theoretically) possible to emulate
a fake CPU that only serves as a "virtual MMU" so games would
allocate their mem via this fake cpu ?

just a thought...

Aphyx

Reply 5 of 6, by Aphyx

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thanks,

but i already tried the remakes, and i was surprised
they need a Pentium II class system with geforce
to smoothly run a remake of a game that did run
very well on a 486 😀 ... and if you got so much
cpu power you don't need any remake, just download
WinUAE and the Turrican 2 Image disk files from
the Factor 5 homepage (yes, they give them away for free)

thanks anyway ,

Aphyx

Reply 6 of 6, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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Aphyx wrote:

Anyway emulating the Amiga is not an option
pn my little computer 😀 Amiga soundemulation takes
to much cpu cycles. Maybe i'll try VMware,...

Then maybe you should consider emulating the Atari ST. The first two Turrican's were made for it as well and emulating it doesn't use as many resources.

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