Try SAPUCDEX (search our forums). Let us know if that fixes the issue or not (probably not...)

Thanks a lot to both you and SaPu 😀. Following Vlad R's instructions, the game now detects the CD, however CD music is messed up severely, ie there is lots of skipping and eventually it cuts out completely. The interesting thing is that whenever I "minimize" Screamer (not recoverable) or terminate it altogether, the CDDA picks up again and continues to play without a hitch until the CD is removed manually from the drive. My solution was to disable CD music from within the game, thus minimizing CD access and giving me a good overall speed-up and rather nice SFX in conjunction with VDMS.
The problem is that the game will reproducibly crash at a certain point, whether this is VDMS related though, I doubt. I've had problems in the past getting it to run stable on various machinesm and OS's, even under pure DOS and in a DOS box under both Win95 and Win98, so I'd attribute this to buggy game code rather than anything else. Speaking of which, I've got it to install and "work" under Win95 in Bochs, and at about two seconds per frame, too 😁. Game setup detected a Pentium @ 1MHz, 🤣.
My real specs are Windows 2000 with SP3, 256 Megs and and P3@600.
One more question: I couldn't find the logfile for SaPuCDEX? Is logging disabled in vx.x.0.3? Thanks again.

If no errors then there will be no log files. Sound skipping does not count as an error. Hmmm, it's possible that NTVDM is chewing alot of processor cycles. You "only" have a P3 600mhz. Anyone try this game on an Athlon 1.6ghz+?

Probably CD & game are out of sync and game tries to "seek" the CD periodically but always messes up. If the game does not use DOS4GW/p-mode (i.e. disabling p-mode/DOSX support in LaunchPad ot AUTOEXEC.VDMS doesn't make the game refuse to load) then try using SPEEDSET as well.

V.

exactly how did you get it to recognize the cd?
i'm using sapucdex but the game still asks for the disk, what am i doing wrong?

I put sapucdex.dll and sapucdex.exe in the VDMS folder and made a LaunchPad shortcut for STARTH.EXE. Under Properties, DOS Environment, Autoexec.bat I checked Additional options and added "sapucdex" (without the quotes) in the field below. Check VESA support on the Compatibility page, if you have problems going fullscreen, like I did. Everything else I left untouched.

Interesting -- that CD audio problem sounds very similar to what I experience with Return to Zork on my machine.

I'm sure I or someone else has asked this before, but would it be possible to have a DOS > Windows CD audio command mapper? Thinking briefly, CITY2000: London had a small program called "CDPLAY" on it that could be used to easily discover what the calls made in DOS are. That said, I'm sure they're already documented, so I'm just rambling. 😀

Belgarath wrote:

i'm using sapucdex but the game still asks for the disk, what am i doing wrong?

If you're using the GUI launcher, you need to place it in the AUTOEXEC.BAT box under the "Dos Environment" tab and make sure you do not enable the "Low-level CD-ROM support".

Unregistered wrote:

Thanks a lot to both you and SaPu 😀. Following Vlad R's instructions, the game now detects the CD, however CD music is messed up severely, ie there is lots of skipping and eventually it cuts out completely.

That's bad, but I don't think it's caused by SAPUCDEX. Try running this on a faster computer.

The interesting thing is that whenever I "minimize" Screamer (not recoverable) or terminate it altogether, the CDDA picks up again and continues to play without a hitch until the CD is removed manually from the drive. My solution was to disable CD music from within the game, thus minimizing CD access and giving me a good overall speed-up and rather nice SFX in conjunction with VDMS.

Glad to hear it!

The problem is that the game will reproducibly crash at a certain point, whether this is VDMS related though, I doubt. I've had problems in the past getting it to run stable on various machinesm and OS's, even under pure DOS and in a DOS box under both Win95 and Win98, so I'd attribute this to buggy game code rather than anything else. Speaking of which, I've got it to install and "work" under Win95 in Bochs, and at about two seconds per frame, too 😁. Game setup detected a Pentium @ 1MHz, 🤣.
My real specs are Windows 2000 with SP3, 256 Megs and and P3@600.

Cool. You could use Bochs to figure out where the buggy code lies, or attempt to patch it. You may also want to try the current version of Virtual PC for Windows. Also, try running Bleifuss without VDMS and see if it still crashes.

One more question: I couldn't find the logfile for SaPuCDEX? Is logging disabled in vx.x.0.3? Thanks again.

No, it should be enabled. If there is no logfile, then SAPUCDEX has done all it can, and there are no unimplemented things yet in SAPUCDEX anyhow, everything is implemented.

BTW - I believe this is a no CD patch for Bleifuss: http://dragon.shuihu.net/softreg/cracks/sk_bleif.zip

Did you know that Bleifuss 2 and Bleifuss Fun (==Screamer Rally, right?) are playable using GliDOS? Search our forums for "Screamer". 😀

Originally posted by Stiletto That's bad, but I don't think it's caused by SAPUCDEX.

Actually, I think that it is SAPUCDEX. This is precisely the behavior I got in "Tomb Raider" and "Alien Trilogy".

What about CD caching in Windows? Does that even exist anymore? Could it have an impact?