Back to home page

DOS ain't dead

Forum index page

Log in | Register

Search:  
Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view

SDL for DOS and Diablo for DOS (Developers)

posted by Zyzzle, 04.02.2026, 05:07
(edited by Zyzzle on 04.02.2026, 05:18)

> I managed to get it to work some time ago on real DOS machine with GeForce4
> card.
> But I had to use the UniVBE which replaces to VBE BIOS to not to overwrite
> the modelist during other VESA calls.
> (it is also a tricky thing because the GeForce4 is not supported by UniVBE
> so it was necesarry to use unofficial patcher for it...)
>
> However, the colors were not correct - everything was too dark (maybe some
> problem with expected DAC width - 6 or 8 bits issue) and I also had a
> problem with some animation, maybe attact animation - when the animation
> started it never ended and stayed in infinite loop.
 I got it partially working on bare dos on a "modern" system: i5-8250u with integrated Intel onboard GPU - but colors were dark. This is obviously a palette problem. I tried the utility 6bitdac.com to fake a 6-bit vs 8-bit DAC and this made no difference. All menus options worked, the intro animation was fine, but when I selected a new game character to start. It accepted all "new character", started to load the game, got almost to the end of the progression screen, but then crashed with a fault back to DOS. I was running the game from a 512mb RAMDRIVE in pure DOS 7.1. Perhaps I'm missing some files. The only files present, in the root directory are:
CWSDPMI.EXE
DEVX.EXE
DEVX.MPQ (5.414.788 bytes)
and DIABDAT.MPQ (517.501.242 bytes).

No other files or directories are present.

There were several resolutions listed in the "settings" menu. I had resolutions listed up to 1920x1080. But changing to any one other than 640x480 made the game freeze. No crash, just system freeze.

Strangely, when I try to EXIT using the game menu, the system freezes, no return to DOS prompt.

Interestingly, it failed on two other laptops (one with Intel i5-3420 CPU and onboard GPU, and another with Intel I7-5600 with Intel HD onboard GPU, with the error log reporting (SDL VBE mode error(1)-unable to initialize.

So close, but so far.... Are there any further suggestions to get it to load a start a new game character?

Post reply
 

Complete thread:

Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view
23247 Postings in 2191 Threads, 405 registered users (0 online)
DOS ain't dead | Admin contact
RSS Feed
powered by my little forum