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MPXplay under CWSDPMI (Users)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 04.11.2010, 06:24

> > Hm, I just tried to run DOOM - sound on ( SB emulation ) - with CWSDPMI
> and
> > it reboots quickly. Without sound it runs, but I guess you also started
> > mpxplay WITH sound emulation loaded?
>
> I tried cwsdpmi r7 -p under MSDOS 6.22 and it does evil things to dos4gw
> progs.
>
> When SBemu not loaded I got error on loading:
 >
>(snip)
>
> When SBemu was loaded it rebooted immediatelly.
>
> MPXplay gives me error (regardless on SBemu):
> Program crashed (EXCEPTION ERROR) (bad environment, mpxplay.ini or audio
> file)
Doom is from 1993, and similarly DOS/4GW is also pretty old (even the later public or commercial versions). So it's not hugely surprising that they are incompatible, esp. since (as CWS mentions) they don't follow the DPMI spec closely enough and/or were buggy. CWSDPMI was not directly meant to be a universal "extender", only as close to compliant with the DPMI spec as possible, esp. for DJGPPv2 stand-alone use. (OpenWatcom 1.0 didn't appear until 2003 while CWSDPMI r1 was in 1996.)

In short, I know it'd be nice if everybody played well together, but they don't. In this particular example, if you really want to play Doom, you'd better use one of the (DJGPP + Allegro 3.x) open source ports (e.g. FreeDoom data via Eternity engine).

I'm not sure if Allegro supports your soundcard (unlikely for newer machines) but it's probably still better than original Doom, at least. But YMMV.

IIRC, the only DOS Doom port that works under XP seems to be CDoom (no nearptrs!), which has snippets of Allegro (but uses some other MIDI player, I forget which). I think it's alleged to be the smallest Doom .EXE, too. Vavoom uses MESA, but it's fairly slow. Boom is old and needs very old tools to recompile. In short, for normal Doom it matters less, but for FreeDoom your best bet (IMHO) is (recompiled w/ Allegro 3.10) Eternity 3.31 (bringing you VBE/AF and patches.dat support instead of only default patches.dat). FreeDoom explicitly needs a Boom-compatible, and IIRC Doom Legacy, Vavoom, etc. were too buggy or flat out incompatible. (MBF or SMMU, can't remember, one hated SB under DOSEMU, other must've had some issues too. Oh well.)

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