DOS ain't dead - Gamemaker is open source

Laaca

Czech republic,
31.07.2021, 00:56

Gamemaker is open source (Announce)

Well, it is not truly new, however: The goold old DOS games creation system is free and open sourced dince 2014.
Here you can see a rich wiki, the Gamemaker itself and also a huge amount of games created with it.

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DOS-u-akbar!

Zyzzle

31.07.2021, 02:09

@ Laaca

Gamemaker is open source

Post reply

> Well, it is not truly new, however: The goold old DOS games creation system
> is free and open sourced dince 2014.
> Here
> you can see a rich wiki, the Gamemaker itself and also a huge amount of
> games created with it.

Did you get any Gamemaker games working on pure DOS in any "modern" systems (post-2006)? These Gamemaker games all seem to rely on a buggy, wonky VGA internal driver cooked into their .EXE files. Did anyone here manage to get these games to work in pure DOS? Hoping to narrow the problem down, please try in pure DOS and report your findings

I tried everything from old Atom netbooks to modern powerful 10th gen intel laptops, and every game just displays a black screen, no way to get out, no picture. In pure MS-DOS v. 7.1. And configuration options are not accessible. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the VGA drivers, as I think these Gamemaker games just use a broken (?) mode 0x13 320x200x256. In DOSBOX-x for under HX, I can get such games to display a configuration menu (in VGA 320x200, NOT textmode 9x16 font), and I can change the configuration options (no sound, standard VGA), and save the new config file. But, again, when executed in pure DOS, the games won't start. Even using "simulated" mode in DOSBOX doesn't work in anything with Intel onboard graphics.

Such a pity. If the source code is available, perhaps it can be recompiled with a more "modern" / compatible VGA internal driver, but I wouldn't know which one or how to embed it into the (newly) recompiled engine files.

Berlin, Germany,
31.07.2021, 18:44

@ Zyzzle

Gamemaker is open source

Post reply

> Did you get any Gamemaker games working on pure DOS in any "modern" systems
> (post-2006)? These Gamemaker games all seem to rely on a buggy, wonky VGA
> internal driver cooked into their .EXE files. Did anyone here manage to get
> these games to work in pure DOS? Hoping to narrow the problem down, please
> try in pure DOS and report your findings

Please, be little more specific.
Tell us the names of the games and where you got these.

> I tried everything from old Atom netbooks to modern powerful 10th gen intel
> laptops, and every game just displays a black screen, no way to get out, no
> picture. In pure MS-DOS v. 7.1. And configuration options are not
> accessible. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the VGA
> drivers, as I think these Gamemaker games just use a broken (?) mode 0x13
> 320x200x256. In DOSBOX-x for under HX, I can get such games to display a
> configuration menu (in VGA 320x200, NOT textmode 9x16 font), and I can
> change the configuration options (no sound, standard VGA), and save the new
> config file. But, again, when executed in pure DOS, the games won't start.
> Even using "simulated" mode in DOSBOX doesn't work in anything with Intel
> onboard graphics.

Did you make the games run anywhere?

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Zyzzle

01.08.2021, 01:15

@ rr

Gamemaker is open source

Post reply

> Please, be little more specific.
> Tell us the names of the games and where you got these.
>
There is a Game maker archive located here:

https://aderack.com/game-maker/index.php?title=List_of_Game-Maker_games

Over 100 games created with the engine are located there. None of the ones I downloaded work on modern systems. I tried 10 or 12. They all just open with a black screen, no display. Possible problem with the pallete and / or VGA-detection code or driver. This is in pure DOS.

> Did you make the games run anywhere?

Yes, they only seem to run in core2 duo or before systems, in native DOS. Anything newer and they don't run. They also run in my old Pentium 233 desktop.

They do work in DOSBOX-X with HX 2.17 in newer systems than core 2, but this is undesireable because they do not start in a fullscreen (320x200) mode, but only in a very small window (320x196) within the 800x600 display that DOSBOX use. I'd much rather figure out how to run these games natively in pure DOS.

mceric

Germany,
01.08.2021, 09:45

@ Zyzzle

Gamemaker is open source

Post reply

> There is a Game maker archive located here:
>
> https://aderack.com/game-maker/index.php?title=List_of_Game-Maker_games

According to the wiki page about the engine itself

https://aderack.com/game-maker/index.php?title=Game-Maker

all game maker games use the same modified VGA resolution
of 312x196, but according to the appendix of the manual

https://aderack.com/game-maker/downloads/Manual.pdf

you can also configure games to use SVGA mode for
ATI, ATI Wonder, Trident 8800 or 8900, Paradise,
Tseng ET3000 or ET4000, or "simulate" mode, which
is described as slower. I would assume that the
latter avoids evil hardware specific tricks :-)

This seems to be something which can be done with
all games by starting a binary with the command
line option "configure", which sounds promising.

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FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

Berlin, Germany,
01.08.2021, 19:29

@ Zyzzle

Gamemaker is open source

Post reply

> > Please, be little more specific.
> > Tell us the names of the games and where you got these.
> >
> There is a Game maker archive located here:
>
> https://aderack.com/game-maker/index.php?title=List_of_Game-Maker_games
>
> Over 100 games created with the engine are located there. None of the ones
> I downloaded work on modern systems. I tried 10 or 12. They all just open

So, by accident, I download and try the other 90 games, you didn't try and tell you "All work fine".
Is it really that hard for you to give the names of 2-3 games you tried?

> with a black screen, no display. Possible problem with the pallete and / or
> VGA-detection code or driver. This is in pure DOS.

"pure DOS" still might be not "pure DOS", because there could be different CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT settings.

> > Did you make the games run anywhere?
>
> Yes, they only seem to run in core2 duo or before systems, in native DOS.
> Anything newer and they don't run. They also run in my old Pentium 233
> desktop.

All with the same DOS system? Same version, same CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files?

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Zyzzle

02.08.2021, 02:10

@ rr

Gamemaker is open source

Post reply

> > > Please, be little more specific.
> > > Tell us the names of the games and where you got these.
> > >
> > There is a Game maker archive located here:
> >
> > https://aderack.com/game-maker/index.php?title=List_of_Game-Maker_games
> >
> > Over 100 games created with the engine are located there. None of the
> ones
> > I downloaded work on modern systems. I tried 10 or 12. They all just
> open
>
> So, by accident, I download and try the other 90 games, you didn't try and
> tell you "All work fine".
> Is it really that hard for you to give the names of 2-3 games you tried?
>
> > with a black screen, no display. Possible problem with the pallete and /
> or
> > VGA-detection code or driver. This is in pure DOS.
>
> "pure DOS" still might be not "pure DOS", because there could be different
> CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT settings.
>
> > > Did you make the games run anywhere?
> >
> > Yes, they only seem to run in core2 duo or before systems, in native
> DOS.
> > Anything newer and they don't run. They also run in my old Pentium 233
> > desktop.
>
> All with the same DOS system? Same version, same CONFIG.SYS and
> AUTOEXEC.BAT files?

I tried these games:
Advanced techniques demo
Air-Strike 42
Dino Hunt
Earth vs The Flying Saucers
Graphics Tools
Jet!
Moonchild
Panzer 2019
Raiden II
Santa is Back!
Ski
Space Harrier
Ulysses

And none work on any system that I've got with newer than core2 duo, MSDOS 7.1. Even booted clean with no autoexec, no config.sys and no memory management driver (Safe mode MS-DOS, by pressing F8 upon boot). Also, I have a config.sys and autoexec.bat which does load a minimal set of drivers upon boot on a USB stick (Jepeteh's XMS 3.5 standard, Ramdrive, MTRRLFBE, and keyboard rate speedup), which when booted with no changes on my core2duo system works fine with all of these games, while any laptop / CPU I have newer than 2006 with Intel onboard graphics fails. Even using "Simulate" configuration driver fails.

I did read the manual. It's possible to start all these games with "<gamename> configure" to bring up configuration screen (in DOSBOX only, for me!), select VGA driver or "Simulate" graphics driver. I then copied this config.dat file over to my other newer systems, with a clean boot, MS-DOS 7.1, and still can't get any of them to display anything, even with the new CONFIG.DAT file.

The very game engine file itself is called PLAYGAME.EXE. None of the game engine / construction files with run, either. Even typing, as instructed by the manual "PLAYGAME configure" does nothing but freeze the system. I just find it very curious, since these games do seem compatible at VGA register level, also even my "modern" systems support the standard 320x200 mode 13 at register level.

The only system that I have which refuses to support VGA mode 13 at register level is a 10th Gen i5 system, so it's useless for work in straight DOS.

I guess all the trouble isn't worth it, since others above reported the games are "boring", but I'm interested in getting them to run more as a technical exercise. How can they all contain an engine which is "broken"? The games don't rely upon XMS, EMS, or fancy tricks.

Laaca

Czech republic,
02.08.2021, 08:37

@ Zyzzle

Gamemaker is open source

Post reply

Well, do I understand correctly that after running the game you get into setup screen where you can choose a soundcard setting and choose the videocard from the list?
And the crash in after? (regardless of the videocard you have chosen?)

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DOS-u-akbar!

Zyzzle

02.08.2021, 15:31

@ Laaca

Gamemaker is open source

Post reply

> Well, do I understand correctly that after running the game you get into
> setup screen where you can choose a soundcard setting and choose the
> videocard from the list?
> And the crash in after? (regardless of the videocard you have chosen?)

No, the crash is *before*. I was only able to get to the configuration screen by using DOSBOX-x. The configuration screen itself uses mode 13 (320x200) VGA which is very poorly thought out, since the very VGA driver which is used to produce this configuration screen seems buggy / incompatible somehow.

Just to see what I mean, download a Game maker game, any one. Type the name of the game .exe, followed by configure

Ex: for Raiden 2, type "raiden2 configure" to see what this 'configuration' screen looks like.

It would have been so much better if the configuration screen was in the standard 9x16 DOS text font!

Laaca

Czech republic,
01.08.2021, 22:36

@ Zyzzle

Gamemaker is open source

Post reply

Hm, I have a very new videocard (GeForce RTX 2060) and all games I tried run without any problems (tried in pure DOS (FreeDOS 2043))
The games I tried were:
Raiden II
FireAxe
Ulysses
Worth to mention that all were boring :-(

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DOS-u-akbar!