Hello.

Bart Oldeman wrote:
>> BTW, release 1.1.4.5 was the last where snake.com is working under 
>> xdos/xdosemu.
>  after some binary searches I found out that Stas' pic_prot.diff is 
>  guilty for doing this.
There might be something wrong here.
The report states that this game
stopped working under "xdos/xdosemu",
and I am sure my patch have nothing
to do with an X code (that's why I
haven't even tried the game - I was
sure I couldn't break the X code).
Now I tried, and indeed it doesn't
work. However it misses the Eric A's
userfont patch, so I think it never
worked under xdosemu unless someone
applied a userfont patch manually.

> Stas, can you figure out why?
I can only figure out why it doesn't work
under console, but that's an entirely
different story. Anyway, it seems to
me that the watchdog patch was flawed:
if I set the $_pic_watchdog=(1) or 2
or 3, the game works perfectly (under
console of course), but if I set it to
10 and more - it locks up. That looks
like a problem.
The attached patch fixes it: now
setting $_pic_watchdog to any reasonable
value (within a range of 1-100 approx)
will work for that game.
However I have found my test-case
for that problem screwed up by an
XMS changes of 1.1.4.1. For now I just
reverted an XMS changes to test the
attached patch. I'll return to that
problem when I'll have more time.

Background: this game works inside a
keyboard interrupt handler (probably
many pop-up progs do so if they use
a hot-key), so essentially it needs a
reentrancy, which was restricted due
to the timer jerkiness discussed recently
around the Cosmo problem. That's why
we need (sometimes) a $_pic_watchdog.