2nd reality not working

2nd reality not working

[Stuart Axon]

I just tried the classic demo 2nd reality + got a black screen
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63

However I am running in vmware, can anybody confirm if it runs in
dosemu on a real machine ?

Re: 2nd reality not working

[Frank Cox]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:09:04 +0000
Stuart Axon wrote:

> I just tried the classic demo 2nd reality + got a black screen
> http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63
> 
> However I am running in vmware, can anybody confirm if it runs in
> dosemu on a real machine ?

I just tried it.  The dosemu window closed and I got this error reported on my
terminal:

ERROR: EMU86: error 99

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com
DRY CLEANER BUSINESS FOR SALE ~ http://www.canadadrycleanerforsale.com

Re: 2nd reality not working

[Stu]

Cheers :)

I'm running demos to get interesting screenshots for flickr.  - So far
I've changed the memory to 32768xms and dpmi, also enabled the
experimental sound.
Now that 2gb of ram is the norm, perhaps these memory settings should
be default so more things run "out of the box"
- I'm guessing most people increase these ?

2009/1/19 Frank Cox <theatre@sasktel.net>:
> On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:09:04 +0000
> Stuart Axon wrote:
>
>> I just tried the classic demo 2nd reality + got a black screen
>> http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63
>>
>> However I am running in vmware, can anybody confirm if it runs in
>> dosemu on a real machine ?
>
> I just tried it.  The dosemu window closed and I got this error reported on my
> terminal:
>
> ERROR: EMU86: error 99
>
> --
> MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com
> DRY CLEANER BUSINESS FOR SALE ~ http://www.canadadrycleanerforsale.com
>

Re: 2nd reality not working

[Frantisek Hanzlik]

Stuart Axon wrote:
> I just tried the classic demo 2nd reality + got a black screen
> http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63
>
> However I am running in vmware, can anybody confirm if it runs in
> dosemu on a real machine ?
> --
I tried it on my one (Core2Duo E8200/2.66GHz, distribution kernel 2.6.27.9,
Fedora 10, Gnome 2.18, DOSEMU 1.4 with patches from SVN under X11), and
it seems as game run, but slowly. And what is interesting, this probably
relate with audio subsystem: with $_sound=(on) I have only black screen
and 100% CPU load. With $_sound=(2) /new audio code/ sound tolerably works,
but there are big differences in accordance with game sound setting.
When I measured duration between game start and appearance of
"A Future Crew Production" banner, then I got these interesting values:
- SB Pro Stereo, high quality	- 4 min
- No sound, poor quality	- 2 min 6 sec
- SB Pro Stereo, poor quality	- 1 min 10 sec
- SB mono, high quality		- 46 sec
- SB mono, poor quality		- 25 sec

Maybe some other voodoos with dosemu.conf options will gain further
performance improvements, but I have no experiences in game area and
no time to fiddling with.

Regards,
Franta Hanzlik

Re: 2nd reality not working

[Stuart Axon]

Just for reference - It's not a game - demos can be thought of as more
like computer art (ref)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_reality

For reference, second reality worked pretty well on a 486 33mhz
running DOS, gravis ultrasound is recommended (obviously this won't
work here), I've never seen a real gravis so don't know what it sounds
like with that.

The 100% CPU is certainly plausible as it's possible they did some
funny things in that program.

Maybe their doing something odd with the screenmode that causes the
black screen (it looks like 320x200 vga, but certainly could be some
weird ModeX varient)

I'll have another go in the next couple of days - (and will try and
leave it going a bit longer).
I was running dosemu in ubuntu on a 2.x ghz computer.

2009/1/21 Frantisek Hanzlik <franta@hanzlici.cz>:
> Stuart Axon wrote:
>>
>> I just tried the classic demo 2nd reality + got a black screen
>> http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63
>>
>> However I am running in vmware, can anybody confirm if it runs in
>> dosemu on a real machine ?
>> --
>
> I tried it on my one (Core2Duo E8200/2.66GHz, distribution kernel 2.6.27.9,
> Fedora 10, Gnome 2.18, DOSEMU 1.4 with patches from SVN under X11), and
> it seems as game run, but slowly. And what is interesting, this probably
> relate with audio subsystem: with $_sound=(on) I have only black screen
> and 100% CPU load. With $_sound=(2) /new audio code/ sound tolerably works,
> but there are big differences in accordance with game sound setting.
> When I measured duration between game start and appearance of
> "A Future Crew Production" banner, then I got these interesting values:
> - SB Pro Stereo, high quality   - 4 min
> - No sound, poor quality        - 2 min 6 sec
> - SB Pro Stereo, poor quality   - 1 min 10 sec
> - SB mono, high quality         - 46 sec
> - SB mono, poor quality         - 25 sec
>
> Maybe some other voodoos with dosemu.conf options will gain further
> performance improvements, but I have no experiences in game area and
> no time to fiddling with.
>
> Regards,
> Franta Hanzlik
>

Re: 2nd reality not working

[Frantisek Hanzlik]

Hi Stuart,

Stuart Axon wrote:
> Just for reference - It's not a game - demos can be thought of as more
> like computer art (ref)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_reality

thanks for explanation and references. But what Wikipedia says about
this demo, they heavy use direct hardware access, which may be
probably very difficult to emulation in any emulator, dosemu.

>
> For reference, second reality worked pretty well on a 486 33mhz
> running DOS, gravis ultrasound is recommended (obviously this won't
> work here), I've never seen a real gravis so don't know what it sounds
> like with that.
>
> The 100% CPU is certainly plausible as it's possible they did some
> funny things in that program.
>
> Maybe their doing something odd with the screenmode that causes the
> black screen (it looks like 320x200 vga, but certainly could be some
> weird ModeX varient)
I tested SR on my other PC (P4 Northwood 2.4GHz/1GB RAM/Fedora 10/2.6.27.9
kernel), results are rather poor:

- GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP8x w. Nvidia driver: sound so so, but black screen
with all SR parameters 1-5. Only with "u" param demo display stars.

- GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP8x w. opensource nv driver: almost same as previous,
only difference is with parameter "2" - first part is black screen,
second (from circular waves) seems good, but slow

. Radeon 9000, opensource radeon driver: SR works, but is slow

Core2Duo with:
- Radeon HD4350 or integrated Intel G35/GMA X3500 - works (slow too),
as I wrote in last mail.

>
> I'll have another go in the next couple of days - (and will try and
> leave it going a bit longer).
> I was running dosemu in ubuntu on a 2.x ghz computer.
>

I think DOSEMU use SDL plugin for access to video card (and maybe to
sound too) and then with different types of them there are different
results. But it is question more likely for Bart Oldeman or Stas
Sergeev, who knows DOSEMU internals...

Franta

Re: 2nd reality not working

[Stuart Axon]

It's very possible that it doesn't work on a new pc very well (in dos,
not windows :)

The direct hardware access will all be things that dosemu
does/should/will one day
virtualise (e.g. sound blaster, direct access to the screen).
- after all a lot of dos programs run "close to the metal".

Demos are good to test as they push what was possible at the time so are good
for finding parts that we don't emulate well yet.


Noticing you mentioned that it does work, just slowly I thought I'd
give it a go:
  It is very slow (about 1 fps)
     (possible some sort of timeing issue(?))
  - It says 'ERROR: PCM "Sound Output: SDL device" out of sync' a lot

  Sometimes the screen is just white

Some screens have 4 images, offset by one pixel in the Y direction, suggesting
they are using some strange ModeX that we don't support properly.



For comparison I tried in dosbox, where it seemed to be fullspeed.  I
didn't manage to
get the sound working, but didn't try too hard.


Ideally we'd have something like the wine application database so this
doesn't go
into the ticket clutter.
http://appdb.winehq.org/
Which lists apps and how well they work (or any hacks/fixes to make them work).
- Each app has app-maintainers, when a new release happens they test their apps
to see how well they work.
-- The main problem is whether we'd have the people power to keep something like
that properly maintained.


The other thing they do well is a compatability testing -
Tests are written and run on windows, then new code in wine should act in the
same way as windows - idealy we could do the same, but share the code
with dosbox and JPC so all the emulators could improve the tests (and by
passing them the compatability).



2009/1/25 Frantisek Hanzlik <franta@hanzlici.cz>:
> Hi Stuart,
>
> Stuart Axon wrote:
>>
>> Just for reference - It's not a game - demos can be thought of as more
>> like computer art (ref)
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_reality
>
> thanks for explanation and references. But what Wikipedia says about
> this demo, they heavy use direct hardware access, which may be
> probably very difficult to emulation in any emulator, dosemu.
>
>>
>> For reference, second reality worked pretty well on a 486 33mhz
>> running DOS, gravis ultrasound is recommended (obviously this won't
>> work here), I've never seen a real gravis so don't know what it sounds
>> like with that.
>>
>> The 100% CPU is certainly plausible as it's possible they did some
>> funny things in that program.
>>
>> Maybe their doing something odd with the screenmode that causes the
>> black screen (it looks like 320x200 vga, but certainly could be some
>> weird ModeX varient)
>
> I tested SR on my other PC (P4 Northwood 2.4GHz/1GB RAM/Fedora 10/2.6.27.9
> kernel), results are rather poor:
>
> - GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP8x w. Nvidia driver: sound so so, but black screen
> with all SR parameters 1-5. Only with "u" param demo display stars.
>
> - GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP8x w. opensource nv driver: almost same as previous,
> only difference is with parameter "2" - first part is black screen,
> second (from circular waves) seems good, but slow
>
> . Radeon 9000, opensource radeon driver: SR works, but is slow
>
> Core2Duo with:
> - Radeon HD4350 or integrated Intel G35/GMA X3500 - works (slow too),
> as I wrote in last mail.
>
>>
>> I'll have another go in the next couple of days - (and will try and
>> leave it going a bit longer).
>> I was running dosemu in ubuntu on a 2.x ghz computer.
>>
>
> I think DOSEMU use SDL plugin for access to video card (and maybe to
> sound too) and then with different types of them there are different
> results. But it is question more likely for Bart Oldeman or Stas
> Sergeev, who knows DOSEMU internals...
>
> Franta
>