keropi

I don't think anything can be done to fix the problems in real dos machines, the original engine is problematic even unaltered... I gave up at this point :/ , don't have anything else to test...

yeah, I've been testing on pure DOS... all the cache enable/disable utils I tried just locked the machine (a 440BX based) , will try the ones you linked and report back

slot1 test was a failure... I found no way to disable L1 or L2 caches on my 440BX mobo and ofcourse with a 400mhz PII the sb sound was terrible... didn't bother to test more since I could not really trust the result with such a speedy machine

^ that's very strange because the SB16 that I use (CT-2230) uses IRQ5 by default (like all sb16s, DMA=1 , HDMA=5 , IRQ=5 , PORT=220 and MPU=300 so roland has 330) Also in BIOS/PNP page I have assigned all relevant irqs/dmas to ISA-Legacy ... Didn't get the chance to test on the PII system today....

well, unfortunately indy4 behaves the same... freezes/locks ( kinda differently though, if you wait a little it can unfreeze but fail after a while again, this time permanently)... even with the update patches and icache to disable L1 , it does not work well... maybe it's a chipset thing after all , never really played the "talkie editions" ... I will try the chipset theory tomorrow with a slot1 intel-based machine and a 233mhz PII edit: did a test without a mouse connected, I could not make monkey2 freeze but indy4 just rebooted my pc during the intro dialogues... I never knew lucas stuff to be so picky on hardware!

thanks for the tips, I will check indy4 and report... I did try to run the game from 98SE (forgot to mention that) and I got the exact same freezing but this time due to windows I could alt+tab my way out of it.... In regards of drivers the SB16 does not use any... just an init program on startup (not a pnp card btw) or nothing at all... and I also tried with the 8bit SoundBlaster, it only needs the BLASTER variable. And for mouse I used either ctmouse or MS's mouse.com... I even tried without a mouse driver installed, in my case if you have a mouse plugged in the mouse port then it somehow causes this... maybe it's the mouseport's IRQ12? or it's mem address?

Well, after testing with 3 different mobos that use the VIA MVP3 chipset I have concluded that the freezing occurs when one uses a PS2 mouse on the onboard ps2 connector! With a serial mouse the game never freezes, no matter how hard I try or for how long I play. With a ps2 mouse it's just a matter of spending some time clicking like hell on the sleeping pirates (thus you hear a piece of dialog that restarts on the next click without delay). I have no idea if there is a workaround for that PS2 mouse problem, I can only assume that the game doesn't like the ps2 port's address/irq on MVP3 chipsets or it's general implementation...?

first of all thanks for making those ultimate talkie editions, they rock! unfortunately I am having severe problems running those on a real DOS pc with a LAPC-I + SB16 (made a pentium1 pc for old DOS gaming some 3 years back and it's the first time I get this behavior). Both original DOS MIs play fine as every other DOS game I've thrown into the machine. The talking builders complete without errors (image with both games's files + crc32) and I get games that work on DOSBOX and on my 486DX2 pc. But on the p1 I get severe SB problems and freezes. I tried disabling both L1+L2 caches (so I get a pc that is slower than a 386DX) , tried leaving ~14MB of free ram under the first 16MB and even tried putting on the pentium the 8bit sound blaster that my 486 has. I still can't make them work, roland music works fantastically but the sb part suffers. * If I use roland+sb , music is fine but at some point during speech the game will freeze. Color cycling of the cursor will still continue , music will continue but controls/keyboard are frozen. A reset is needed. * If I use sb-only then the game just make some horrible "music" coming from the FM chip and strangely enough speech is OK. A reset won't help here , the game/pc works but until you do a power-cycle you can't get rid of the sb's sounds. I made a video of this behavior (showing MI1 , MI2 has the same behavior): (This BBCode requires its accompanying plugin to work properly.) Is there a chance of squashing this bug? I must stress that the pc has no irq/dma/hardware problems, I have ~100 games installed (my whole originals collection -> gallery link) and never had this problem, only speed related ones on older titles that get solved with slowdown utilities. I'll be more than happy to provide more info/testing if the creators decide it's worth checking, thanks in advance! edit: made further tests, if I disable only L1 cache then the sb driver works. Still I get the freezing. I also put the sound buffers to 64 , I could delay the freezing but eventually I got it again. edit2: made more tests, run the game with KGB in the background keeping a log on activity, nothing important and the game just access monkey.001 as usual when the freeze happens I also substituted the games directory to S: so I run the game from "fake" S: in case there was a problem and the game did not like the c:\games\mi1se path... made no difference too... Last thing I did was run the game with GM music, still no difference