I have a problem running some games from EA (Electronic Arts) in Windows 98.
Need for speed 2, NBA Live 98 and both FIFA 98 games have severe glitches (Polygons glitching/flickering) or just crash after a few minutes.
The only common thing these games share is that they are made By EA. All other games i tried work with no issues.
Isn’t that strange? Maybe all these games share some engine code that DOSBox Pure doesn’t like? These games work fine in 86Box and PCem.
These games do not work on any DOSBox, just like Alpha Centuri and others, because of the sound; they are very demanding on the original SB sound card, and the one that is emulated is more like a clone.
There are several patches for NFS2, but they are all for “modern” Windows, from XP onwards.Although I believe one can run on Windows 98 and there are also official patches, I haven’t tried any.
Yeah… I love Alpha Centauri but got no dice to install planetary pack on wine so far…
I managed to launch a game on DOSBox pure by disabling the driver sound in the device manager tho. Do you think it could be possible to make it run with sound by using another driver, or for another model like the SB Pro 2? There’s also an option to disable EAX (was ON by default) in the ini file…
To disable the sound, you can also lower the hardware acceleration. In this game, if you rename a file (I can’t remember which one now), and the sound disappears.
Unfortunately not, BS Pro and earlier are just adjustments/patches for the SB16 to run some DOS games that require these cards. It is not a complete emulation of the hardware.
The thing about SB 16 is that it includes audio samples for effects and ambient sounds and produces sound effects such as soundround (EAX). DOSBox does not support this because it is based on DirectX and is not necessary for DOS games.
For Windows, the solution to this would be to fix the current hardware/driver or include some complete hardware, similar to what they did with Voodoo.
Yup,
I’ve tried with SB pro in the core options and reinstalled SB Pro drivers from the Win98 SE disc but got a BSOD with the same Kernel32 error for the game. Also disabled HW acceleration for sound, not directly in DXdiag, because it crashed when closed, but in the sound options that slider was accessible. Still got a crash ingame tho. Intro cinematics and main menu with sounds are fine, but I only saw one sec of the map screen and then it crashed. Funny think is the autosave that was written before the crash is working with sound disabled.
I’ll give it a try with the Gravis Ultrasound driver for Win98 but I have big doubts it’ll work with that. DirectX support seems already pretty limited for the real hardware. Last time I tried to run that game was in the late 2000s on XP and in my memories there were issues as well, at the time with an SB AWE64. There are also recent community patches focusing on Win10/11 compatibility, I’ll se if it could fix my issues with Wine.
Hopefully directX support will improve with time for the emulated driver. It seems really close to running well for those odd games.
I just tried NBA Live 98 with the sound device removed from the device manager and all the polygon glitching and flickering is gone.
You would think these visual bugs are CPU/GPU related but no, it was the sound all along.
Is there maybe a way to identify the games that have similar issues in DOSbox? At first i thought it was something EA was doing in their games or it’s games that require DX5 (turns out one of the games that have issues require only DX3). Or it’s a random thing?
Installing GUS for DOS requires a lot of tweaking to get it to work. On Windows, it’s even more of a pain. If you’re interested, there’s a step-by-step tutorial on Vogon. But that doesn’t solve the problem. The game might not even start.
I’m confusing things, it’s not EAX (it came out with SB Live). An Alpha Centuri developer said that the problem lies in the soundround. The eax=0 in the .ini file is from the later update.
The SB16 is compatible with Qsound and A3D, both of which produce reverberation effects, and all games are related to this effect, such as in NFS2 when you drive through the tunnel, the audio is turned off. If this is the problem, it may be very easy to fix.
I don’t know, maybe there is a specific list for DOSBox. It has two particularities: they are compatible with Windows 95 and SB16.
The closest thing I found is this list of Windows games with Soundround on mobygames. It might be a good place to start.
I got it working for DOS already, I think I read the same tutorial you’re talking about. It’s not that hard to set up on DOS really and the sounds are nice. On Windows I’m stuck. I hear pops when installing the driver, I can set the DMA and IRQ value in the Win98 driver parameters but the port of the emulated driver is fixed at 230 and the Win98 driver doesnt allow changing from 220.
Anyway, I finally got Alpha Centauti running on Wine Lutris 7.2.2, with all videos, bells and whistles, using the Thinker and PRACX mods. Latest WineProtonGE wouldnt display mouse cursor and would crash when edgescrolling.
I’m still willing to find a way to make it run on DOSBox pure tho, I’m just short on ideas for a workaround.
As a sidenote I had to convert the audio files of the game using this script to avoid pops. Looking at the GOG forum and how the game is completely broken on win11 right now and the community alone trying to find a solution, I hope someone find a way to emulate this on DOSBox for preservation.
sox "$DIR1/$FILE" --norm=-1 "$DIR2/$FILE" pad 0.1 2.4 rate -v 22050 dither That line in the script seems to indicate 22050 for samplerate, so maybe at some point the game used some hardware conversion the DOSBox emulated driver cant handle.
I know, it’s Qsound, it supports hardware for DirectX from Windows 95. A2D appeared a year later.
It is relatively easy to install on DOS, but you have “ULTRASND” pre-installed, and there is also a very good variant called “ULTRA161.” Both can be downloaded. The Windows version requires additional work; it must be installed in DOS mode and then in Windows mode.
“…3D acceleration is the way” I am investigating to see if a solution can be found, although it will most likely have to be corrected from the code.
You managed to run the Ultrasound in Win98? How can I set port 230 in the driver here, it wouldnt allow?
No, it’s something I have pending, but I think there are less than a dozen exclusive Windows games that support gus.
I understand that DB-Pure handles the gus port at 240, according to the menu. To change it, I imagine it’s like any other in Device Manager: select it and uncheck the automatic box.
As a MIDI device, very few, but I thought it could support more for PCM stuff. Anyway as I explained,
240, 230, doesnt matter, I can set custom DMA and IRQ values but not for the port, stuck at 220.
This is beyond my capabilities; I don’t have the knowledge, but I think it would be better to install it on Windows 95 following the Vogon guide.
OK thanks I’ll test that on my Win95 img, but so far I stopped trying as I got Alpha Centauri working with Wine-Lutris. I guess it may well be possible that the base game without the Alien Crossfire extension work well in Win95 with the SB16 driver…