Tux

Well in my case this pc doesn't have any isa port, so this was not an option ! What is sure is that it was the end of creative, at this point soundcards started to be merged in the motherboards, except for some very specific uses. No problem for the delay, this thing has probably been here for years before being noticed... ! I made a few more tests on my end because we still have seal sources to compare, I thought it was just a simple timeout problem with the dsp, but no luck, it doesn't fix anything for now. It's extremely hard to debug some low level stuff on dos, especially when you are used to work with higher level stuff as we are today... ! An interesting problem anyway, I'll probably try again later... !

Well anyway here is a link to the latest dos version but using seal this time, it's the only known workaround for now when getting no sound : http://raine.1emulation.com/archive/raine-seal-0.96.7.7z Seal is supposed to be more primitive, its awe32 driver doesn't seem to work, I just tested on bubble bobble and it seems to sound ok at least on this game, but anyway it's the only solution for now !

If you could test the latest dos version on one of your isa sound cards... I think the driver creates a virtual port to handle requests, and it just doesn't work with the allegro driver, but it might work with a normal isa card. The problem is the same when using one of their test program to play a sample so at least the error is not from me.

Yeah I know that, but thanks for making me curious enough to have a last look at it, it's an old compaq computer, so I don't like messing with the internals, but I have seen worst configurations. Finally it's a "Creative CT4750", which seems to be a sbpci. I found a very good page to configure these old cards in dos there : https://retronn.de/imports/soundblaster_config_guide.html and then their ftp site with all the drivers you might want : ftp://retronn.de/driver/Creative/ In short : the pci cards use the blaster variable just for compatibility with the old dos applications, they don't need it anymore, they work totally differently, and so they require a program to be loaded to handle them, it can either be the windows driver (I am sure it's the 1st time I do this configuration for dos !), or like here the right dos program to load, the environment variable alone can't do anything. And with all this I was finally able to make it work ! And to my dismay, I confirm the bug, as incredible as it may sound, nothing can be heard with the allegro sound drivers when seal drivers work perfectly ! Allegro is really a big pile of bugs, it was part of the reason for switching to sdl, I would never have thought they would manage to still annoy me after all this time !!! The problem is what to do with that ? Most sites keep this allegro version as the last stable allegro version for dos... ! The short solution is to have seal, even though seal is sub optimal, at least it works ! Oh well, I'll make a few tests maybe and update this later...

I tried to resurrect a very old pc I had around here, 128 Mb of ram, 1 GHz cpu, setting up a pure dos boot was already hard for it, but I finally found something. But I failed miserably at the sound card configuration. There is a sounblaster compatible pci card in it, but I don't remember which card it is exactly. Maybe there was a windows driver with the card, it's very old stuff. I assumed it would work with just a blaster environment variable in dos, clearly it doesn't ! Oh well, I'd say all this is just a big waste of time, I would never have thought it could be that hard to just setup a sound card in dos... ! So for now I give up, unless I find what this card is precisely and how to configure it in dos, there is no way, and for now I don't have the faintest idea !

Yeah that's strange, even though allegro had some astounding bugs I can't believe its sound system doesn't work correctly with the vanilla hardware, there's something off... Maybe they are still on the web too, a place to send some message ? Also be sure to test from the other thread : go to mode-x 320x240 (8 bpp, all mode-x are 8bpp), and then try to enable triple buffer, the advantage is that it can be tested on any vga card, no need for vesa3 for this. I get a black screen in pcem when doing this, but it might do something more on a normal pc. Maybe you should try some test programs from allegro4 to test sound... Quite a lot of people used this lib so I can't believe it couldn't work on the original hardware... edit : I found a related thread on their site there : https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/596505/0 it's not exactly your problem, it seems related to the sbpro 8 bits samples and doesn't affect sb16, but it's still a very buggy sound driver in allegro 4.2.2 (by the way the allegro in raine here is 4.2.3.1). Well, I'd say if you really want to go to the bottom of this, you'll have to test directly some allegro versions then, there is a sample program to play samples, hopefully it will be enough to check the quality of the sound, build some version and see what you get. The thread tracked the bug appearing in 4.1.15 apparently... ! Luckily allegro is quite fast to build, at least on a modern machine. I remember that at that time I had already some sb compatible card and it worked well for me at the time with raine... Each time I find such a big bug in allegro I am amazed, their documentation feels like it's an almost professional project, and then you find astounding bugs in it... an alternative would be to find another sound library, but testing a new sound driver in raine would take ages, so no thanks. Well I can also post the seal binary if you want it.

After testing : yeah I confirm, this ad version is for allegro sound, that's the same thing used in the latest 0.97.6 binary, both use correctly the sb16 in pcem for me. and when clearing the blaster environment variable (set blaster=), I still get sound with the allegro version, so it uses some autodetection if there is no blaster environment variable after all, but only silence with the seal version, which is the last one which worked for you. I can post the seal binary for the latest version if you want, I still have seal around here, but it has only SB and awe32 driver, nothing for sb16, plus no autodetection, seal is officially dead since the end of 1999, so it would be better if you managed to fix your sound with the allegro version !

You pointed both time to 0.91.9 to be the last dos version with working sound, and then having broken sound. (ah ok, the 2nd link is for the ad version, sorry my bad). Well if I am not wrong this a was for allegro, if that's right then the last released binary (0.97.6) also uses allegro sound. Anyway this 0.91.9 is from 2020, you could have posted earlier... ! Well I had sb16 emulation working in pcem but it doesn't do any autodetection, it relies entirely on the BLASTER environment variable, if you set it badly, you don't hear a thing. It's a little strange you don't get any sound on a sb16, it's the base card for a lot of things, but if you double checked this blaster environment variable, there is not a lot more things I'll be able to do... !

Yeah the sources are available of course. Some sources archives are on this site, up until 0.51.11 I think. If you want something more recent, use the github icon to go to the github page, click on the tags to select the version you want, then it will give you links to download the sources for this version in zip, or tar.gz. The problem is allegro, you need to find some sources for allegro4, then there are some patches, I use these, some from arch linux which probably come from somewhere else, some from the old days of Antiriad with the dos version : patch -p0 < ${startdir}/makefile.all.djgpp.patch patch -p0 < ${startdir}/makefile.dj.djgpp.patch patch -p0 < ${startdir}/misc_mdhelper_sh.djgpp.patch patch -p0 < ${startdir}/src_misc_vbeafex_c.djgpp.patch patch -p1 < ${startdir}/diff-inline patch -p1 < ${startdir}/raine_hacks.patch patch -p1 < ${startdir}/vesa.patch Of course all this is for djgpp. I compiled the whole thing for version 0.96.6, and it worked quite well with PCem, which is quite a serious emulator for old x86 hardware... The best I could do with triple buffer is trying to enable it from a 320x240 mode-x -> black screen (instead of the usual error message "Can't enable triple buffer").

Out of luck here, I remember cleaning up old files not too long ago and deleting a rained.7z file which I didn't recognize... ! Well if I remember correctly I didn't get much feedback from this build, so I don't know if the changes inside were merged into the main version or not, but I'd say it's likely. Anyway, even with PCem and in 16bpp with univbe, I still can't enable triple buffer, and it doesn't say why, it just says it can't, so I can't test that at all.

Hum, looong post... ! Well no need for an update since the update can be loaded with the crc warning. Let's wait and see... ! Your return key is just the gui way of working at its base : no button, then the only key handled is ESC to close the dialog, or button 2 of the mouse etc... If there is at least 1 button, then either Return or the 1st letter of the string inside the button selects it. And yeah sorry I don't think about adding a button all the time, this gui accepts dialogs without any button so I use this sometimes, but sometimes it just feel right to have a single ok button below the message. Just accept it that's all ! Double line in the crc message : after looking at the code it's actually inherited from the dos version, which explicitly added the double line feed, so I did the same without wondering anything. Oh well you are the only one reacting to this kind of detail... More interesting is the fact that this particular last line escaped from the translations, I'll have to try to update them then... Ok, updated for the french translations, a few new strings to translate eventually for the others too... I'll update the others with empty strings for now. Also there is only 1 line feed now, although you are probably the only one interested by that ! For the crc error : it's very rare to actually need the 2 crcs at this point. Those who need it can check the zip archive. The crc displayed is the expected one, and for zip at least, when the message is added the actual crc of the file is not even known, it just knows it's different ! So I will leave it like that.

Well for emulating raine in dos I wouldn't need anything more, everything works perfectly, sound rdtsc, even some vesa modes using univbe, eventually some svga chip supporting more vesa modes but even with the few I had it was enough to test. And even with the windows version I used, which works perfectly in wine. it was abandoned, but then taken again by someone else, I don't remember the details, but yeah there seems to be quite some chaos in the x86 emulation world currently (even dosemu & dosbox seem to have a hard time creating their next stable release). Anyway thanks for the info, it was useful and allowed me to fix a few bugs related to the sh2 emulation, even if there are still some problems with this dos version, it's better, and a working version in 2024 is already quite a feat !

Most of the changes in this one are for the dos version and were released as 0.96.6 for dos anyway, but : - fixed an amazing bug for pengo which was here since 0.43.2, that was in september 2005 !!! See the thread in the forum if you want details. - galaga will now display a message when loaded if it can't find anything for the explosion sample, you can ignore it, it's for info. - gui fixes : games states, transparency, length of game title + size at bottom of screen. - a new "color theme", it was just because I noticed the dos version had actually 3 color themes, but it was done simply by rotating the colors rgb values, here it's a little more involved. Anyway the red theme had been forgotten in the sdl versions... http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

And finally fixed the text truncation, for info the string was cut at 99 characters long because we still need finite buffers to store strings, it seemed to me that 99 characters was way enough for name (size), but some crazy games like samshope seem to need more... I think this name should be shortened, but I enlarged the buffer to 200 characters to avoid this kind of problem in the future anyway.

Didn't know it neither, might be very old, it's not amongst the most played games... ! Reproducible with the asm version too... It was extremely old indeed, from between 0.43.1 & 0.43.2 ! But it was a stupid mistake, related to how regions with more than 1 gfx layout are handled, the big target here was cps2, and it got most of the work, and pengo stayed with some not totally finished code, which produced this effect. The fix is 2 lines only actually, but it took me quite a while to find out what happened ! Thanks for the report !

Updated the rained-0.96.6.7z archive on the site, the only changes inside are related to sh2 emulation explained in the previous post, date of the exe inside : 14th of January !

I had a look at this PCem, it indeed looks interesting, but where is the documentation ? Since there is no interface, how do you want to use this without any documentation ?!!! Even in the forum there is no basic documentation, no default configuration file, nothing, it's quite extreme ! I found the github repository containing all the bioses but they are useless without a minimum set of documentation... If you have a link on how to start using this thing, I am interested... ! Ok, understood, you need the windows version to get the interface, the guys who wrote this are heavily addicted to microsoft... ! But the good news is that it runs fine in wine, and so I can create the config file this way ! Crappy way to do things though... ! After testing on a pentium2-300 with pcem (splendid emulation of the machine this time, this emulator is really THE emulator for dos), gunbird2 runs perfectly with a solid 60 fps. I saw a zooming problem during the intro, specific to this dos version (the flying carpet man while he approaches), I don't know why, but at least it runs smoothly with a serious margin, even with sound (soundblaster 16, 22 Khz). For reference, this sh2 runs at 57/2 MHz, but with almost all instructions taking only 1 cycle (risc), so I'd say it's equivalent to at least twice this frequency for a "normal" cpu. Which means good emulation, raine honor is safe ! I thought about trying some heavy optimizations on this one, I didn't want to do it first because the driver would loose in readability and I didn't think it would make a big difference. After this test I am sure I don't need to do it ! Thanks for the info on pcem though, not sure it will be useful soon because maintaining the dos version today would be crazy as I said, but it's good to know there is a way to test this properly. For info the linux version sucks, no configuration manager which makes it useless alone, and when I try to run it with the config created in wine, it just crashes without any message. As I said these guys are heavily addicted to microsoft, but their program is good anyway (the windows version!) The only advantage of dosbox is that you don't need to create a disk image, but the emulation is less precise for sure on this kind of thing, I could even select a mach 64 gx to have 2d acceleration and then run univbe on it using pcem, quite impressive, even if I was limited to 512x384 16bpp for this test, but it was enough (and the resolutions < 512x384 in 8bpp are all broken in vesa3 for some reason, it seems their emulation isn't totally perfect here). But all this is quite impressive compared to what we had so far ! edit : PCem being quite fascinating to use, I fixed the crash in 8bpp, and the black sprites in 16 bpp for the dos version, this was just that color depths other than 32bpp were badly handled, and 8bpp was crashing because of an overflow in the color map. It's likely that other 24bpp games have problems in 8bpp in dos then, maybe I'll check that later. About 60% cpu free during most the intro on a pentium2-300 in 8bpp, I'd say it runs quite well ! The colors look a little pale in 8bpp, it's normal, it's the effect of the color conversion to fit all this in a 256 colors palette, switch to 16 bpp if you want bright colors ! I didn't find a way to mount directly a vhd in linux yet, I found something on the net about that but it doesn't seem to work, so I work on the vdi used by virtualbox, and then convert it to vhd for PCem using some virtualbox tool, really sub-optimal, but even if that's quite a lot of steps, it's quick to do and manageable. Oh well, I think I'll be able to stop here for now ! The proper way to mount a vhd in linux : https://devicetests.com/mount-virtual-hard-disk-ubuntu (method 1 works perfectly).

I had a dosemu env which worked not too bad to run the dos version, but dosemu seems to have a lot of trouble to reach their 2.0 version and it's getting hard to make it work, plus it was running at the current speed of the cpu, not emulated, at least it was very fast ! I didn't know pcem, emulator for ibm pc and clones ? And it can even run the dos version ? Wow, I'll have to test it one day then !

1 & 2 fixed in git, I'll keep 3 for later... !

Didn't think of anything, it can read command.dat, but not display it ! So it's enough, updated the download page, it appears below the 2 other binaries, 2.4 Mb, including history.dat and hiscore.dat, these 2 are handled. http://raine.1emulation.com/download/latest.html

Well I had disabled ips support in the dos version yesterday, but after thinking about it I added it today : there is almost nothing to do to add it, but without gui of course, the dos gui is crazy to program. But anyway it recognizes the ips directory and any file it contains, which means if you load a rom whose short name is a, and you have a file ips/a.ini containing a list of files to load from ips/a directory, it will do so. I just tested it with an ips I got for bublbobl, and it works perfectly, it's primitive, but it works ! At least it will be a decent version... ! I'll keep it a little longer to see if I think about something else...

Yeah I did it for that too, still a ton of respect for it even if it's outdated now.

1) Yeah I didn't test it, it would be easier to just remove the option... ! Don't worry, I'll test it... 2) did you at least read what I wrote about editing the colors or reverting to the default themes for that ? Either edit your bg color or revert, or even better revert 1st, and if it's still not enough for you then edit the bg color manually. 3) Nope obviously, didn't do it (boring and uninteresting, but yeah should be done one day). Yeah that's what he is already, and he loves that, too bad he can't code to help to fix these things... !

And here is the conclusion : If someone wants to test this, I'll release the binary... a very last dos version, that was the least I could do ! The not maintained anymore is not totally true, I improved the message box in the allegro gui for this version, I wanted galaga to be able to display a message on a few lines and it was not supported in dos, now it is. But I won't do any major change on it despite its problems, it would be too crazy now... !

And here's a screenshot of the result, gunbird2 running in a dosbox session : It's extremely slow, 6 fps and non constant, it crashes in 8bpp for some unknown reason on the colour mapper, it requires more ram than I ever saw in a dos machine (287 Mb displayed here !), but it works !!! Well, it wouldn't work at all on an old machine because of the ram requirement anyway, but maybe it would be faster, this cpu emulation isn't really very efficient... But at least it's good to be able to optimize stuff ! (and it takes forever to load too !).