State of the Win9x/DOS builds

[Oerg]

Hi,

I just saw in my IRC logs that Alam made some new DOS builds in November of 2016. They do not work. Tested on Pentium III 500MHz, DOS 7.10 with EMM386, QEMM97 and pure (himem.sys only).

In 2014 Alam made a special perfectly functional Windows 98 build. It even worked on Windows NT 4.0, sans netplay. I don't quite remember the details, but it was SDL1.2 based. Is the game still buildable for SDL 1.2?

(SRB2 2.1.8, video of it running here)

Stock version of Windows 98SE is hopeless for all newer SRB2 builds.

Regular builds with KernelEx

If you're unfamiliar with KernelEx, it is sort of a "fan-made service pack", a kernel extension that provides a lot of API calls and other kernel functionality that stock Win9x lacks in order to make more modern software run.

Tested on PIII-500, 512MB of RAM, Windows 98SE + KernelEx 4.5.2016.17, GeForce 4 MX 460 (ForceWare 56.64), Creative Sound Blaster 16 PnP. This is my only windows 98 machine at the moment, so take performance results with a grain of salt.

srb2dd and srb2win.exe 2.1.19 will work with KernelEx 4.5.2016.17 installed


srb2dd.exe works perfectly. Lacks net-code... I'm not up to date on what's going on there. Performs well even on the P3.

srb2win.exe works somewhat. Slow rendering, only playable at 320x200 on my P3-500 compared to srb2dd. Music plays too fast. Sound effects play with about 400ms delay and the game has trouble playing sound effects in quick succession, e.g. the beep at the score tally.

KernelEx with OpenGL mode

srb2dd.exe: Works really well but still pretty cpu-bottlenecked on my P3. Resolution does not seem to affect performance that much, as is expected. Almost the same performance between 640x480 and 1920x1080.

srb2win.exe: Resolution switches only really work in windowed mode. Very slow rendering for some reason (~10fps at 320x200)

Ironically the stock versions of older SRB2 builds (2.1.14, 2.1.16) will not work, even with KernelEx.

Might not be very interesting for most people here, but I still thought I'd share my experiences.

 

[Rob]

The reason you hare having issues between DD builds and the normal SRB2Win builds is that we are using SDL2 for rendering at this point, and support for SDL2 is pretty shit on older operating systems. It comes as no surprise to me that you're having issues between the two.
The basic logic behind this is that, as new operating systems are being developed, DirectDraw is rapidly being phased out, and is not supported. You'll have the inverse effect when testing on modern operating systems, where DD is shit and SDL2 is better. It's also worth noting, for your benefit, that we are going to be axing DD support altogether as of 2.2.

 

[Monster Iestyn]

Hold on, I thought it was the other way round, where SDL2 doesn't support Win9x/DOS?

SDL 1.2 on the other hand may be okay with them, though none of our official releases have ever used SDL 1.2. (They all used DirectX before 2.1.12 so I'm aware.)

 

[Rob]

You are correct, it is the other way around. My bad.

 

[Prime 2.0]

Netcode on 2.1.19 DD is disabled because of synch issues that occur when directdraw and SDL2 players are in the same game.

Also, I would just like to say that it is nothing short of astonishing that 2.1 is even remotely playable on a Pentium 3.