Metal Mutant (by Silmarils) crashes with VDPMI loaded

[drivelling-spinel]

Dear @crazii, team, apologies if you find this issue I am bringing up here to be somewhat niche, yet I am not sure where else I could look for advice with regards to VDPMI.

During my exploration of SBEMU (and VSBHDA) on the few machines I have that run DOS, I have made a "small discovery" that combination of JEMMEX.EXE, QPIEMU.DLL and VDPMI.EXE results in keyboard controller ports becoming accessible for manipulation by real mode applications even in cases when otherwise they would not, thus enabling, for example, this small keyboard TSR utility I am using for key rebinding keys with the games that otherwise don't support this.

Sadly, running a particular game (Metal Mutant from Silmarils) with JEMMEX.EXE and VDPMI.EXE results in a crash midway through introduction sequence, that one cannot skip (which interestingly only happens if VGA mode is selected at the start of the game). I have tried all three versions of VDPMI.EXE that I have found (one published on Vogons, and two found in issues discussion here on github) and all result in the same crash.

I am including the log file produced with /ll=2 /log=2 options of the latter two versions VDPMI.LOG.

The issue is observed on both an ICH7 machine and a TP300LD laptop, with FreeDOS and Windows 98SE kernels.

Again, please note that I am not running SBEMU for this game, but am keen to get advice on the VDPMI malfunction, so that I could resolve it and the game in a particular configuration.

[Torinde]

Maybe @madbrain76 can help.

[madbrain76]

Sorry, no idea on this one unfortunately.