Deus (1996), Ishar 3 (1994), Robinson's Requiem (1994), Time Warriors (1997), Crash in Alt Launcher

[Python-Exoproject]

These four games currently crash using the alt launcher due to dosbox Staging.

The long story short is that Staging made some fixes to VGA emulation which had many benefits for dosbox. A few games though still required a quirk of the old approach so the team have added the conf setting vga_render_per_scanline=off to allow for these.

As there is no other advantage to switching these games to Staging at this point (a disadvantage actually as there remains an issue with sensitivity to cycles that the more accurate Staging emulation struggles with but vanilla dosbox is able to power through) I am not providing confs for Staging conversion or suggesting we switch main launch over. There are a couple things for each game worth noting for alt launcher compatibility however that I will note per game:

Deus (1996) Game requires 50k cycles for the High Res mode, but over 40k Staging currently crashes even with the flag added. Once the cycles issue is fixed we will need to readdress this game to get it running for alt launcher

Ishar 3 (1994) Game works in Staging at required cycles, in fact I actually suggest we increase the cycles to 15,000 as the game is a bit slow when exiting a pub and it still runs fine at the higher speed. To allow Staging to run the game we need to add vga_render_per_scanline=off to the [dosbox] section of the conf. This will not affect vanilla dosbox main launch and will allow the game to run via alt launcher

Robinson's Requiem (1994) Game works in Staging at required cycles. To allow Staging to run the game we need to add vga_render_per_scanline=off to the [dosbox] section of the conf. This will not affect vanilla dosbox main launch and will allow the game to run via alt launcher

Time Warriors (1997) Game requires 75k cycles to be smooth enough for a fighting game, but over 60k Staging currently crashes even with the flag added. Once the cycles issue is fixed we will need to readdress this game to get it running for alt launcher. Another note for this one when it gets fixed for Staging, it currently uses a TSR made by ripsaw8080 to implement a CD Music fix in vanilla dosbox. The root issue in vanilla dosbox has been fixed in Staging code and the TSR is no longer needed (in fact the TSR actually stops the music now when using Staging).

[exoscoriae]

ok, so no action to take here that i can see.

[exoscoriae]

@Python-Exoproject should this be moved to low priority? If there is nothing I can do, I'd rather it be pushed over.

[Python-Exoproject]

The conf tweak suggestions for Ishar 3 and Robinson's Requiem can be implemented into the current confs without changing forks to Staging at this time. This is so that these two games can stay on a more stable fork for main launch, but wont die when run via alt launcher.

Staging wont run Time Warriors or Deus at the needed cycles yet without crashing so nothing needs to be changed for them as alt launcher is not an option.

Other than the conf tweaks for those two games the ticket can be parked until staging solve the overall issues with these games

[exoscoriae]

made conf tweaks.

moving to low priority