Success running Descent...

Hi, I have been experimenting with some protected mode stuff, so...
Descent does run when I use DR-DOS emm386 if and only if I have a
emm386 PIC=ON
line in my fdauto.bat (autoexec.bat). I could not test with emm386 DPMI=ON
because ALL ways to use it (MULTI=ON or OFF, with or without FDXMS or HIMEM
loaded before, ...) just crashed (FCB chain broken or illegal instruction
were the error messages). DPMI=ON ran quite unstable with older kernels,
too (and I think it is because emm386 is buggy), but now it ceased to run
at all.

When I use UMBPCI instead of DR-DOS emm386, Descent crashes (prints a DOS4/GW
General Protection Fault message). Other programs tested are AuGoS (compiled
with DPMI16BI and Borland Pascal, a Go game, freeware), Jazz Jackrabbit (also
16bit DPMI user as far as I know, Shareware), Lemmings 3d (Shareware, using
EMS and protected mode) and Terminal Velocity (the hardware 3d demo game that
came with my graphics card).

All of them crash when I have a BITDISK RAMDISK defined as the TEMP directory.
Otherwise, they all run, but Terminal Velocity crashes with a message that it
could not find the 3d chip when switching to 3d mode (it is written for Virge
but I have Virge DX, so I have to install a wrapper before - without the
wrapper, Terminal Velocity refuses to run at all. The wrapper came with the
graphics card).

By the way, both Jazz Jackrabbit and Lemmings 3d are free versions: When you
register, you get more levels, but otherwise, you can use the provided levels
without registering. I saw Jazz Jackrabbit 2 for Windows in a store for only
5 bucks (Euro, in my case): Do you know if this would be a registered version?
At least it has all levels. It is for Windows with Direct Draw, do you
know it it runs in ordinary Wine (Win emulator for Linux)?

By the way, now that I know how to use MENUS in fdconfig.sys, my multiple-
choice life in FreeDOS has become a lot easier :-).


PS: I noticed that one of my FreeCOM 0.83 beta 50 copies has 5e 41
instead of 8a 5a at file offset 15a63 (using fc /b), which makes it
say "failed to load strings resource" and actually run so much out
of strings that even the output of "dir" looks like a pile of "string #..."
- anybody got the same problem? Why? What does this mean? I use the binary
xmsswap download version, so your version should use the same offsets...