That particular error might relate to a modification to change the soundtrack from CD audio to Ogg Vorbis files. Ogg Vorbis decompression and digital audio playback while simultaneously playing the game might be too much for your machine even if you can get it to run on Windows 98.

Yep that would be the cause. There's multiple ways to hook CD audio redirection into a program. The most common two are to drop an override .dll in the same dir as the exe, with the same name as a dll that that exe already loads; or, patch the exe to load a differently named dll. If you see a "winmm.dll", or anything else that looks like it doesn't belong, try moving it out of the way and see if that improves things; if it's more like "_inmm.dll" then you could try un-patching the exe (simple string replacement). You'll lose music though, at least until you burn a CD. (Or maybe there's a MIDI fallback? Don't remember.)

Don't forget to remove nGlide while you're at it.

Or you could use the Hammer of Thyrion source port instead. Not sure whether the win32 builds run on Win98 though... but if they don't, there's a DOS port, making it even better than the original version.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2024-12-27, 01:54:

That particular error might relate to a modification to change the soundtrack from CD audio to Ogg Vorbis files. Ogg Vorbis decompression and digital audio playback while simultaneously playing the game might be too much for your machine even if you can get it to run on Windows 98.

You are most likely right. I could try messing with KernelEX even further, but it's unlikely to help when the Vorbis thing sends instructions that don't exist. I suppose I could try a spare Windows XP hard drive just to see what would happen.

However, according to my experiences with unpacking GOG installers, the K6-2 450 overclocked to 500 MHz is about 600 times slower than my Ryzen 5 5600X. Yikes. It's questionable if it can even play compressed audio while running a game, Half Life barely works with EAX on that system.

elszgensa wrote on 2024-12-27, 11:37:

Or you could use the Hammer of Thyrion source port instead. Not sure whether the win32 builds run on Win98 though... but if they don't, there's a DOS port, making it even better than the original version.

That source port sounds interesting. I have recently bought this game from GOG also. I wonder if the DOS port supports 3DFX Glide acceleration.

It seems that it does support CD audio so potentially could burn a disk with the music on it for systems without the processing power to decode OGG files whilst playing the game.

I've said this before but I really wish GOG provided unaltered copies of disk images with as many games as possible ,
I know people with original hardware are not their target audience but youtubers or researchers would benefit from having original copies to play around with ,
plus it would help with preservation efforts and so that people don't have to jump through hoops to get a version that works on period correct hardware.

AppleSauce wrote on 2024-12-27, 14:22:

I've said this before but I really wish GOG provided unaltered copies of disk images with as many games as possible ,
I know people with original hardware are not their target audience but youtubers or researchers would benefit from having original copies to play around with ,
plus it would help with preservation efforts and so that people don't have to jump through hoops to get a version that works on period correct hardware.

Something I wonder about is if publishing binary diffs between the GoG version and the original is anyhow more legitimate "abandonware" than the full original game

For binary diffs:
As far as US copyright law: If not a "substantial part" which typically means if it is core of the original work which a diff is not.
Also since the GOG store version breaks compatibility with the original OS then as far as the DMCA is concerned it's allowed. (gog galaxy dependency)

Review the following assuming U.S. laws apply:
"Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17) Chapter 12: Copyright Protection and Management Systems"
"Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies"

Also review cased for precedent.

The above override Terms of Service that proponents seems to love so much but you can't expect mods and the ignorant masses to read and interpret laws and the game stores aren't going to do that for you.

but as always you can be sued for anything.

I did not think the Hammer of Thyrion port went that far, very impressive. I have downloaded both the DOS and Windows x86 versions. Both work out of the box in software mode, but I have not been able to get Glide working. In any case this is very promising. There is support for all the Voodoo cards and with a wee messing around I got the Voodoo 1 version running, but so far the DOS version returns a blank screen and loads for seemingly ever, while the Windows version throws some kind of Glide related error. I'm on the right path at least. Thanks everyone.

DosFreak wrote on 2024-12-27, 15:36:

Also since the GOG store version breaks compatibility with the original OS then as far as the DMCA is concerned it's allowed. (gog galaxy dependency)

Nope. Galaxy is entirely optional, you're free to ignore it and manually download the installers from the website instead, so this is not a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card. You'll have to continue looking at each game individually and decide whether any of their "fixes" break stuff.

Its not optional, the offline installers still use the gog galaxy DLL which breaks OS compatibility. (For those games that require the gog galaxy DLL)

So there may be some... I for one can't say I've run into any of those yet, so my point of needing to examine them closer still stands.

DosFreak wrote on 2024-12-27, 17:20:

Its not optional, the offline installers still use the gog galaxy DLL which breaks OS compatibility. (For those games that require the gog galaxy DLL)

Perhaps it is possible for someone to make a replacement GOG Galaxy DLL that is Win9x compatible. It doesn't need to work, just as long as it offers the same interface and responses to the game.

DosFreak wrote on 2024-12-27, 17:20:

Its not optional, the offline installers still use the gog galaxy DLL which breaks OS compatibility. (For those games that require the gog galaxy DLL)

Gentlemen, I installed all these games using official GOG installers in the first place. They run without issue on Windows 9x so long as you use KernelEX. GOG on 9x is a very seamless experience so long as it is DOS games you are interested in. The Windows games are far more complicated as the programs are typically patched, which is indeed why I made this post.

We are quite lucky that Raven and id Software open sourced their games, so it is quite easy to fix these issues. I now got Glide working in DOS, with a wee more tinkering I may even get it to play those cursed .ogg music files.

The question that I still have is that of games that have not been open sourced. I would imagine for there not to be that many that tick all these boxes over on GOG, but still.

DosFreak wrote on 2024-12-27, 15:36:

For binary diffs: As far as US copyright law: If not a "substantial part" which typically means if it is core of the original wo […]
Show full quote

For binary diffs:
As far as US copyright law: If not a "substantial part" which typically means if it is core of the original work which a diff is not.
Also since the GOG store version breaks compatibility with the original OS then as far as the DMCA is concerned it's allowed. (gog galaxy dependency)

Review the following assuming U.S. laws apply:
"Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17) Chapter 12: Copyright Protection and Management Systems"
"Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies"

Also review cased for precedent.

The above override Terms of Service that proponents seems to love so much but you can't expect mods and the ignorant masses to read and interpret laws and the game stores aren't going to do that for you.

but as always you can be sued for anything.

Thanks. That makes sense. I feel like binary diffs could be a good solution to allow people to legally reconstruct the original game from a legally-purchased new copy, without GOG having to sell and support true Win95 vintage software. At least with the DOS games, it's relatively straightforward to extract them out of the DOSBox container and put on real hardware.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2024-12-28, 02:02:

At least with the DOS games, it's relatively straightforward to extract them out of the DOSBox container and put on real hardware.

Strongly disagree. GoG does a really good job of butchering them, usually by some combination of omitting the setup programs (required for configuring sound cards), using non-standard compressed audio tracks for CDs and using broken community developed patches to combine multiple disk games into one archive. It's even worse now that they use ScummVM whenever possible since they don't include the DOS binaries at all.

PCIe_awe64_gold wrote on 2024-12-27, 20:01:

I now got Glide working in DOS, with a wee more tinkering I may even get it to play those cursed .ogg music files.

How did you manage to get glide working in DOS? It just locks up my PC when I try? This is with Voodoo 1 and Pentium MMX

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2024-12-28, 10:50:

How did you manage to get glide working in DOS? It just locks up my PC when I try? This is with Voodoo 1 and Pentium MMX

Yes, I had this same issue. You mustn't run it in Windows. That's the first step, for some reason it refuses to work if started that way. As for getting it actually working, well they supply the drivers for all the 3dfx cards, so it is just a matter of copying the Voodoo 1 driver to the base game directory. Also for best chances of success I did not use the GOG "data1" directory, but rather copied just "pak0" and "pak1" to the provided data1 folder. More or less just following the provided instructions to the letter, in hoping it would start working.