This game is rather notoriously unstable. To take a wild guess, I suspect it may not be compatible with 512 MB of RAM, in which case the easiest fix would be to use HIMEMX to restrict the amount of RAM to something much smaller.

Strictly for troubleshooting purposes, in the hopes of narrowing down the problem, does the installation on the SD card work if you run it in DOSBox on another PC?

Jorpho wrote on 2021-07-06, 03:43:

This game is rather notoriously unstable. To take a wild guess, I suspect it may not be compatible with 512 MB of RAM, in which case the easiest fix would be to use HIMEMX to restrict the amount of RAM to something much smaller.

Strictly for troubleshooting purposes, in the hopes of narrowing down the problem, does the installation on the SD card work if you run it in DOSBox on another PC?

I have nothing useful to contribute, but I could not resist pointing out the somehow reassuring irony of Skynet being both unstable and possible averse to too much memory . So much for "judgement day" . 😉
( Cue Brad Fiedel's arguably most famous track playing with increasingly wrong notes, varying tempo and distortion) 😉

darry wrote on 2021-07-06, 04:06:

Jorpho wrote on 2021-07-06, 03:43:

This game is rather notoriously unstable. To take a wild guess, I suspect it may not be compatible with 512 MB of RAM, in which case the easiest fix would be to use HIMEMX to restrict the amount of RAM to something much smaller.

Strictly for troubleshooting purposes, in the hopes of narrowing down the problem, does the installation on the SD card work if you run it in DOSBox on another PC?

I have nothing useful to contribute, but I could not resist pointing out the somehow reassuring irony of Skynet being both unstable and possible averse to too much memory . So much for "judgement day" . 😉
( Cue Brad Fiedel's arguably most famous track playing with increasingly wrong notes, varying tempo and distortion) 😉

Hehehe!

Jorpho wrote on 2021-07-06, 03:43:

This game is rather notoriously unstable. To take a wild guess, I suspect it may not be compatible with 512 MB of RAM, in which case the easiest fix would be to use HIMEMX to restrict the amount of RAM to something much smaller.

Strictly for troubleshooting purposes, in the hopes of narrowing down the problem, does the installation on the SD card work if you run it in DOSBox on another PC?

Thank you, I will try HIMEMX. I have the 512mb in there for my Win98 card. I wasn't aware of HIMEMX! I will also try mounting the SD card on my main PC with DOSbox and see if it runs. The last time I played the game in earnest was back in 1996 on a Pentium 90 with 8mb of RAM, on Televideo graphics card.

I tried HimemX, and the problems persisted. I limited XMS to 8mb. I then reinstalled the game into a different directory and left it unpatched, and ran without sound. I could run around and shoot, but as soon as I threw a bomb, it locked up. I mounted the game directory under DOSBox on my main PC, and I must not have midi set up right because I couldn't hear music while testing, so I set it up with a SB16 configuration, and the game ran like a charm.

Right now, I am installing it on my Win98 SD card to see if I can run it under Win98. I will try running it in VGA mode (maybe an issue with the Voodoo5 and how this game handles 640x480 in DOS?) and will try running it with SB16 for music. Other than that, I don't know what could be causing this issue. I cannot find a single instance of a divide overflow error with this game when I google it. I have to imagine that there are people running this game on a Pentium III 700 with a Voodoo5 out there. Maybe it doesn't like Cute Mouse, I don't know. In my experience, a divide overflow error occurs when running a game on a machine that is too fast, but I get the error even when using moslo.

The game runs fine on the same machine on my Windows 98 SD card - in Windows. I tried running the game without SMARTDRV and UNISOUND as well, so I have no idea what is causing this game to not work in pure DOS mode. At any rate I know I can play it, but I do hope to narrow down what is happening, because Betrayal At Krondor crashed after playing around in game for a few minutes, and it could be related.

Well, I figured it out, but it brings me back to the same problems as my EMM386/UMB thread. This Gateway/Tabor III is one of the most unstable systems I have ever played with, when it comes to MS-DOS memory management. It is getting to the point that I am doubting that a good memory configuration is possibly with this "pure" Windows 98 motherboard. The UMB map seems to change upon each reboot and the UMB addresses that are seemingly available lead to crashes, lockups, and reboots.

Removing the I=XXXX-XXXX values from my EMM386 line does three things:

1. Fails to load anything into upper memory.
2. Allows me to run SkyNET without crashes or lockups.
3. Seems to fail to provide enough memory for digital sounds to play through my AWE32.

Back to the drawing board and I think that I will have to use 3rd party drivers to get a decent memory configuration on this things. I have gone from feeling excited about the nostalgia of rebuilding a Gateway system to being very annoyed with it's existence...

Don't forget some of the unofficial patches that fix long standing bugs in the game.

Re: Terminator Skynet problem

liqmat wrote on 2021-07-07, 20:07:

Don't forget some of the unofficial patches that fix long standing bugs in the game.

Re: Terminator Skynet problem

I'm testing with the unofficial patch. I reinstalled the game. I was able to get into the game and even save it, and shoot some bots. However, trying to change the control settings causes the game to lock up with a black screen.

While trying to deal with the problem, I found this site, https://www.cubic.org/docs/configuring.htm and downloaded a program from there called umbinfo.com. Unlike MSD and UMBCHK from the umb pci package, I was able to get a proper memory address for an I=xxxx-xxxx switch. I discarded SMARTDRV and now have 623k largest executable, which I think translates into the most you can get.