VOGONS

Fate of Atlantis, Simon the Sorceror sound crashing issue (DOS)

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First post, by Kitty Trouble

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So I would love to play DOS games in actual DOS mode, but for example these 2 games I have had a specific type of crashing related to my sound card (probably)

In Fate of Atlantis, when I skip through text (using period key) there is a chance that the game will freeze. As I am speedrunning that game, pressing period to skip text is required.

I have had the errors on the following systems:

Windows 98 PC (my childhood PC with a Pentium-S computer that has a Sound blaster 16 ISA card) - rebooted in DOS (Setting GUI=0) - this is the one shown in the videos below

Dell Dimension 4600 running Windows 98 SE using Sound Blaster Live card - in DOS mode, same as above.
Same computer, but with DOS 6.22 installed
Same computer, but with FreeDOS installed

Because it's doing it on 2 separate computers I feel like it's not the specific hardware and an issue with the games that I just don't know the solution for.

Also, when playing Simon the Sorceror (talkie) the game similarly crashes after I would examine an item. In that game, it crashes as soon as the dialogue finishes, and that one is much more consistent, I can't do 1 or 2 things without the game crashing. Though I won't be playing that specific game again, I thought it would be important to mention.

I'd prefer to play DOS games in DOS mode when I can...as a workaround right now I am playing Indy in windows 98 mode to prevent the crashing, but of course I couldn't do the same with Simon, so I had to play the non-talkie version. Ideas?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yASSbID6Cnk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80EncVjuQqE

Reply 1 of 2, by feda

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I posted a reply to the thread you made about this a month ago.

Reply 2 of 2, by Kitty Trouble

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feda wrote on 2025-01-04, 06:22:

I posted a reply to the thread you made about this a month ago.

I apologize, I forgot that I had posted this here prior, someone I was talking to had just mentioned asking vogons.

It's not the mouse driver, I disabled it completely, and it still crashes. It's almost definitely sound related, because it happens when sound effects (voices) are finishing / being deactivated.

For some reason, the crash is behaving differently than it used to. Now it is not glitching out with the audio, the audio is just stopping. The background music continues to play. If the mouse cursor is visible, it continues glowing. But the game becomes non-interactible. I'm not really sure what changed. I've been playing around with different buffer sizes. I tried 8 then 64 and both are behaving this new way, now.

When I played simon, it would glitch out and keep repeating the last part of the dialogue.

Edit: I have discovered that if the game sits long enough you are able to interact with the game again, but until that happens you can't click on things, use the keyboard, or use keyboard shortcuts with it. I don't know why or how it happens, but twice now I have left it sitting in its crashed state and then been able to interact with the game after a long time of not touching it. It might not work every time, though.

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