#172 Xcom Apocalypse CD strangeness

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

I recently upgraded my version of Dosemu from
1.0.something to 1.2, when I read that other people
were able to play both UFO and Xcom Apocalypse under
Dosemu; I had been unable to start the things whatsoever.

Sure enough, the Debian package of it installed cleanly
(though I had to keep my existing config file because
I'd lose too many settings), and I found that yes, both
games seemed to work at last! Hooray, great job, you
guys! I was a bit confused because the notes on the
site said that Apocalypse refused to start if
configured with audio, because mine had been and it
started fine.

Then I went to play a mission in Apocalypse, it got as
far as the mission briefing screen, and then showed a
little dialogue box "PLEASE PUT THE XCOM CD BACK IN THE
DRIVE", and refused to accept it was already there.
Dosemu could already see the CD, and Apocalypse could
too because it plays its music from a huge raw audio
file on it (yes, I do mean a file not a normal CD audio
track), and the music was working before trying to
start a mission. So I'm assuming now that there's more
than one method Dos programs can try to read CDs with.

I looked through the config files (existing and new)
for mention of any CD options, found none. Searched
through the docs for discussion of CDs and only found
the thing about the cdrom.sys driver and mscdex, which
seemed to match what I'd already put in my config.sys
and autoexec.bat (I even tried changing my "lh
c:\mscdex etc etc" to plain "c:\mscdex etc etc" in case
that made a difference; it didn't). Anything I'm missing?

[Stas Sergeev]

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configured with audio, because mine had been and it
started fine.
Thanks, I clarified the comment to refer to the DEMO
version only.

when I read that other people
were able to play both UFO and Xcom Apocalypse under
Dosemu; I had been unable to start the things whatsoever.
Maybe it will help if you copy the game to the HD?

c:\mscdex etc etc" to plain "c:\mscdex etc etc" in case
that made a difference; it didn't). Anything I'm missing?
Most likely not. Might be some bug in dosemu's cdrom
driver. But since we don't have a CD version of the game,
but only a demo, it is hard to tell.
Try to upgrade your dosemu - 1.2.x is really very old,
but wrt cdrom - there were not many changes.
Then change the line

undef CDROM_DEBUG

to

define CDROM_DEBUG 1

produce the -D9+C log and attach it here. Maybe from
that log we'll be able to deduce the problem.

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

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Maybe it will help if you copy the game to the HD?
Well I'm very low on disk space, so I couldn't fit an image
of the CD on it. But the suggestion sparked a thought I had
regarding the use of LRedir to create the drive I unpacked
the game to.

I'd noticed when I tried reinstalling the game from scratch
that it'd do a few files, and then stop and exit with most
of them uncopied (my first Dosemu copy of Apocalypse was
just copied straight from my Windows machine, so that didn't
happen before). When I checked one of the files defining the
installation ("xtract.lst") it had a list of filenames in
varying case, and I wondered if the way that Lredir made the
filesystem case-insensitive might have gone wrong somehow.

So on a hunch I made a disk image wiith mkfatimage16 and
copied all the files over with a homemade version of Xcopy
(using mtools), and when I tried it, it worked perfectly.
It's possible the install program would work properly too if
given such a disk image as a target, but I haven't tried
that. It seemed important to point out though, because other
people might be having problems that turn out somehow to
come from using lredired drives.

[Stas Sergeev]

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Would be nice if you try the installation on the hdimage
drive, and if it works while on the lredired - fails, please
open another lredir-related report and attach the -D9+Dd
log. Having the properly working lredir is very important.