I have a P120 with 48 MB RAM, and with some junky 1 MB video card. I am running Caldera DR-DOS 7.03, and in most cases QEMM97 as a memory manager, though I think I have tried it with out QEMM loaded. Vavoom runs okay, though slow on more complex levels unless I lower the detail and resolution - except that it crashes a lot for no apparent reason, and it always needs a cold boot. Sometimes it's just when I make a mistake, i.e. I'll be in the console, and I'll enter in something wrong...for example, try to warp to a map that doesn't exist - and it will instantly crash.<br>The crashes just seem unpredictable unless I purposely do something wrong - but they just happen randomly, regardless of the IWAD that I use.<br>Any hints? How can I go about trying to fix or debug this?<br><br>[it also crashes on Linux, I get a Segmentation Violation or something like that]

It will help me, if you create a debug file (option -debug) and then tell me the stack trace that you will find at the end of the debug.txt (it's located in basev directory).

Okay, I'll try that. I saw mentions of debug.txt but I never saw the file in my directory...<br><br>Also, I would like to note that sometimes it has not exactly "crashed" - I have a resident program in the background that I can invoke with a keystroke. If I do that, I can restore the video mode and terminate what's left of Vavoom, and I am left at a DOS prompt with no problems or fragments of Vavoom left in memory.<br>Because Ctrl+Alt+Del did not work (I think, at least), I thought I had a hardware crash.<br><br><br>Okay, I did some more messing around....<br>(a) The Ultimate DOOM crashes no matter what. If I load the WAD with no GWA present, it immediately crashes if I go to New Game. If I build everything beforehand with GLBSP and GLVIS, the same thing happens.<br>(b) DOOM 2 or basically any other level based on DOOM 2 seems to crash at random if I have Vavoom build the GWA file.<br>(c) If I use separate utilities (in this case, GLBSP and GLVIS) to build the GWA and vis data, I have never had anything based on DOOM II crash. It took 3 hours to build TNT's GWA file, but I ran the game and it never crashed, even in complex levels at 1024x768 with MD2 models and all visual effects on, despite that it ran probably less than 2 fps.<br><br>That seems to be part of the problem... but I'll send you the stuff from DEBUG.TXT anyway once I make it crash, now that I know how to keep all the DOOM 2 stuff from crashing.

It's in the basev directory<br>but you'll have to start the<br>game with the -debug option<br>for it to be created.<br><br>from the vavoom directory just type<br>cd basev<br>edit debug.txt<br><br>and you should be able to look for your error

"It's in the basev directory<br>but you'll have to start the<br>game with the -debug option<br>for it to be created."<br>Janis Legzdinsh explained that quite clearly, thanks....<br><br><br><br>I ran with -debug and found nothing in the way of any kind of core dump, or basically anything related to memory at all.<br><br> - I ran, I forget exact parameters except I know -debug was in there, and<br>still in textmode it started reading the CD-ROM. Then it just crashed. It was<br>a hardware crash; nothing at all responded. Nothing was in debug.txt.<br>This happened multiple times, and I wonder WHY THE HELL IT HAPPENED.<br>I had run it with a CD-ROM in the drive many times and this never happened.<br><br> - I ran with Ultimate DOOM and started a game; it started<br>looping whatever sound was playing. I waited several minutes<br>to see if anything happened, nothing did, I invoked<br>Controlled Chaos with Alt-Lshift-B, hit 9 to restore the video<br>mode, then 3 to terminate the current program. Back at a DOS<br>prompt with no apparent ill effects, I looked at debug.txt and<br>got this:<br><br>0x1f70000 (31.437500 meg) allocated for zone, Zone base 0x930ACC<br>adding ..\udoom\doom.wad<br>adding basev/doom/wad0.wad<br>adding basev/doom2/wad0.wad<br>configured audio device<br> SFX   : ES1868 (22729 hz) on port 220, using IRQ 5 and DMA channel 1<br> Music : OPL3 synth on port 220<br>MSCDEX version 2.128<br>CD get audio info failed (Drive not ready)<br>CDAudio: no music tracks<br>CDAudio_Init: No CD in player.<br>CD Audio Initialized<br>Free memory 30594508, largest block 30558296, free blocks 4<br>Purgable memory 35116, largest block 0, total blocks 1<br>Executing "basev/startup.vs".<br>Executing "basev/default.cfg".<br>Executing "basev/doom2/config.cfg".<br>Can't find "autoexec.cfg".<br>600k surface cache<br>Can't find song "D_DM2TTL"<br>Spawning server MAP01<br><br> * MAP01? Shouldn't that be E1M1? That is very obviously not<br>an error on my part.<br><br><br> - Vavoom also crashes if I attempt a warp to a nonexistent level, for<br>example if I use the MAP command in the console, and make a typo and put in<br>something like MAP MPA01 instead of MAP MAP01.<br>Even so, why would it crash over a very simple error such as that?<br><br> - If I hit F1 or attempt to quit with Ultimate DOOM, the same thing<br>happens.<br>Here is if I hit F1:<br>...<br>600k surface cache<br>320x200x8.<br>Can't find song "D_DM2TTL"<br>- (.R_DrawPic)<br>- R_GetPicInfo<br>- R_DrawPic<br><br>Here is if I quit:<br>....<br>600k surface cache<br>320x200x8.<br>Can't find song "D_DM2TTL"<br>- (.LocalSound)<br>- S_LoadSound<br>- S_StartSound<br><br>

roy5050:<br>"from the vavoom directory just type<br>cd basev<br>edit debug.txt"<br><br>Please, I'm not an idiot. I know how to use DOS.

Well, I can clearly see that Vavoom thinks that you are playing Doom 2. If you are using -iwad option, try to add the following option:<br><br>-game basev/doom1<br><br>OTOH if you edited games.txt, make sure that game directory is basev/doom1

Your wad might be missing some lumps that<br>are not used by you but used by the engine for<br>gaming internals.<br><br>Examples:<br><br>PNAMES -- a lump that list the name of all the sprites in a format editors can userstand--to convert a token such as "REDWALL" into a pcx/bmp image.<br><br>TEXTURES -- tells what sprites to use for a given texture name. Textures can have more that on sprite.<br><br>Note Floors/Ceilings flats are different--any image that is 64x64 with offsets of 0 is assumed to be a flat.<br><br>PLAYPAL--the palette used by the doom players<br><br>COLORMAP-- the palette used by the game<br><br>TEXTMAP -- the pallet used to display characters on the screen<br><br>DEMOxy -- Game demos.<br><br>You might have to merge your wad with a standard doom2 wad to restore any entries that might be lost.<br><br>Note: this is by no means a complete list of entries that people might not know about but are referenced to in most engines.<br><br>& lastly<br><br>TITLEPIC -- the picture show when the game is loaded for the first time.<br><br>ENDOOM -- the screen you see when you exit the game. <br><br>(Janis it would be nice  :) if you could put an avi/mpeg viedo in place of TITLEPIC or ENDOOM)

The problem is not in missing lumps, but because of the wrong game detection which is because the main wad is not in the same folder as Vavoom.