Get the typical register and stack dump when attempting to run the Doom1 or Doom2 wad using the DOS version of Vavoom 1.17 and CWSDPMI .90 (have also tried later releases of CWSDPMI without success). Partial details: Exiting due to signal SIGILL Invalid Opcode at eip=0001d372 eax=ffffffff esp=003c4cdc App stack: 0003c4d38..00344d38 Exceptn stack: 00344c90..00342d50 Typically himem.sys will be loaded in addition to any sound and mouse drivers; in fact, the allegro setup app works just fine. Have tried various combinations of -nojoy -nosfx -nolan without success. System is a P133 with 72 MB of RAM and an ESS 1688 sound card. All suggestions welcome. Danke, Slag

Not an answer to your question, but if you run only DOS on this machine, you should throw out the extra 8 MB module because DOS can't recognize anything above 64 MB no matter what. Also, I guess it's of a different size than the rest, which means it might cause system instability in some cases.

Did it print any startup messages before crash?

I'm afraid there are no messages at startup. After I type "vavoom.exe" there is a brief pause followed by the register/stack dump (which I can provide a full copy of if it would be helpful). RambOrc: the 8 MB module is soldered to the motherboard. :) The machine is an IBM Thinkpad 560e that I keep on hand for playing my favorite DOS games. I've been able to play regular Doom1/2, Descent, Duke3d, and Quake. I remembered how much fun I had using Vavoom under Win32 and decided to give the DOS port a try. Descent uses dos4gw by default and I may have had to rebind to DOS32a to get it to work properly, although I'm not sure whether that was due to DOS 7.10 weirdness or laptop hardware weirdness... :) -slag

I too have a couple of PCs on which Vavoom has a cow on startup... PC#1 is an AMD5x86-P75-S running at 160 MHz (it has a big fan) with 48 MBytes RAM, a Cirrus 5430 1MByte PCI VGA card, an Opti 930 sound card all running on an Sis 497 motherboard... It's running MSDOS 6.22 with HIMEM, EMM386 and SDD653... it has 594 KBytes free (ie, about 608,000 bytes free) when I run the DOS MEM command... The ALLEGRO setup runs fine, it detects an OPL3 MIDI driver and a SBPRO digital driver... I have the Heretic IWAD file in the root Vavoom directory... when I run Vavoom WITHOUT first running CWSDPMI (version 0.90+), it says "Selected software reaseriser" and chugs along for a while and finally spits out the following before stopping with the obligitory baby cow - Free Memory 24932492, Largest block 24747176, Free blocks 123 Purgeable memory 0, largest block 0, total blocks 0 Executing "basev/startup.vs" Executing "basev/default.cfg" Invalid bpp, using 8 Terninate called after throwing an instance of "VavoomError" Abort! Terminate called recursively Abort! General Protection Fault in RMCB at eicp=19a702; flags=3002 eax=015900b7 ebx=000020d4 ecx=00000000 edx=0032be01 esi=00001a8a edi=000030d8 ebp=0032bca0 esp=00003094 cs=a7 ds=3b es=33 fs=33 gs=0 ss=33 error=00b4 AND when I run Vavoom after rebooting the PC and then first running CWSDPMI (version 0.90+), it gives me EXACTLY the same result... which is a shame - Doom Legacy 1.41 runs fine on this setup, so I'm puzzled as to where Vavoom might be having trouble... PC#2, on the other hand, is very similarly configured to PC#1 - same software and so forth, including MSDOS 6.22 and SDD653, but with a 486DX2-100, a Realtek 1 MByte ISA VGA card, an Opti 924 sound card and only 8 MBytes of RAM... Like PC#1, PC#2 shows 594 KBytes (about 608,000 bytes) of memory free when I run the DOS MEM command... AND it seems to make no difference at all to PC#2 (same as for PC#1) whether or not I first run CWSDMPI (version 0.90+) before running Vavoom... As for PC#1, the ALLEGRO setup works fine for PC#2... but here's the funny thing - when I run Vavoom on PC#2, it doesn't actually complain - it actually seems like it's going to run, until it terminates with the following message - Z_Malloc: failed on allocation of 540672 bytes which I guess is understandable, seeing as how it only has 8 MBytes to start with... SO being a boy genius, I decided to see if I could get Vavoom running on PC#2 from within Windows 3.11, to exploit the virtual memory thereby available... and guess what - it WORKED as far as getting the Heretic main menu up on the screen complete with MIDI music - but it crashed and hung the PC if I actually tried to select Single Player and start a game... SO - PC#1 won't run Vavoom in DOS - it has a serious cow... and PC#2 (the lower specced PC of the two) actually looks like it wants to run Vavoom in DOS, except that it runs out of memory before it finishes loading Vavoom, and it gets further if Vavoom is run from within Windows 3.1 (but it still crashes when you try to start a game)... are these problems caused by Vavoom? as I suggested before, it seems a shame not to be able to get these old clunkers to run Vavoom, seeing as how they both work fine with Doom Legacy 1.41 for DOS... and I'm just itching to do a comparative series of benchmark tests between Vavoom and Doom Legacy on them... any advice that you might be able to provide on what I'm doing wrong with Vavoom, or how to go about getting these old PCs working with Vavoom, would be welcomed...

Can you post the debug files?

I would happily post the debug files, but have no clue where to find them... How does one induce the program to drop a debug file? After I (attempt to) run Vavoom on either of the aforementioned PCs, there is no new file in the Vavoom directory... Is there a switch to force production of a debug file?

whoops - ok I found out about the -debug switch, so here's the two debug files from the twp PCs, debug-01.txt for PC#1 and debug-02.txt for PC#2...

... not sure if that worked, so try again...

sorry to be stuffing around so much, but I can't see any indication that the debug files that I tried to attach to these posts have actually been attached... is there some trick to attaching a file to a post here? I'd much rather attach the debug files than cut and paste them into the text of a post (one of them is about 350 KBytes)... any suggestions would be welcomed...

arrrggghhh!! @#$@%@@!!! just checked the permitted attachments specs & etc, so now have DEBUG-01.TXT (for PC#1) and DEBUG-02.TXT (for PC#2) archived in the attached file, DEBUG.ZIP... think I'll go and get a little bit high...