I tried to use my "capture the game running on a super-slow CPU" trick on SimCity 2000 and got a surprising result: it just crashes immediately!
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Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 09:42:43 JST
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
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✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 09:42:43 JST
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@foone question: how do you end up with a screen like this? aren't the text and graphics modes using different planes with incompatible encodings?
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a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 10:50:15 JST
a kilo of saucepans (rakslice)
@foone @whitequark like there's no reason a video bios couldn't know how to draw text in a graphics mode the video hardware supports
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✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 10:50:15 JST
✧✦Catherine✦✧
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Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 10:50:16 JST
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
@whitequark They are! I'm not entirely sure this is possible on real hardware, but sometimes text modes are emulated on top of a vesa mode, so they can crash and collide like this
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Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 15:31:37 JST
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
I wonder how you write a program so that if your CPU suddenly drops to 1/100th speed, it crashes. weird.
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this. -
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Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 15:33:24 JST
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
@StompyRobot Sound is a good point! I went back and tried disabling music/sound to see if it'd help, but sadly no.
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this. -
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Very Human Robot (stompyrobot@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 15:33:25 JST
Very Human Robot
@foone many async systems have that problem. Sound playback is common.
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Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 15:36:28 JST
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
@foone Heh 'U' I guess the DOS is crying. ^^ -
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Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 15:36:29 JST
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
I tried doing a memory dump and DOSBox says all 16 megabytes of ram I have are 0x55. 32bit DOS programs are so weird
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Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 15:36:30 JST
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
I suspect the crash is mouse related: I got it to run at 125 cycles/second for a couple seconds, but then I moved the mouse "too much" and it crashed
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Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 15:36:31 JST
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
130 is also way higher than I'd like, because you can memcopy the screen in like 50 frames at that speed
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Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 15:36:31 JST
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
so normally I use like 30 cycles per second for these slow-motion drawing GIFs. sadly this game is buffered and crashy at low speeds
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Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Jul-2025 15:36:32 JST
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
130 cycles/second seems to be the slowest you can set it without it crashing.
it also double-buffers the screen so I can't easily capture it drawing the screen. I don't yet have a way to capture the evolution of off-screen buffers (though I've worked on it )
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