Re: Anyone 'upgraded' back to XP after falling out with Vista?

The message <5u2hk2F1g47vmU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from John Jordan <junk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

Johnny B Good wrote:

That site, unfortunately, requires (free, but very nosey) registration.
However, it did reveal the name of the file from which I successfully
googled an alternative download source. :-)

Well, that's how I found the link. I downloaded the file myself from
Microsoft years back. act26.exe should be 6,945,768 bytes and have stuff
in the version & security signature tabs.

Yeah, it's funny, but I didn't think to check (the bleedin' obvious:-)
until you mentioned it. The file size is an exact match and all the
version info looks good (but 'd already run it on my test winXP setup by
then).

WTF is a shim? Is it an acronym or an actual name for a piece of code
(I've seen this expression years ago amongst the many patch updates for
netware 3.12 - often wondering wtf a 'shim' was - I know what it is in
mechanical engineering terms - basically a spacer).

Microsoft seem to use the term for patch code that sits between the
executable and the libraries.

That suggests it's used in a similar sense to the mechanical
engineering one (a spacer to take up the slack).

I googled the "pop/cli fix" and the results seem to imply an actual
hack of the game program code being needed. I'll deal with that sort of
fix only if I feel there's no alternative.

Yeah, essentially you patch the code to replace the popf with sti in the
common pushf/cli/stuff/popf sequence. popf doesn't change the interrupt
flag in NT.

I'm only guessing here (I've only used Z80 assembler), but the pushf
looks like a 'push flags onto the stack' instruction, cli a 'Clear
interrupt' and popf a 'pop flags off the stack' instruction. I don't
know whetther 'stuff' is simply shorthand for 'yada yada' (more code) or
an actual instruction. :-)

Anyway, I've had a chance to try out both act26 and vdmsound on the
winXP box (just vdmsound alone on my win2k box) and I have to say the
results seem just as disappointing as they were 2 or maybe 3 years ago.

When you think that even an almost 4 old system like mine must be at
least 16 times more powerful than the PCs that the latest of these old
games were designed to run on, I can't believe how piss poor the
emulated support is (and we're not even talking about an emulator in the
full sense of say a ZX Spectrum emulator, just a means of intercepting
calls to the soundcard and then, via a little bit of patch code, passing
them onto the real sound card hardware - and, of course, emulation of a
dos environment).

Right now, I'm setting up a refurbished Celeron500/96MB/win98se box to
try out my own suggestion that "You'd be better off using an old skt7
Pentium box for running these old dos games on.". Just playing catchup
with AVG/Spybot/Ad-Aware updates at the moment.

Just setting up "Blood" (had a slight hitch with testing the sound FX -
nothing unusual, sadly, with win9x setups). The problem seems to be
_over-use_ of the sound configuration program. I've gotten the game
working ok, but I'm now struggling with Duke3D.

I suspect it's more to do with the on-board C-Media sound drivers on
this grotty intel chipset board (it's no BX440 job, the best intel
chipset in its class). I think I've still got a 486 DX4/100 box knocking
about somewhere. I'll get back to you on that... later! :-)

--
Regards, John.

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