Tie Fighter DOS CD hangs just after DOS4G/W screen

[Danfun64]

Describe the bug I have recently installed WinBox for 86Box and have made a fresh VM using the 486 Multimedia PC template (Lucky Star LS-486E). After making some changes to the system, I formatted the disk and installed DOS 6.22, the OAKCDROM driver, the CTMOUSE driver, and the drivers from the AWE32 CD (whilst disabling the AWE32 specific drivers and I had it set to SoundBlaster 16) and ran Memmeker. With everything set into place, I installed the DOS CD version of Tie Fighter from its disk, set the sound card information, and loaded the game... and it froze on a black screen after DOS4G/W finished loading. I tried various things to get the game to run. I tried installing QEMM, changed the graphics card, changed the memory, turned off the sound support of the game, switched machines to a [ALi M1489] AMI WinBIOS 486 PCI, replaced DOS4G/W with DOS32A, running the Lucasarts Boot Disk, etc. Nothing seemed to work.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Have a 486DX/2 DOS 6.22 VM prepared for 86Box
2. Install Tie Fighter CD with Maximum Install
3. Run the game
4. Hang after the DOS4G/W screen

Expected behavior After the DOS4G/W screen, the opening cutscene will load.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: Windows 10 Home 21H1 64-bit
• 86Box version: v3.1.0 build 3353
• Build information: WinBox for 86Box v1.0.0.962. 32-bit 86Box.

Additional context In my attempts to get the game running, I attempted to run the DOS Floppy version of Tie Fighter and the DOS CD version of X-Wing. Both worked fine. Since neither of those ran with DOS4G/W, I tested a DOS4G/W game (Doom 2), which also ran fine.

I have previously discussed this issue on the 86Box Discord server. gogogo did some troubleshooting and was able to get the game to run, albeit inconsistently. I never managed to get the game to run at all.

Attached is my 86box.cfg as well an html file containing a log of the Discord conversation (begins at page 2). If you wish to see my hard drive, I will post it for you 86box.zip .

[Danfun64]

Another thing worth noting. I honestly thought the game worked in PCem, but with similar settings (486DX2-66, AMI WinBIOS 486 PCI) I get the same result.

[Danfun64]

I was wrong on the PCem front. With PCem it was "AMI WinBIOS 486" that worked, which appears to translate to "Kaimei 486" according to 86Box... except I'm not sure that's working either.

edit: NOW It's working, by copying over the hdd I used for PCem. Previously I had been using dynamic .vhd instead of .img. I wonder if that's somehow the problem.

[Danfun64]

Whatever the problem is, I think it has to do with hard drive generation. The game refuses to load if I create a hard drive in Winbox (or at least if I try to create a 2gb one in Winbox following the values in https://www.computerhope.com/hdwd.htm) but when I use the 2gb hard drive from https://sites.google.com/site/dotalshoff/games/dosbox it works, even if I format it.

[OBattler]

This wouldn't be the only thing affected then. I noticed that Windows 95 OSR 2.x FDISK also creates a complete mess of a FAT16 partition in 86Box (but somehow, has no problem with FAT32), but if I use MS-DOS 6.00 FDISK, it creates a properly working partition.

But, you're using MS-DO 6.22 - I haven't tried that yet. Perhaps the "bad" code is already there.

[OBattler]

Could it be a BIOS incompatibility? Since a lot of those 486 BIOS'es didn't really properly support hard disks bigger than 503 MB (the CHS limit).

[Danfun64]

When I was experimenting on getting things to work, I was running an old version of PCem (v14) with an even older rom set (v11). PCem v14 and the latest 86box (not sure about PCem v17) seem to handle large hard drives differently. PCem v14 (at least with AMI WinBIOS 486) recognized the large hard drive in the bios and could presumably use all 2GB of the pre formatted Dosbox hard drive file, but fdisk in both the WIN98SE boot disk and the Freedos 1.3 RC5 boot disk only saw 503 MB. Format C: worked with the former but the latter refused to work. In contrast, fdisk recognized the full storage of the hdd-2gb.img file with both boot disks as well as the wiped and reinstalled DOS 6.22 installation, and format C: worked with the Freedos boot disk and presumably works with WIN98SE boot disk as well.

My guess is that the problem might involve however partitions are made. I also had problems with a WinBox 2gb file whether I used win98se's FDISK or let DOS 6.22 configure the unpartitioned space in the installation.

[OBattler]

If FDISK only saw 503 MB, it means that while the BIOS saw all the 2 GB, its INT 13h calls only support up to 503 MB. That's exactly what I was talking about above. You need a BIOS with LBA support, try the Zida 4DPS or the Soyo 4SAW2. Yeah, they have Award BIOS instead of AMI, but AMI tended to lag behind Award in terms of support for such stuff back then.

[Danfun64]

That was for PCem v14 though. 86box doesn't have that problem... but who knows?

[OBattler]

I believe you used a machhine (with, I believe, a later BIOS version) on 86Box, which may explain the difference.

Also, try generating the hard disk image with 86Box itself instead of with WinBox.

[Danfun64]

I'm sorry that I haven't tried the "generating the hard disk image with 86Box itself instead of with WinBox." bit yet.

Something new just happened after a recent 86box update using the same hard drive file I was always using. Now 86box crashes to desktop with no error message after the DOS4G/W screen.

[Danfun64]

Now having tried X-Wing CD, that's crashing as well. What the heck?