Duke4.net Forums: Re: Duke Nukem II crashing - Duke4.net Forums

1st off this is a Dell Inspiron 3541 laptop OS Win7 Home 32bit. Everything on the laptop is running fine other then Duke Nukem II.
I have the registered version of MS DOS, Duke Nukem II. 1 of a hand full of MS DOS games that I payed for a long time ago and still have.
Anyways I am playing the game via Dosbox. I have been using Dosbox for a long time. This time I played Dukem Nukem II from the start
episode 1, level 1.. I get up to the end of episode 3, level 1 and the whole screen blacks out. No controls, no nothing. The only control I have is
Ctrl + Alt + Del > task manager, then end the game and it drops back to Windows desktop. After that Windows is fine. I normelly save each level
at the start of a new level. I have tried starting episode 3 level 1 from the new start a few times and the same thing happens every time. Could
episode 3 level 2 be corrupted? I haven't deleted the game and reinstalled yet. I just though I would throw it out there and see what ideas come up.

Steve

A PS. It is NOT episode 3 level 2 that has the problem. It is episode 3 level 3. When I win episode 3 level 2 and the game moves on to level 3. That's when the screen goes black and so on.

I just tried uninstalling Duke Nukem II and reinstalling it. I still have the same problem.

Steve

This is weird, I recall being able to complete the whole series under DOSBox, although it admittedly occurred just once.
I also recall having issues with occasional freezes on an old Win95 setup (possibly related to sound playback), but I don't think I ever got these under DOSBox.

Can you post the full contents of your Duke Nukem II dir? This includes the following details, for each file: File name, file size, md5sum.

These seem to be the details from my copy (which does *not* include that Duke-with-glasses patch), covering file sizes and md5sums:

dn2help.exe 10795 706ca630fa56053388b322f0da4ab3d5
dn2hint.exe 9499 91846be25c24ac01b983786fb9f410c2
file_id.diz 446 2d34e618cdc17857719890902df8aa56
nukem2.cmp 5496675 342fe660b7222c6d84ebabc5abc563ea
nukem2.exe 59552 9c89c02891856091397ae92d18438096
nukem2.f1 98960 b5985516a2e46f5ef81cb9abfa3265f3
nukem2.f2 38622 f517c739beb6ef8d7e51e937854100c3
nukem2.f3 52427 3eafe45253ef83669ac9c8476fa97de7
nukem2.f4 240848 f63eeeeb24c07f73b8fb4da56653e690
nukem2.f5 33911 98f0584c244df06d13f367206445cb72

reble11, on 09 July 2017 - 06:53 AM, said:

NY00123, on 09 July 2017 - 12:04 PM, said:

Uninstalling and reinstalling is a good idea, but you might have to delete some remaining files manually after uninstalling (this may vary, depending on the uninstaller). So please post the full contents of your Duke Nukem II dir.

The files NY00123 posted are what is found on the Duke Nukem 3D CD. I have never seen the files of any other version, so I don't know what else there might be. DN2HELP.EXE and DN2HINT.EXE can be ignored, as they are just text files merged with a text viewer program. All you need in order to to play are the files that start with NUKEM2 (and the FILE_ID.DIZ for the copy protection).

Also, it would help if you could tell me what difficulty level you are using and when exactly the game "blacks out". The normal sequence when finishing a level is this:

• fade out & in
  
• show the "secret bonus" screen and add bonusses (or no bonus)
  
• fade out & in
  
• show the loading screen
  
• fade out & in
  
• next level begins

Just to make testing easier, I created a savegame for E3L3 for you (see Attachments). This is using medium difficulty and starts you off with 0 points.

By the way I did do some level mod's about 5 years ago. And the mod's have worked fine since then.
Here is my file list bellow.

NY00123, on 09 July 2017 - 12:04 PM, said:

I always keep an unmodified copy of any game, on cd/dvd, that I modified just in case there is a problem with the game, like now. I just installed the clean (no in game saved files) unmodified version of Duke Nukem II and played from the start of episode 3 (in easy mode. without my mod's. The game is harder to play for me without the mod's) and I got to the end of level 2. The screen is still going completely blank when level 3 starts to load. And the only control that still works is Ctrl + Alt + Del > task manager and shut the game down, then I get desktop and everything else back.

Steve

I think I know now what's going on. I made a few mod's on episode 3 level 3. But I forgot to del the old file "nukem2.-s1". There was a conflict between the old "nukem2.-s1" and the mod's I made in E3-L3. The key that got me on the right track was the "nukem2.s1" test file that you made for me. Thanks. The conflict bit slipped my mind because since I got the bugs out of Duke Nukem II with the mod's in place. I never had any problems until now. Thanks again k1n9 By the way are you an Amateur Radio Operator? I can't remember whitch country has that letter and number combo.

K1n9_Duk3, on 09 July 2017 - 02:00 PM, said:

I'm not sure if you've managed to fix the problem, but I just wanted to say that the saved games (NUKEM2.-S? files) don't store anything related to the level files. All there is is the episode number and level number, but no actual level data. The saved games won't cause the game to crash, especially not in the situation you described.

I haven't checked this for all the files you posted, but E3L3 (N3.MNI) is definitely modified. My guess is that the level file might have been corrupted, because of this:

reble11, on 09 July 2017 - 08:45 PM, said:

That's a pretty damn old version of my editor you've got there (v0.9a). And it had a bug in the RLE compression routine that could corrupt the level files. That bug was fixed in later versions. You can get the most recent version of my editor (v0.9f) here.

Just delete the N3.MNI file and rename NUKEM2-CMP.bak back to NUKEM2.CMP. The game should work fine after that, unless there are other level files that also have been corrupted.

Now I am 99.99% sure as to what happened to episode 3 level 3. I don't remember were I found the file "guide.pdf" by K1n9 Duk3. "K1n9 Duk3's Enormous
Tool (referred to as \the editor") to modify Duke Nukem II". I found the following paragraph, in the guide, bellow that explains what probably happened to E3 L3.
-------------
1.6.2. Masked Foreground Tiles
Be very careful when using masked tiles that have the foreground bit set. The game
will freeze if there are more than 252 masked foreground tiles visible at the same
time! Solid foreground tiles are not affected by this limit.
The game probably uses a fixed-length array to store any masked foreground tiles
that are currently visible. Once that array is full, trying to find an empty slot in
the array could cause a deadlock.
-----------------
I did make some changes to the Masked Foreground Tiles. I probably went over 252 masked foreground limit. So the game locked up. I learned something new about this game.
A PS. I have run into this problem before in other games when adding more life and ammo cans.

K1n9_Duk3, on 10 July 2017 - 12:47 PM, said:

K1n9_Duk3 1st I did "Just delete the N3.MNI file and rename NUKEM2-CMP.bak back to NUKEM2.CMP". That set episode 3 level 3 back to default. All is good there. I tried putting my mod's back in with your game editor v0.9f and I got an error message when I tried to save the level. See the attached screen capture picture. I didn't save the mod's. I then tried using the editor v0.9a and the save took AA-OK, the game plays just fine starting at episode 3 level 1 and I played through to the end of level 4 without any problems. Why is v0.9f giving me the error message? By the way I also have v0.9b beta on my MS-DOS games backup DVD

Steve

.

reble11, on 12 July 2017 - 02:39 AM, said:

I added some code that scans the level for errors that will make the level unwinnable, result in corrupted level files or cause an "out of memory" crash. The earlier versions of the level editor didn't have that, which is probably why you ended up with these freezes in the first place. Just keep in mind that without having access to the game's source code, some of these warnings are just educated guesses on my part. Some levels might work even if the editor shows you an error, other levels might not work even though the editor doesn't detect any errors.

To see what the actual issue is, you need to press F2 in the level editor (or click "SCAN" at the bottom of the screen, or select "Scan Level" from the level editor's menu). That will show you a text window with warnings and error messages, as well as some statistics at the very bottom.

Note that F2 will only show the results of the last scan of the current level. If you modified the level and want to see if that fixed the problem, you need to SCAN it again.

Now I have a completely new problem with Duke Nukem II. Now when I load the game via Dosbox (all of my other DOS games load and play fine via Dosbox) DN II gets to the 1st attached screen capture. I hit the space bar to move on and the game dumps out to the DOS prompt, see the 2nd attached screen capture. I tried del the game on the C: drive and reinstalling the backup from the D: hard drive. Same problem. I let my 12 yr old nephew use the DOS backup game cd to load the games into his laptop and he lost the cd (my bad on that). My last resource for the DOS Duke Nukem games is the original 3 cd set that I bought new a long time ago. "Duke Nukem kill a ton". The 3 cd's are still in good shape and readable. But I lost my instructions for uncompressing the Duke Nukem II files, see the 3rd attached file. I lost the instructions when I was tired, I wasn't paying attention to the drive letter when I reformatted SD card. And I reformatted the D: hard drive instead, again my bad. I am still trying to recover from that lose. I had about a 3rd of the 350 some odd gb's that were used on a 500gb hd backed up. There are some prog installers on the HD that I will never find again.

K1n9_Duk3, on 12 July 2017 - 12:39 PM, said:

Make sure that all the NUKEM2.* files and FILE_ID.DIZ are not write-protected. For some reason, Duke Nukem II tries to open all these files with read/write access, even for files that are never written to.

For example: When NUKEM2.F5 (the Apogee logo animation) is write-protected, the game crashes after the anti-piracy screen (your 1st attached image). But it's weird that the game exits to a blank DOS screen on your end (your 2nd attached image). It should show the contents of DOSTEXT2.BIN (stored inside NUKEM2.CMP by default) and if it can't find that file, this will cause the game to lock up. This makes me think that either your NUKEM2.EXE or your NUKEM2.CMP files might not be the exact same files that I have.

To help you any further, I would need to see more details. Like file size and CRC checksums for all the files in your Duke2 folder. If you don't want to post them, then at least compare them to the values NY00123 posted and see if one of your files was corrupted.

I added the contents of the DN2INST directory on the Duke Nukem 3D v1.3d CD to a zip file to get the size and CRC checksum for all the files (see attached image). You should be able to do the same and compare the results.

The files were read only and write-protected on the cd. There is a batch file on the cd that is setup to copy the files to what ever directory that I want on the C: drive and at the same time removes the read only and write-protect check marks. Duke Nukem II plays ok as is. But I can't add my mod's to the game without decompressing the CMP, F1 - F5, GT and NM files. There is a prog and a way to do it but it has been so long since I did it. I can't remember how to do it. That's why when I get a set of instructions to do something. I save the instructions for future reference like this.

K1n9_Duk3, on 13 July 2017 - 01:13 PM, said:

K1n9_Duk3 I found the instructions online to get the unmodified files in the "NUKEM2.CMP" file on the original cd uncompressed and into an empty dir in the D: hard drive via Duke Nukem II editor V0.9 beta. Now how do I uncompress the "Nukem2.F1 to *.F5" files?

You don't. The NUKEM2.F? files are FLIC animations that you can edit with the animation editor in "K1n9_Duk3's Enormous Tool". Just leave them alone unless you want to edit the intro animations.

Ironically, the NUKEM2.F? files are actually "compressed", while NUKEM2.CMP itself is not compressed in any way.

I don't need to mod the FLIC files. I may look at them for the shits an giggles of it. Thanks for all your help.

K1n9_Duk3, on 19 July 2017 - 01:14 PM, said: