Looking for someone to help me fix a bootable Vantage disk

[IG-88]

What I have is an old bootable version of Vantage with Game Launcher as an FE. I did some tweaking to GL's main screen and added some roms. Now I have the files all on my desktop but cant for the life of me figure out how to make them into an .iso image. I know how to burn an iso but not how to make one. Could I send them to someone to see if they could? They're not very large as you could imagine.

Thanks

[BobA]

You could use spystyle's bootable dos CD as it was made to run vantage.    It  had a selectable menu for features and PC bits if I remember correctly.   If nothing else it will give you a framework to make your own bootable CD.
Thread
Link to iso hosted by Saint
http://tinyurl.com/55opbg

edit: added links

[IG-88]

Thanks for the reply BobA. I have that disk and have used it frequently,  and it works quite well. However on this particular old laptop it hangs during setup and I can't get it to continue no matter what I do. That's when I tried this other bootable cd I had in my collection. It loads all that I wanted and actually works quite well. But I wanted to change a few things (GL's header and add some more roms). I got that part accomplished but I don't know how to make it back into an iso again. Does that make sense?

[BobA]

I can see you wanting to customize a disk for your particular setup.   I would offer to help but since have not used any of the dos bootables I would just be guessing.

My only hint would be to use Magic ISO Maker on the bootable disk.   It opens an image of that disk that you can manipulate (add delete etc) and then reburn the iso again using Magic ISO Maker.

edit: added a bit about the ISO

[spystyle]

Howdy Dana and Bob

Hey a little bird told me about this thread

You can send me the files and I'll try to make them into a bootable ISO then explain how I did it

Have fun!
Craig

[IG-88]

Fantastic. I'll send the folder now, 7-zipped

To bring Bob up to speed. I tried MagicISO along with 3 other programs. Couldn't figure it out. Thought of Craig, and asked him to try for me!

[spystyle]

Alright, to make those files bootable I used MagicISO

In magicISO I opened the old spystyle DOS boot CD ISO, which is bootable. Then in MagicISO's browser I deleted all the files from the SpyStyle DOS boot CD and replaced them with the files you sent me, then saved the lot as a new ISO. This way it uses the boot record from the previous ISO (I think that's how it works).

Like this :

(your files)


(magic ISO)


(file > open)


(SpyStyle DOS boot CD ISO)


(delete all files)


(replace with your files, notice it says "bootable")


(file > save as)


(your ISO)


Your files boot but it didn't work well. I think you need to make an autoexec.bat that launches your front end (not to mention maybe sound drivers and mouse drivers)

Oh DOS, I was glad to pass the torch for DOS and now I only use MAME-XP Any low end P4 can be made to run so fast with it. I'm such an equipment snob anymore I throw out anything less than P4. I'm thinking of moving to all LCD as well and ditching heavy tubes

I sent the ISO to your e-mail

Have fun!
Craig

[IG-88]

Thanks alot Craig. I will try your suggestions out. However I didn't get that email. Gmail is kinda funny about executables me thinks. I have a yahoo account. I'll send it to you via PM.

[spystyle]

OK, post your autoexec.bat and we can all coach you

[IG-88]

Love too. However I don't have an autoexec.bat. I had thought about using yours but I see that it doesn't have one either. Or am I looking but not seeing...

[spystyle]

OK I'm trying to remember DOS stuff ...

type the following while at the C:> prompt

edit autoexec.bat

Now you can type lines and save it as a text file. But this text file is called autoexec.bat so it's a system file for DOS. When DOS starts it will automatically do whatever is written in autoexec.bat text file. So with that file you can start drivers or programs, like a mouse driver, a sound driver, and a MAME or vantage front end.

Here is an example :

@echo Now starting arcade machine ... (this displays those words)

@echo off (this turns off the text for the following words so they aren't displayed, but the previous words are still on screen)

C:\drv\driver.exe (an example driver)

C:\glaunch\glaunch.exe (launches game launcher)

(end example)

The real autoexec.bat will not have spaces between the lines. It would be like this :

@echo Starting arcade machine ...
@echo off
C:\drv\driver.exe
C:\glaunch\glaunch.exe

(end example)

Installing your sound card drivers will create an autoexec.bat I'm sure too, it adds a couple lines.

You can upload your Vantage ISO "sans R0Ms", and we can all pick it apart and test it in Virtual PC.

Have fun!
Craig

[BobA]

Thanks spystyle for stepping in with the assist. I thought that was the way to go with MagicISo but I have not done DOS in years.

[spystyle]

We'll have to have a look at his ISO

[IG-88]

I'll have to get back to you guys in a day or 2. Am away from my desk for a bit

[Masterful Gaze]

Talk about funny. I just stumbled onto SpyStyles Bootdisk last night and set dos up to run on an old machine. It took forever to get my sound card working but other than that it works great. It sure brought back the old days!

I'm afraid that my dos is more than a bit rusty but if there's anything I can add to help I will.

[spystyle]

Ah yes, that SpyStyle DOS boot CD was quite an undertaking. I built it on Fraggle's original disk which was great in concept but broken all over. When I left the project the soundcards were the weakest part. Also GameLauncher was buggy sometimes. But otherwise it was a pretty cool disk with potential. It's "open source" so you can pick it up and make it your own "gooder" version.

Now instead I like MAME-XP :

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=59373.msg843533#msg843533

That link is part of a very long discussion about using nLite to make a "skinny" XP for arcade computers. I also like to use "driverpacks" to add almost every driver ever made to the disk, so it's highly compatible and very fast.

These days low end Pentium 4 computers can be had for like $60 - I send anything less to h3ll. My days of messing around with old junker computers are gone Now I'm a snob!

have fun!
Craig

[IG-88]

Ok. Attached (hopefully) is the folder -sans roms. I have not built it into an .iso yet.

@ Spystyle: I did get your/my vantage iso burnt to a disk and it starts to work but hangs right after the mouse drivers load. (see pic)

@Masterful Gaze: I have used that disk before too. ALOT in fact. I got a whole pallet of old computers some time ago and used it on alot of them. Worked great for me too, as long as I had the correct soundcards. What is your system specs if I may ask?

Alright, back on topic  

Funny thing about my original vantage boot disk. (kudos too whomever built it!)  It worked flawlessly on the old laptop I put it on. Audio and video both. The only thing I did was update the rom set and tweak the heading in GL. Now for the life of me I do not see any soundcard drivers on that disk that could have been installed. It went through a format before it installed itself too so they shouldn't have still been on the laptop from the previous O/S. Hows that figure?


EDIT: Folder is to large to attach. Even zipped. How do I get it for you guys to see.

[spystyle]

You can upload it to rapdishare or megaupload or similar

[IG-88]

Oh ya, I always forget about those. Here ya go:

http://rapidshare.com/files/338509412/vantage2.zip.html

[spystyle]

OK I made those files into a bootable ISO, usable in MS Virtual PC (a free ISO tester)

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=K43450GT

and here is MS Virtual PC 2007 :

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en

OK, starting virtual PC 2007 and testing this ISO, let's see ...

OK it boots with CD-ROM support

It boots to drive "X" (the CD rom drive)



(I use Fdisk to make a new partition in C)

(this requires a restart)

format /S C:

(this formats C, the /S makes it bootable)

Xcopy X: /E C:

(this copies all the contents of the CD-ROM to the hard drive)

A: (enter)

This goes to the system files on the bootable ISO

md c:\dos

(this makes a directory DOS on the C drive)

copy *.* c:\dos

(this copies the system files to c:\dos - I think this makes a dirty DOS install)

C: (enter)

(this puts us back at the hard drive)

cd dos

(this puts us in the directory DOS)

edit autoexec.bat

(this allows us to edit that file)

(Change path=A:\ to Path=C:\DOS)

(completely remove the line SET DIRCMD... also DOS and DOS and ECHO)

(change the line x: to c:)

(and save and exit the text editor, use ALT, arrow keys, and ENTER if you don't have a mouse)

copy config.sys c:\

copy autoexec.bat c:\

copy himem.sys c:\

(these lines copy those files to the root of the hard drive)

(Now I remove the CD / ISO and restart to see if C: is in business)

(OK that worked, now we have a DOS install)

(now that you have a DOS install you can type things like "edit autoexec.bat" and it works)

cd vantage

cd glaunch

glaunch

(these three lines take us to the game launcher directory and run it)

But it crashes

It has the error message Exiting due to signal sigsegv

And that is as far as I got ...

[spystyle]

So, you could make a batch file that does all of that stuff.

Here is how you make a batch file :

C:>

edit glaunch.bat

(now inside the text editor)

cd vantage
cd glaunch
glaunch
cd\

(now save and exit the text editor)

Now when you are at C:>

All you have to do is type :

glaunch (and press enter)

and it will type the following for you :

cd vantage
cd glaunch
glaunch
cd\

The switch at the bottom brings you back to C:>

Because now when you type "glaunch" at the C:> it launches glaunch.bat

Batch files are the lowest form of programming, I think

Good luck!
Craig

[Masterful Gaze]

I have an old pile of used parts sitting around too. The system I just messed with is a jetway motherboard with a 1ghz duron. I put in 256M and a 128M for the ram and I had an old soundblaster live sound card. The soundcard was printed as a soundblaster pci 512.

Installing everything went pretty smooth after I figured out that the sound card needed to load a sound blaster 16 emulator first before it would work. Luckily all of that was on spystyles cd and I didn't need to hunt it up on the internet.

The only glitch I had was that game launcher would hang up on launch. Putting in the pause command seems to have fixed it though it makes the mame logo that pops up fairly useless.

I wanted to install xp on it but xp would just throw bsods at me in the middle of the install so I said forget it and went dos.

I'm downloading the files you guys are working with now so when that's done I take a look at them.

[spystyle]

...
I wanted to install xp on it but xp would just throw B.S.O.D. at me in the middle of the install...

Is that Duron a P3 or P4 clone? Either way at 1GHZ it's not too bad. I bet it could run MAME-XP and MAME36 (or similar) romset. I would bump the RAM up to max (512 or 1024?) and use a GeForce video card (not expensive).

If you are getting "blue screen of death"



You should run MEMtest86 boot CD to test the RAM :

http://www.memtest86.com/download.html

Just boot with the MEMtest86 boot CD and let it run for hours until it says "passed" or whatever it says. As long as you don't see any red you are all set. If the screen turns red all over you have a bad RAM stick, and that could cause the crash.

Good :



Bad :



You should also check the power supply to make sure it's not outputting crazy voltages, it's super easy with an Antec PSU tester.



That device is also color coded, green is good red is bad.

Finally once you have windows installed you can test the hard drive for bad sectors with HDtune :

http://www.hdtune.com/
 
Good luck
Craig

[spystyle]

Back on the topic of Dana's Vantage CD - I tried using Vantage from the SpyStyle CD and got the same error message for both :

Exiting due to signal sigsegv

Why does Vantage crash like that?

[IG-88]

Dont know if this helps or not but I found this:

SIGSEGV
This signal is generated when a program tries to read or write outside the memory that is allocated for it, or to write memory that can only be read. (Actually, the signals only occur when the program goes far enough outside to be detected by the system's memory protection mechanism.) The name is an abbreviation for "segmentation violation".

Common ways of getting a SIGSEGV condition include dereferencing a null or uninitialized pointer, or when you use a pointer to step through an array, but fail to check for the end of the array. It varies among systems whether dereferencing a null pointer generates SIGSEGV or SIGBUS.

I'll need a programmer to 'splain that in english for me. 

[spystyle]

Yeah that's not helpful.

However I did PM our moderator Peale, I think he's on the team that makes Vantage. I also e-mailed it's author Brian Lewis.

So really this problem has always existed, even on my old disk! I think it's an incompatibility between DOS 7 and Vantage 1.12, maybe it needs a program running in memory to fix it.

We'll see what the DOS gurus have to say... Are there any DOS gurus left? No? DOS has died 10 years ago?

DOS

1981-2000

May it rest in binary

[IG-88]

Yeah that's not helpful.

Thanks. Glad I couldn't contribute. 

[spystyle]

Oops well I meant I can't personally understand it I wasn't trying to be sassy

In related news :

I got a reply from Peale!

Hi Peale

Aren't you one of the Vantage and ArcadeOS team members?

I get "Exiting due to signal sigsegv" when I try to run Vantage and I'm not the only one. But I think we are all using DOS 7.

Is there some kind of setting to use Vantage 1.12 with DOS 7 to avoid this crash?

I didn't write it, but I did volunteer to maintain the website.

I've seen that before, but I forget what the fix is. I want to say it has something to do with himem.sys. I haven't tried anything with it for years now.

Sometimes I wonder if we should just abandon DOS completely ... Oh wait I have done that already!

Good luck
Craig

[IG-88]

I'm beginning to think the same thing. I got the original one to work and while not perfect I'm not sure it's worth the effort of us getting this figured out. I love the speed of DOS and all, but if I cant live with the way GL looks and the small list of games, I may just go win98 and Mame32 v36.

Besides the way you figured out how too optimize win98 Craig, almost makes it as quick as DOS anyways. 

ps. I was just joshin' ya earlier 

pps. I can't believe you went over to the dark side and abandoned all the pre-P4 machines! Am I the only one left who likes them anymore....?   

[spystyle]

It's my love for Neo Geo Those games run best on a real P4



But I am also a Dig-Dug and Galaga fan

[Masterful Gaze]

The SIGSEGV error thing sounds like it's running out of memory when it's trying to load a rom. From what I understand  the Noems and Novcpi switches on your emm386.exe in your config.sys is supposed to fix this. Yours may be slightly different but it should look something like this:

Device=c:\dos\emm386.exe noems novcpi

If you already have this in your config.sys file then you might be having ram issues. I think you said somewhere that you were using a laptop so I'm not sure if you can switch the ram out or not but if you can then try that and see what happens.

As far as I'm concerned I use whatever I happen to have laying around. I would much rather put an old computer to work doing something useful or fun than just throw it away out of hand. In most cases there's nothing wrong with them beyond just being slow.

Spystyles old bootdisk seems to work fine on my end. Sure we can make a new bootdisk but it would pretty much be the same thing just with different batch files. So the obvious question to ask is what part isn't working on your system? Are you getting any error messages? What do you see on the screen when it starts to boot up?

I have a Dos 6.22 boot disk floating around somewhere here if we need it. Shoot I think I still have a copy of Windows 3.1 somewhere too LOL.

If we can figure out what's causing the hang up it should be fairly easy to work around it I think.

[spystyle]

...Device=c:\dos\emm386.exe noems novcpi...

That line already exists and vantage still crashes

I tried removing "noems novcpi" (then restarting, then trying Vantage again) and the result was the same.

Are you able to run Vantage off a SpyStyle boot CD install?

[Masterful Gaze]

Yeah, no problems at all. Seems to run great on my end.

I have Mame v36 and Vantage running. GL even brings up snapshots for the Mame menu though it slows things down a bit.

[spystyle]

What? You are running Vantage from a SpyStyle boot CD install ?

Try this :

From C:>

cd vantage (enter)
vantage (enter)

At that point for me it crashes with "sigsev" error

[Masterful Gaze]

Yeah, this is off of your cd. LOL, you sound surprised that it actually works.

When I type vantage and nothing else I get that error, but if I tell it to load up a rom then it loads it up with no errors.

[IG-88]

Spystyles old bootdisk seems to work fine on my end. Sure we can make a new bootdisk but it would pretty much be the same thing just with different batch files. So the obvious question to ask is what part isn't working on your system? Are you getting any error messages? What do you see on the screen when it starts to boot up?

If you are asking me, my vantage disk loads on my laptop just fine and the games and everything work fine. I just wanted to add more roms and change the header on GL. I did do those things and had Craig rebuild the iso for me but now it wont work. I'm not sure what the issue is.

For what its worth I've only got vantage to work off of spystyles disk on one of many different computers. The mame side of it works fantastic!

[Masterful Gaze]

I'm not really liking GL that much, at least the dos version of it anyway. It works alright but we don't seem to have many options for dos fe though.

Beyond the headache of getting the sound working I really haven't had any problems with it. When I added the roms to it I didn't want to burn another cd so I put the hard drive into my desktop and transfered them that way. I tried using a live cd but it was just too buggy to work with.

I'm afraid this is my first time working with GL so I haven't tried to change the header yet. I figured that if it ain't broke don't mess with it LOL.

So you've tried it on different computers and it didn't work on all of them? That makes me curious so I might try to put together another system and try it out again. I'm not sure I have another sound card though that will work in dos.

[IG-88]

Dont laugh but the only sound cards I got to work were ISA's Models CT2xx too CT3xx. I think I spent 3 months gathering all those that I could find on ebay and elsewhere! 

If you need help with GL I think I still have my notes. I got fairly good at tweaking it. I love the simplicity of its look. And youre right, there isnt much out there for DOS FE's.

[Masterful Gaze]

If I remember right most ISA slot sound cards were sound blaster compatible so in theory most of them should be able to be setup to work. I used to have dos games that had built in sound drivers and I used to use them to get the odd sound card to work for me.

LOL I think Windows has made me soft.

PCI sound cards are another matter. Since Windows most sound cards aren't sound blaster compatible anymore so this makes it difficult if not impossible to get them to work in dos.

So did spystyle get you setup then or are you still having problems? The idea of picking up with his boot disk and going where he left off does pull me. I don't think I have enough knowledge though to do anymore with it then he already has.

[IG-88]

What this disc of mine is supposed to do in theory is you just boot with it. It then formats the drive, installs DOS and appropriate drivers, then vantage and GL with all their files. All the roms, sounds and eventually snaps are there too. About a 10 minute process depending on the hard drive size. Then pull the disc, reboot and you are ready to go.

All I did was drag the files from my original disc (which worked mind you) onto this computer and added some roms and fixed the heading on GL. I couldn't get the .iso rebuilt so I asked Craig (spystyle) to do it for me. Which he did. I then burnt the .iso to a new disc and tried reinstalling it on the same laptop and only got to the screen in reply #16.

Make sense?