bug in pic_prot.diff (was Re: Bootfile)

Hello.

There might be something wrong here. The report states that this game stopped working under "xdos/xdosemu", and I am sure my patch have nothing to do with an X code (that's why I haven't even tried the game - I was sure I couldn't break the X code). Now I tried, and indeed it doesn't work. However it misses the Eric A's userfont patch, so I think it never worked under xdosemu unless someone applied a userfont patch manually.

I can only figure out why it doesn't work under console, but that's an entirely different story. Anyway, it seems to me that the watchdog patch was flawed:
if I set the $_pic_watchdog=(1) or 2 or 3, the game works perfectly (under console of course), but if I set it to 10 and more - it locks up. That looks like a problem.
The attached patch fixes it: now setting $_pic_watchdog to any reasonable value (within a range of 1-100 approx) will work for that game.
However I have found my test-case for that problem screwed up by an XMS changes of 1.1.4.1. For now I just reverted an XMS changes to test the attached patch. I'll return to that problem when I'll have more time.

Background: this game works inside a keyboard interrupt handler (probably many pop-up progs do so if they use a hot-key), so essentially it needs a reentrancy, which was restricted due to the timer jerkiness discussed recently around the Cosmo problem. That's why we need (sometimes) a $_pic_watchdog.

@@ -733,7 +733,6 @@
      if (test_bit(ilevel, &pic_irqall)) {
        pic_push(ilevel);
        set_bit(ilevel, &pic_irqs_active);
-       pic_wcount = 0;
      }
 
      if (!in_dpmi || in_dpmi_dos_int) {

@@ -838,7 +837,8 @@
         pic_wirr&=~pic_newirr;        /* clear watchdog timer */
 	pic_activate();
     }
-    pic_wcount = 0;
+    if (!pic_icount)
+      pic_wcount = 0;
 }
 
 /* DANG_BEGIN_FUNCTION pic_request

@@ -1031,9 +1031,8 @@
       if(++pic_wcount >= config.pic_watchdog) {
         error("PIC: force reschedule\n");
         pic_resched();
+	pic_wcount = 0;
       }
-    } else {
-      pic_wcount = 0;
     }
   }
 }      

yes, this is what confused me too (I thought it would be a vgaemu bug), but it was really a keyboard related problem.

maybe "working" just meant "playing with funny characters". As that's how it worked in 1.1.4.5.

Hmm why do you now need to enable the hack in the first place where it was unnecessary before? That doesn't sound like a good thing to me.

i'll look at the XMS changes again to see if I missed something there.

Bart