ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: POLARIS SNOCROSS

[Dont_Tell_Taco_Tyrant]

Road Rash got me kicked out of Cub Scouts.

[dashofweak]

Road Rash got me kicked out of Cub Scouts.

 

I want to hear....nay, NEED to hear the rest of this story

[Icebox]

I'm with you Ross, fuck sticky keys!

[ScottD.Betson]

I'm with you Ross, fuck sticky keys!

I despise sticky keys

[BTGBullseye]

I'm with you Ross, fuck sticky keys!

I despise sticky keys

It's the first thing I disable on Windows installs I deal with.

[frustrated]

I don't know if Ross is going to read this, but if he or anyone else has the actual retail version and they cannot run the game on a modern system at all, I would be interested to know what exactly is the problem.

 

If the game doesn't start because it thinks you have less than 32MB of RAM, that should be fixable by running the program in compatibility mode. A more proper fix: Open the .exe in hex editor. Go to offset 0x16FFD. Change the value from 7D into EB. This turns a conditional jump into an unconditional jump. Remember to backup whenever modifying game files. I only have access to the pirate version, so I hope the offsets are the same in the original.

 

The bug seems to be caused by the game trying to ask the OS how much memory is available. It is using an old system API call that does not give correct results. However, a bigger issue is that the function returns a 32-bit unsigned integer, but the programmers thought it would be a good idea to treat it as a 32-bit signed integer. As a result, numbers over 2 gigs are reported as negative numbers, which makes the memory check fail.

 

If you're using the pirate version, it crashes in the loading screen, because it is missing ALL sounds, with the exception of the menu clicking sound. This can be fixed by inserting the missing sounds into the sound folder.

 

It could be that there are more game-breaking bugs than these two, but I haven't found any, and it seems to work fine on my system. Then again, I only have 3 gigs of RAM, so maybe there are hidden problems that only affect people with more RAM. The headlights in night maps work, but texture and polygon aliasing do exist, just like in Ross's video. In the first moongaming episode, I noticed that Ross complained how the game didn't save the game. My guess is that Ross did not give the game the rights to write into the game folder, so the save failed. My recommendation is to always try the compatibility mode and proper access rights when dealing with old games that have problems. Maybe it will help with crashes. I think the 21.1Hz frame rate is just due to emulation. On my rig, the fps is 30.

 

I have managed to change the menu screen resolution into 1024x768. I'll post a guide for that once the fix is properly done. I think it might be possible to enable higher resolutions as well, but I make no promises.

 

EDIT: Yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath on the fixes actually working on Ross's version. Looking at the video, the game is published by infogrames, and it's actually called Polaris SnoCross. The only version I can find is a game called "SnowCross" published by Wanadoo. I didn't even know Ross's version even exists.

[DeepSnow]

I am a big fan of instrumental music and alternative versions of any good songs that originally have lyrics in them. So here is a question about the original ingame version of Point Defiance music with muted lyrics. Can anyone release a ripped version of these songs? I tried searching up for the game version, but theres nothing. I‘d appreciate it if someone will rip the ingame music files and convert the music into a proper format.

[Gigelinho]

Since it's almost Christmas, I'd like to play Polaris SnoCross. Is there anywhere this game can still be downloaded as abandonware?

[BTGBullseye]

3 hours ago, Gigelinho said:

Since it's almost Christmas, I'd like to play Polaris SnoCross. Is there anywhere this game can still be downloaded as abandonware?

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/snowcross-btt

[Gigelinho]

On 12/16/2018 at 4:08 PM, BTGBullseye said:

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/snowcross-btt

Thanks! 

 

I guess I didn't find it because I was searching for "Polaris" in the title too.

 

So, uh, any tips getting this to run? Under Win10 it doesn't even try (of course) while under Win95 in a virtual machine it crashes immediately on launch with a protection fault type of error that isn't useful at all.

Edited December 17, 2018 by Gigelinho
added question (see edit history)

[BTGBullseye]

No clue. I stopped caring about W10 a long time ago... Gonna have to give it a retry in a few weeks though because I'm building a new gaming system for someone.

 

My suggestion is to do a Linux USB (runs off the USB stick) install with WINE, and see if it runs in there.

Edited December 17, 2018 by BTGBullseye (see edit history)

[Nicknine]

So apparently, this game has different titles in America and Europe. Ross played the American version called Polaris Snocross. European version is simply called SnowCross and European PC version actually has the original soundtrack from the console versions instead of Point Defiance songs. How interesting.

Edited December 26, 2018 by Nicknine (see edit history)

[Nicknine]

I tried running this game on Windows 10 and it crashed at startup for me. Upon looking at it in the debugger, it looks like a bug in DirectInput device enumeration code. The game goes over each DirectInput device in the system, adds it to the list and calls init function depending on the device type (mouse, keyboard, game controller). Problems arise, however, if it comes across a miscellaneous device type (DIDEVTYPE_DEVICE), this results in the local type variable remaining at -1 which results in array out-of-bounds crash further down. This bug notably gets triggered if you have USB keyboard and/or mouse in your system (something everyone has these days) since DirectInput adds each of them as a misc device. Case in point, if I unplug the mouse and disable the touchpad on my laptop, the game starts.

 

I thought about using dinputto8 + devreorder to hide those extra USB devices but dinputto8 doesn't seem to work with this game properly. So the alternate method is to patch the executable to only enumerate one device type (can't enumerate multiple at once) - go to 0x7F892 in hex editor and replace 00 with 03 to use the keyboard or 04 to use a gamepad.

 

The game seems to be working fine with dgVoodoo2 after patching exe, the headlights in night levels appear as they should.

Edited May 27 by Nicknine (see edit history)

[Nicknine]

I have fixed the bug in dinputto8 that stopped it from working with this game.

No need to patch exe anymore, you can now use dinputto8 + devreorder to get around device enumeration bug.
https://mega.nz/file/iRpV3DJI#mtqzZ0W3TlIpSH5lrr4ilcHEINfm_uB6ff1nYr8h7Q8 (latest build of dinputto8)

https://github.com/briankendall/devreorder

Install both of these into game dir then go to [visible] section in devreorder.ini and add your gamepad's GUID or name (or just some dummy entry if you don't have a gamepad). This will filter out USB keyboards and mice from DirectInput device list and prevent the game from crashing.

Edited May 29 by Nicknine (see edit history)