Games issues with RPCEmu 0.9.4?

I’m wondering if anyone else has seen the following with the latest version of RPCEmu 0.9.4? It has to do with games getting stuck / frozen (when run full screen). I’ve seen this behaviour on two Windows 10 PC’s and on macOS as well. Although the behaviour can somewhat differ per session I’ve been able to at least replicate issues in three cases making use of the !Hopper game included with RO. The issues are the same for both the standard RPCEmu binary package as well as the RPCEmu with RO Direct 5.27 package, as offered through the RPCEmu website.

Case 1: !Hopper is started with RPCEmu in full screen mode. Once past the title screen, the game screen is shown, but without moving objects. And the frog controls are not working. Switching back to windowed mode the game is running OK again

Case 2: !Hopper is started with RPCEmu in windowed / non full screen mode. Everything runs fine. When RPCEmu is switched to full screen however, the game still runs OK up to the point where you either die or are able to bring the frog home safely. After this the game gets stuck/frozen. A switch back to windowed mode, sometimes unfreezes the game again, sometimes the mouse has to be moved a little before the game runs again. When switching back to full screen the same happens again

Case 3: Noticing in case 2 that the mouse sometimes needs to be moved to unfreeze the game again, I thought that perhaps the setting Mouse → Follow Host Mouse would make a difference and switched it off. When !Hopper is then started in windowed mode however, the game screen is shown, but without moving objects. And the frog controls are not working. Switching Mouse → Follow Host Mouse back on again and moving the mouse inside the RPCEmu window, unfreezes the game and it’s then working normally again

Kind of same problems as with !Hopper happens for two other games that come with the RO Direct 5.27 package: !MPenguin and !Overlord. !Doom on the other hand runs fine

Perhaps it’s just something on my end, but wanted to ask here just to check and/or if anyone perhaps has any idea on what might be going on here?

Hi Jeroen,

Yes this reproduces for me with V0.9.4

V0.9.3 works fine.

So this looks like a bug in RPCEmu itself that has been introduced in V0.9.4.

Overlord and Mutant Penguin use triple buffering and I would expect Hopper to use double buffering. So the issue might concern switching between video buffers.

Hi Tony,

Thank you very much for confirmation of the issue and hint of what might be going on! I’ll try and bring the issue to the RPCEmu developers.