Call for testing: epicpinball

Description

Epic Pinball is a game released for MSDOS in the early 1990s. This is the shareware version which features a single pinball table. The snap bundles a working version of dosbox and downloads the shareware files from archive.org . The full version can be purchased on GOG.com.

How to install

sudo snap install --channel=beta epicpinball

Edit: I’ve changed the name of the package to epicpinball from epicpinball-mcphail

Requested setups

I have tested this on 16.04 running X11 and proprietary nvidia graphics. Testing on other distribution versions, wayland, other graphics hardware and other drivers would be welcome.

Specific tests

  • Does the game and audio run smoothly?
  • Are errors on downloading and unpacking the game files handled gracefully?
  • Is there a trivial way to break the game installation process?

Thanks!

Awesome! I tested this on 16.04 / X11 / nVidia and it worked fine too. Graphics and audio smooth (as you get from DOS games)

On 17.10/X11/Intel it also worked fine in terms of audio, video and playability, and went full screen. Interestingly on the same machine under 17.10/Wayland/Intel the video wasn’t full screen, but took up an un-scaled portion in the middle of the screen. Like an old 640x480 DOS game on a 1024x768 LCD panel used to. So black border all the way around. Not sure if there is a DOSBox tweak that could be done there.

I noticed you pushed an AMD64 build to the store, do you plan to push i386/armhf ones too? Perhaps leverage the build.snapcraft.io service to make them for you from a github repo? :electric_plug:

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Thanks for testing @popey. I’ve taken your advice and set up a github repo for automatic building. I think it is worth releasing a version (I’ll release a stable version as epicpinball rather then epicpinball-mcphail) and think about the Wayland issue for a future release. I don’t have any Wayland-compatible hardware handy just now.

With regards to the Wayland issue, I wonder if it would display differently if the “output” section of the sdl stanza was changed to something else (the options being surface, overlay, opengl, openglnb)? Would anyone be able to check?

To start with a custom config, please rename $USER/snap/epicpinball-mcphail/current/epic_pinball_shareware/dosbox_distrib.conf to dosbox.conf and edit that one. Thanks!

Testing on a triple head nvidia 16.04 setup, the game works fine but trashes the monitor setup when stopping it, leaving me with only the most left monitor enabled and at a low resolution by default (beyond this, it runs very well)

Hmm. That sounds less than optimal. I’ll need to read up on dosbox and multi monitors. Thanks @ogra .

I also had the issue of the monitor configuration getting trashed by this game. I’m also on a triple-head nvidia 16.04 machine. From some googling, it seems a common issue with dosbox if your primary monitor is to the right hand side of another monitor.

Probably a bad idea, but I’ve added an xrandr reset to the launcher script. Does that do anything to fix the immediate problem (I’m doing this blindly as I’m away from a pc for a while)? Presumably this will do horrible things to a Wayland session?