Civilization 1 has a corruption bug, save games available !

[Skybuck]

In 199x something, when I was about 15 years old or so, I enjoyed playing civilization. I remember playing as french on earth map which was cousy and most amuzing to try and replay earth's history.

If there were americans they would build great library and dominate europe.

After seeing world war 2 documentary on history channel I decided to go back to civilization 1 and play as Adolf Hitler to see if it was possible to win against 2 or 3 super powers. Russias, America and Zulus usually also become strong.

Unfortunately just like back in 1995 on a real computer, it seems civilization 1 has a corruption bug. The screen becomes corrupted. I can remember the same happening back then in 1995. This time in 2021 the same happens in dosbox-x. This time I have the prove though and the means to communicate over the internet, to try and seek help to first confirm this issue and hopefully to get it fixed.

I also enjoy the video game World of Warships and I always wanted to play with modern ships in Civilization 1 and basically play world of warships in civilization but it becomes hard because of this bug.

I am hoping some people and developers will take a look at these save games and tell me what you think.

I also tried updating civilization 1 to latest patches as available on abadonware, I think patched to 1.05 or v5 or something.

Anyway I believe the bug/corruption might be related to the huge ammounts of tanks the zulus produce in this save game. I believe an array in civilization might be overflowing causing corruption bugs.

The save game in which it is must noticeable is called:

Emporer Hitler, Germans/1893 AD

I am not sure in which file this is exactly stored, so I stored all save games and then you can load the game and see this title above.

The save games can be downloaded from here:

Direct Link to save games:
http://www.skybuck.org/Games/Civilization1/CorruptionBug/SaveGames/Zipped/civ1savegames.zip

Link to folder:
http://www.skybuck.org/Games/Civilization1/CorruptionBug/SaveGames/Zipped/

In case the zip file is giving you trouble you can download each save game seperately:
http://www.skybuck.org/Games/Civilization1/CorruptionBug/SaveGames/Unzipped/

I am not a regular on this forum, but I have a question:

Is it known that civilization contains a corruption bug like this ? At least when playing on earth ?

Have you encountered it yourself ?

I am not sure if this corruption bug occurs when soundblaster is selected, I selected roland/mt32 and play with mt-32 emulation which sounds quite nice !

I would love to have a fix available to prevent civilization 1 from corrupting itself ? Is such a fix already available ?

I still have a 80486 intel PC and I could try re-playing civilization to once again confirm this bug, either from a scratch play/new play or indeed this same save game !

I do not believe it is emulater related, my laptop does have 3d chip corruption, but again different issue ha-ha, kinda funny someday skynet will emerge from all these corruptions ! =D

If you don't believe it, try loading this save game yourself in your own civilization 1 environment !

No I did not modify it myself to take over your system ! LOL.

I would also love to have the source code of civilization 1. Was it written in assembler ? Maybe C ?

There is ghyndra reverse engineering software available, have tried it briefly, but the code is hard to understand, I don't know how to compile such code yet... maybe in future.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

P.S.: Adolf Hitler player name was chosen in case it's used as a seed for the random number generator ! =D

P.S.2: I forgot to describe exactly what the corruption bug is because it's so noticeable lol, the entire screen basically becomes corrupted when scrolling. When scrolling enough some parts become viewable again.

P.S.3: The screen corruption happens on the next turn with this save game mentioned above.

 

[Blake00]

I used to get weird corruption bugs that would start changing the map and give me these crazy black squares that gave like 100 food and if I put a city next to them the city would grow to insane sizes haha.

However that stuff was all fixed the final patched versions of Civ1. What version of CivDos are you using? Eg I have 475.04 which I think was either the last one or second to last one and has all the bug fixes.

Also all those fixes were rolled over into the CivWin conversion too (which can be modded to look and sound like CivDos) so you shouldn't have any corruption bugs with that either.

.

 

[Skybuck]

The latest civilization 1 available on the internet v5 or so.

Anyway since the corruption bug many new games started, had lots of fun with this game.

Right now I am in a big war playing American on Earth map where America starts and now Cleaning up what is left of Greece in Europe/Russia ! (At emporer level, haven't seen any enemy carriers yet, maybe that a bug in the game, would be cool if that was fixed, but enemy carriers could be terrafieing ! )

Hope to start a new game soon and try and bring in all new tricks and stuff I learned.

Have not encountered the corruption bug, perhaps because this time I keep enemy units to something more reasonable.

However I did see some corruption, some extra lines of pixels on the space screen and my spaceship approached alpha centauri.

I was a little bit worried it would develop into a corruption bug again... with crazy graphics everywhere but so far so good.

Anyway did you try the save games ?

Do you also see the corrupted screen ?

Maybe I should post a screenshot to show what it looks like kinda interesting !

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

 

[Skybuck]

New corruption save games:

http://www.skybuck.org/Games/Civilization1/CorruptionBug/SaveGames/Zipped/civ1savegames2.zip

It's happening again ! But this time a bit different. It's in the india game, when the aztec spaceship reaches it's final destination the screen becomes corrupted and then massively corrupted and then dos-box-x crashes and a debugger windows appears.

I was really enjoying this game trying to keep the russians alive somewhat. Nuking the horsehocky out of america and zulus before to weaken them a bit... and also ignoring the benefits of united nations to see how powerfull they became.

Also kept the aztecs alive somewhat by weaking the USA.

All in all a very interesting game.. with many AIs still alive at emporer game.

Note:

In this india save game I am trying to change to democrazy to try and get met gold level up and I want to try and invent SDI defense before further engaging with NUKES =D

There are also a couple of other funny things happening:

As the cities are in terror/error/disruption/riots... the nuclear power stations explode ! It's a bit of a chance but it seems to be happening pretty reliably... this time I actually had two nuclear power stations going up in smoke.

This game I decided not to care too much about global warming but then later I changed my mind and decided to try and save the planet as quickly as I could... the tiny little city on island needs settlers from elsewhere to try and make it better... lol it will be covered in water land soon.

If you can try and prevent the nuke explosions in those cities... maybe that can stop the corruption bug.

Anyway really fun save game.. cause I had so much fun... this time I am going to try and report it to dos-box-x as well, because maybe it's a dos-box-x issue !

Or I could try other dos-box versions or even a full ms-dos vmware installation etc.

Depending on if it's a dos-box corruption issue or civilization issue then maybe reverse engineer civilization 1 if it's a bug in civilization 1... for now not sure !

HAHA Almost forgot the save link... put it at the top... there are also some other interesting save games... probably one with hitler and one with america... the america vs greece in europe was also kinda interesting... but the india is much more funny =D

(I was waiting for a big file copy, so don't worry I do usefull stuff too ! LOL=D still am LOL waiting for a virtual machine copy on slow usb portable drive... usb 2.0 )

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

 

[Skybuck]

Not sure how to get a log from dos-box-x but now that I look at the debugger crash screen I do notice opengl commands:

http://www.skybuck.org/Games/Civilization1/CorruptionBug/Civilization1Crash.png

So perhaps dos-box-x is using some kind of opengl command, maybe because civilization is switching screen/maybe vga-mode, maybe this trips it up somehow...

I will try and see if there is a way to run dos-box-x without opengl... and I will also try and run these save games on another computer without broken 3d chip to see what might be causing this problem !

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

 

[Skybuck]

OK PROBLEM SOLVED BY CHANGING CONF TO:

# skybuck: changing to surface to try and prevent corruption issue in civilization 1, it works for broken 3d laptop chip yeah ! =D
# output = openglpp
output = surface

THANKS ! FALSE ALARM, BUT INTERESTING ANYWAY ! =D

ALSO FORCING SCALER FOR FULL SCREEN YES... TERRIFIC... NOW CAN PLAY THIS GAME AGAIN... WILL TRY WITH THE SAVE GAMES IN ZIP 1 AS WELL LOL, AT A LATER DATE !! COOLLLL ! =D

MY FAVORATE GAME WORKING AGAIN... BEST GAME EVER... THOUGH IT MIGHT BE A BIT EARLY TO CELEBRATE BUT LOOKS LIKE THE ISSUE IS GONE ! WILL REPORT BACK IF IT COMES BACK ! =D