uther-fenris on 17/6/2000 at 09:18
Sooooo, after hearing of the closure of LGS (which is without doubt the most depressing thing I've heard this year - guess my gaming life from now on will consist of soul-less FPS clones and paper thin RPG games :-( ) I decided to revisit some of the older classics.
Got UW1 and UW2 to work fine in W98SE (using the RPG Archives W95 installer). Got Thief GOLD and Thief II running (and spent a couple of days marvelling at how damn cool it still is to stand in shadows and blackjack people). And finally turned to TN-SFC, one of my most cherished of classic game memories....
Can't get it to work. Not at all....
The problem is very, very basic. My memory when it comes to MSDOS stuff is very patchy at best. I fooled the install program into installing under W98SE, but I'm having a couple of daft, possibly easy to solve problems:
1: I cannot, for the life of me, remember how to use MSCDEX. When I shift to MSDOS mode, no CD drive.
2: My system is a PIII 733, 256Mb RAM, V5-5500, SB Live Plat, MS Intellimouse. Where, in heavens name, are the MS Mouse drivers for DOS? No sign of a mouse when I shift to MSDOS mode.
'Scuse the stupidity of the questions - in real life I'm a top notch Intranet expert, and all that stuff has forced the MSDOS knowledge out of my leaky brain.
Someone help me - I *need* my TFC fix :-)
Uth
Bokkie on 17/6/2000 at 20:24
Here is a solution....
Download from (
http://www.startdisk.com) www.startdisk.com the "Ultimate boot disk"
When installing this on a clean diskette, you will have a bootdisk which contains a generic cdrom driver (it defaults to the x:\drive but you can change this) + a mouse driver which works with almost any mouse.
For the sound drivers you need to copy the statements in your c:\autoexec.bat file to a:\autoexec.bat.
It needs some fiddling around but it worked great for me -also as ultimate bootdisk- and it's free!
Regards,
Bokkie
Bokkie on 17/6/2000 at 20:44
Here is a solution...
Browse to (
http://www.startdisk.com) www.startdisk.com
Get the "Ultimate Boot Disk" (TM)
And look how everything is loaded in the autoexec.bat and config.sys (it looks complex at first)
You'll find:
a free mouse driver is provided
a free cdrom driver is included
a free memory manager (which enables Upper Memory Blocks without emm386.exe) is also provided but does not work correctly on my pc/games.
+ a lot of tools are included to make this the ultimate dos/win98/win95/NT bootdisk.
-AND-ITS-FREE-
To make your soundcard work you probably need to add some lines to the autoexec.bat (look in c:\autoexec.bat for them)
The cdrom driver on the disk defaults to x:
so you have to change that.
If you want to use the cdrom driver the microsoft way you need to .....
look at this example
config.sys
c:\cdrom\ideatapi.sys /d:firstcd
c:\cdrom\isoatapi.sys /d:secondcd
autoexec.bat
c:\windows\command\mscdex /d:firstcd
c:\windows\command\mscdex /d:secondcd
I hope this helps,
Bokkie
James Sterrett on 19/6/2000 at 21:41
All right... I downloaded the thing, and ran it, and have spent several hours battering at it, but the bloody thing won't even recognize my hard drive, and the CDROM driver crashes half the time (computer hangs right after running the CDROM install.)
What am I doing wrong?
ShadowJack on 20/6/2000 at 19:49
Why even boot to DOS at all?
The game runs fine for me in a Win98SE dos box, with no real mode cd or mouse drivers loaded.
Currently, I'm even using the SBPro and General Midi output on my pci Monster Sound card, and that works fine too. (I had to remove my AWE32 due to lack of isa slots)
One thing you might want to check into though is the VESA driver for your V5 card (envious, btw). Anyone using a Banshee or V3 card has to use a bios patcher tsr to get around some bugs in the Voodoo bios, as detailed in: (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/ubb/Forum8/HTML/000017.html) http://www.ttlg.com/forums/ubb/Forum8/HTML/000017.html
Dunno if the V5 uses the same VGA bios as the V3 and Banshee, so your mileage may vary.
