Infinik on 27/6/2005 at 17:04

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I found a little workaround for this. Put the file in a .rar, and then open the rar and rename the file within it. Then unrar, and you have your renamed file.

Drat on 8/7/2005 at 03:38

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Look in the Dosbox documentation. There is a way to increase CPU cycles.

flexbuster on 24/7/2005 at 03:35

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Man...

Okay, first off, this is what my system is like:

Piece of crap Acer TravelMate 250 laptop
Integrated sound (HOORAY)
Integrated Intel video (64MB) (DOUBLE HOORAY)
Windows XP Professional SP2


Anywho... I played this game a while back using DOSBox.. and while it worked, it ran a tad slow (playable, but not ideally smooth) and I had to leave it in low res or else it would just run way too slow and/or my mouse would go all screwy (more sensitive horizontally than vertically or vice-versa).

So I've been looking into other ways, and tried the method described in this thread.

I followed this advice EXACTLY (although I fixed the nolfb.exe/.com typo), ran it from the VDMSound shortcut.. got the COM1 and COM2 errors and ignored them.

Game started fine, except that for some reason, the video on the intro cinematic was garbled to all hell, totally illegible.

I get into the game, music sounds fine and everything... but for some reason the mouse is all screwy, sensitivity-wise. It's as if for every pixel it's supposed to move, it moves 4 or 5. It's not a sensitivity issue, really.. it literally skips blocks of pixels, as if the sensitivity is being amplified or something. So I had to move the mouse really slowly to do anything, and it could not hover directly over small things (it would pass right over the music volume bar, for instance).

So, as an experiment, I changed the resolution to 640x480. Note that my laptop's screen CAN run just fine on that resolution in Windows, and it runs in default res on SS1 fine, and I can run it in 1024x768 res in Windows fine.
When I changed to 640x480 res in SS1, the same thing happened as in the intro cutscene - everything was garbled to hell. I started pressing keys in "Jane, get me off this crazy thing!" style in order to quit the program, and wound up being awesome and freezing it totally (I think? the video was messed up so who knows what happened). So I hit the "shut down"/power button on my laptop, which sent me back to Windows (alt-tabbing wasn't working, it usually does in SS), and I got a message about some video driver(?) not responding.

Anywho, now, any time I use the VDMSound shortcut to the game, I have MORE problems than that first time I ran it - things run a bit slow now, including the music. This is odd!


Anywho, I can run it fine just using the XP-patched cdshock.exe link - game runs smoothly, mouse works okay, music and sound work... but, I still have to leave it on low-res. Changing to 640x480 leaves it all garbled as explained above, and changing it to some other one gave me a direct crash to desktop with no error messages or anything.

Granted, this is still better than what I had going under DOSbox (assuming loading and saving games works correctly, and I don't run into any other problems), but I'd like to know what's up with the resolution issue... I find it incredibly odd, given that my screen itself can run in 640x480 perfectly (although since it's an LCD screen, there's a bit of fuzziness, but that's to be expected on a laptop and doesn't really bother me).


For what it's worth, this is my cdshock.bat file's contents:

@echo off
c:\SSHOCK\nolfb.com
C:\SSHOCK\MOUSE2KV.EXE 640 480 8 8 C:\SSHOCK\dos4gw.exe cdshock.exe


If I can resolve this resolution issue I should be set to run it straight from the XP-modded EXE file, unless changing the resolution also messes up the mouse... any help?

*EDIT*

I'm sure someone will point this out: When I was running the game under DOSbox, I'm aware of how to optimize my CPU cycles... after a certain point the game starts to slow down again, and even at optimal CPU cycles it's still a lot more slow/choppy than running from XP with the modded EXE.

*EDIT #2*

Using the VDMSound shortcut, I can avoid the odd slowdown by unchecking "enable basic VESA support" in the shortcut properties.. although I could swear the music is still being played at slightly the wrong speed.. odd. For instance, it'll usually run around the correct speed but very slightly slower, and if I do something that causes the game to slowdown for a split second (using the surgery machine seems to do this), which isn't a big deal... it causes the music to speed up for a few seconds for some reason. Also, I fixed the mouse skippage problem by deleting "C:\SSHOCK\MOUSE2KV.EXE 640 480 8 8 " from the .bat file.. although I still have no idea what's up with the resolution issue.

flexbuster on 26/7/2005 at 20:37

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CCCToad: If you click "ignore" to that error message, then click on the game once or twice in the taskbar again, you should be all set. I don't think it affects anything.

CCCToad on 28/7/2005 at 03:37

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Done...

The game plays fine up to the intro, though a bit choppy.

When I attempt to start the game, it promptly boots me to desktop