DM on Windows XP

[Ella]

I hope that someone can help... I am trying to play my old games on my new Win XP comp and I get no sound whatsoever with DM. I've dowloaded the dosbox but I can't get it to work (how does it work?); please help. I am not a techy, so please provide a detailed suggestion. Many thanks.

[Lunever]

I can't help you with Sound and original FTL-DM, but you might try one of 2 very good clones: CSBWin by Paul R- Stevens, which is available at this site, or RTC by George Gilbert, which is available at www.ragingmole.com .

[Ella]

I downloaded it, but can't get it to work -- I get the 'unexpected end of archive' message and 'one or more files may be corrupted.'

[Clorius]

Hey Ella.

I use this version of Dosbox and all i did to make it work, was unzip it and click the dosbox program file at 284k in size.

This is the DM prog. i use with Dosbox, found else where in this forum

Then Dosbox starts its in a dir called Z, and to play DM you need to exec it like in the good old Dos days :)

To mount the C dir type this:

Mount c c:/

c:

All you need to do now is to find the dir where you installed DM, wich looks like this at my pc c:\dm\dungeon>

If I remember correct I had some sort of prob. with getting dosbox to entering long-named-dir. and thats why i renamed the path to the simpler /dungeon path.

[Ella]

Hey Clorius, thanks a bunch for your detailed reply -- it worked! And just in time because I lost all hope and was contemplating deleting the XP and installing 98 again. I just have one little problem: the mouse is very slow to move and it sort of freezes/trails so I cannot make any quick moves -- it takes a while to open any doors, etc. Can you suggest something to fix it? I downloaded the Cute Mouse driver from this website, but I have no idea what to do with that. Thanks again for getting my favorite game to work, you have no ide how frustrated I was:) By the way, the game from my original floppy works according to your instructions, but the version I dowloaded from the link you provided does not -- it just freezes at the opening frame.

P.S. Even my sound works!

[Tokyo Joe]

Go here

http://dmweb.free.fr/CSBForWindowsLinux.htm

for Dungeon Master and Choas Strikes back ported to Windows. The great thing about these versions is that they play in XP!

Hope that helps

[quest]

DOSbox readme:
Special Keys:
=============
ALT-ENTER Go full screen and back.
CTRL-F5 Save a screenshot.
CTRL-F6 Start/Stop recording sound output to a wave file.
CTRL-F7 Decrease frameskip.
CTRL-F8 Increase frameskip.
CTRL-F9 Kill dosbox.
CTRL-F10 Capture/Release the mouse.
CTRL-F11 Slowdown emulation.
CTRL-F12 Speedup emulation.

Hence CTRL-F12 or CTRL-F8 is your choice.

[Clorius]

No Ella ... I dont have any more help.

But it works, and its just like the old days ... with the slow mouse/doors n´stuff :-) . .. .. . and there is sound too yes.

This is how i play it, and at times I too would like different things to go faster, but the slowness gives me the exact same feel as was it played on my old amiga.

[Wil]

Maybe you will feel more strongly yet if you use an amiga emulator instead?

[Ella]

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, guys. Maybe I'll give the backported version a try... As for the emulation, speed (pressing the F keys), it doesn't help. I get some kind of a 'trailing' effect, which I did not see when I played in Win98; it's not just a slow speed, but also some kind of additional trailing. And, there is a pause (long) or a delay after each time I press a fighting action button. Has anybody else seen it? Gosh, it's frustrating.

[Lunever]

I suppose you don't talk about an in-play delay caused by wounds, injury, fatigue or overload, do you? And you also don't talk about the normal recovery time it takes, until you can strike again?
So what exactly do you mean with "trailing"?

[Bill]

I'm also having problems re no sound. At the DOS start up, I go through the menus and select the * items. After selecting the final item (Mouse, I think) the FTL logo appears followed by the dungeon entrance, but then, no sound. Also, I am unable to save the game, it tells me "there is no disk in the drive". Somebody PLEASE help me (in idiot proof terms). I first played this game on the Amiga when it was first released, and thought it was the best game ever produced. I still feel the same. I would dearly love to play this game again!

[Paul Stevens]

Fighting with Windows XP to play an old DOS program
seems like a great waste of effort. Why not get CSBwin?
It is a VERY faithful translation (Not a rewrite) of the original
Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back for the Windows
platform.

P.S. Be a little careful....I wrote the thing and I may be biased.

PAul

[Bill]

Thanks, Paul. But where can I download CSBwin?
Bill

[Ulmo]

Here :
http://dmweb.free.fr/CSBForWindowsLinux.htm

[Des]

I too played DM and CSB yonks ago (on an ST) and recently tried to get the PC DOS version to work on my new shiny rocket-powered XP box and had no joy with the sound, but CSBWin saved the day. Being able to enlarge the screen size is great as is slowing the game down to a sensible speed without having to mess around with Turbo or Moslo. I haven't tried RTC yet.

I did have a spot of trouble getting people's homegrown dungeons to work (see the New Dungeons forum), but I found the answers in the end...

1. DM PC dungeon.dat files need to be converted from little-endian to big-endian (whatever that means) using one of the converters here
http://dmweb.free.fr/Forum/read.php?f=8&i=38&t=38

2. If there are any inconsistencies in the dungeon, CSBWin complains and refuses to run it To fix this open the dungeon in CSBuild http://webpages.charter.net/pstevens1/ and save it. Though you must try to resist the urge to peek at the dungeon - well maybe just a little bit :-)