First post, by SirGraham
I've noticed that the new CVS build supports the mouse cursor of The Big Red Adventure, so I wanted to run the game.
The game runs fine, but there are severe sound problems, especially when speech is played in the intro. In addition, if the floppy version of the game is the one used, DOSBox always crashes after the concert scene in the intro (the crash doesn't happen with the CD version, but the CD version is inferior to the floppy version and runs waaaay too slow under DOSBox).
I remember having similar problems with this game on a real DOS machine, and they were solvable by adding the line "DEVICE=EMM386.EXE D=64" (the line DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS had to appear before it, obviously) to the CONFIG.SYS file.
I haven't find a way to do it under DOSBox - can it be done? I tried using an MS-DOS 6.22 boot disk that has a CONFIG.SYS file with this line, but DOSBox froze when it tried to boot it (and even if it was able to boot it, I'd have to use a HDD image with the game files in it which I'm not yet sure how to do; is there a way to use the MOUNT command after booting an MS-DOS boot disk? SoundBlaster and mouse support work without drivers after booting such a boot disk, so I don't understand why MOUNT doesn't work).
So, is there a way to modify CONFIG.SYS under DOSBox? It'll definitely solve the sound problems. I'm not sure about the crash though - there were crashes on the real DOS machine if "DEVICE=EMM386.EXE D=64" wasn't in use, but they were more random crashes, not constant such as the crash in DOSBox.
Incidentally, I tried running the game with VDMSound, because in VDMSound you can add lines to CONFIG.SYS. However, the game works with the aforementioned sound problems with or without the EMM386 line, so I guess VDMSound can't help with this matter.
I also noticed that if basic VEAS support is enabled in VDMSound, the game crashes constantly at the same exact place it crashes under DOSBox (after the concert in the intro), and if it's disabled, there are no crashes, so apparently this crash is related to the VESA drivers and not to the missing EMM386 line. If this is the case, then it's odd that the CD version doesn't crash under DOSBox (the CD version doesn't work at all with VDMSound, by the way).