Well, after a small chase of a dll called "curses.dll" I got dosbox running.

The intro played great all the way through, but when it got to the game itself the game screen was rendered badly (top portion, bottom portion and hotspots however are fine), and clicking on various hotspots gave the wrong audio for the test on the bottom of the screen.

Please tell me what info I should include in the next post to help you debug (I added screenshots and the log for this one)

Maybe try different cores and use loadfix. There's nothing special in the
log, the "Program tried to free 0 ---ERROR" is there in msdos as well.

Tried different cores and also used loadfix and played with available memory (8, 16, 32), seems like changing the core doesn't create any difference, changing memory (either with loadfix or in conf file) gets different garbled screen, but still garbled...

Anything else I can try?

Hard to say, i'll look through the ems stuff, or maybe the
dos data can put somewhere else or something.

Modified it a bit, hope it works better now. See attachment.

[attachment removed, use dosbox 0.70]

Yup, game screen looks and play great, menu screen may still have a glitch (or it could be the image itself, need to test on real dos to make sure), but it works and doesn't detract anything anyway.

I'll give it a play in the upcoming week and try to finish the game to see if it's stable.

Thanks!!!
😀

Played through entire Chapter 1, aside from a few graphical glitches when changing locations (mostly through the office rotating door), and one game freeze (which I could not duplicate), game seems to be working like a charm!

Will keep on testing this till I finish the game.

Thanks again!

Hello,

I'm having a problem getting Synnergist to run in DOSBox, as well. I'm a newbie with DOSBox, so I apologize in advance if what I have to ask sounds incredibly ignorant.

When I tried to install the game, it crashed; and I downloaded the dosbox_synn2.rar file from one of the posts earlier on this thread, and was able to install the game (my sound settings worked fine and all). So, success THERE was achieved whereas before there was none. Great!

However, when I go to run the game in DOSbox via the exe file, I get a "please insert the CD in the drive" message. And, of course, the CD IS in the drive. If anyone could point me in the right direction in terms of fixing this problem, I would really appreciate it.

How are you mounting the CD and as which drive (I think Synnergist needs to be run from the drive letter it was installed from)?

Hello,

Thank you for your reply. I tried what you suggested, and instead of getting a "please insert CD in the drive" message, I got this instead:

"error opening file syn.cfg. Please make sure that you have run the install program and that it left a syn.cfg file in the currently logged directory."

The game didn't let me install it directly from DOSBox, so I ran the install in Windows. From what drive should I be running the install in in Windows, and then in DOSBox, how do I want to mount the game?

Thanks again.

I think it's best to install the game in dosbox (I don't recall having any problems with it), if your CDROM driver letter is D in windows, it should be D in dosbox.
Also, if you install the game to c:\syn then in dosbox the game should also be in c:\syn

Hi,

Thanks again for trying to help. I WAS able to get the installer running in DOXBox, but when the installer got to the part where it asked me for my CD-ROM drive letter, and I designated it as "E" (the letter of my CD-ROM drive), it told me "access is denied."

Really, I think the problem here is that I'm just too stupid to figure out how to get this game running in DOSBox without step-by-step instructions. But thank you for having tried.

Installing from within windows and trying to run the game in dosbox
isn't recommended as the drive letters/paths will be different.
Yet for this game there's some small ascii file (syn.cfg or something
similar, don't have the game here) which you can edit to match the
drives you mounted in dosbox.

So just install it in windows (telling them that e: is your cdrom drive
if it is that in windows), then try to find that config file/edit it accordingly
(or post the contents and your mountings if it doesn't work out).

Hello,

I installed the game in windows and designated "E" for my CD-Rom drive (which it is).

I believe I have found that config file you mentioned but now I'm not sure what to designate as "E" and what to designate as "C."

I'll cut and paste it here and perhaps you can tell me which should be which ( I have made no changes---this is how it looks having done nothing to change it):

C:\21STCENT\SYN
C:\21STCENT\SYN\
e000
220
1
7
C:\21STCENT\SYN\
a002
388
C:\21STCENT\SYN\FATV10.BNK
C:\21STCENT\SYN\FATV10.BNK
E
0

Thank you for your help. Perhaps someone could tell me if this game is worth the trouble.

😢

Could you please type here step by step what you do to install and run synnergist in dosbox (including all mounts).

This would help to see if you're missing something along the way...

Oh, and the game is nice, but don't know if it's worth all that trouble 😀

Well, thanks to your instructions on your website, I did get Commander Blood running yesterday, so that's good news right there. 😀 I had been bound and determined to get Synnergist to run, because I spent about a year on eBay looking for a copy and finally managed to snag one. 😁

Here's the deal with me and DosBox. I have been using D-Fend primarily as a frontend for DosBox, and thus I could very well be messing up some of my commands when not using that front-end, as I've basically been using D-Fend as a crutch and am not entirely familiar/comfortable yet with DOSBox commands. I did install the game in Windows designating my CD-Rom drive as E:, but I am probably messing up my commands in DosBox. I get there (to the point where I am at c:\21stcent\syn and then try to run the exe file, but I probably get there awkwardly and inefficiently and either get the error message about the config file (see above) or it tells me the CD is not in the drive. I'm probably not setting it up properly and pointing it at the right directories in the right order. So, what I really need is some handholding in terms of what exactly I should type at the prompts to get this game running. I'm assuming I downloaded and ran the rar file (special DosBox) correctly, but it's possible that I didn't do that correctly, either.

My other concern is that I'm pretty sure this game requires expanded memory---correct or not correct? Because how I have been handling that previously with DOS games is by letting D-Fend take care of it. 😊 As you can see, I am a real newbie here.

So, unless someone could give me step-by-step instructions on how to get the game running (and I understand that's probably asking too much), it's a fair certainty that I won't get this game running. Although I DO plan on reading up on how to use DOSBox proper, very soon. I really WANT to learn the ropes.

Don't know about frontends, but when doing regular mounts like
mount C C:\21STCENT
mount D E:\ -t cdrom
then you'd edit the syn config file to read
C:\SYN instead of C:\21STCENT\SYN and so on,
and change the E in the last-but-one line to D

Then you should be able to run the game with something like
c:
cd syn
synn

> My other concern is that I'm pretty sure this game requires expanded
> memory---correct or not correct?

That's right, but in the default setup dosbox already provides expanded
memory (EMS, thus ems=true in dosbox.conf).

You are using the DOSBox posted in this thread by wd right ?

C:\21STCENT\SYN
C:\21STCENT\SYN\
e000
220
1
7
C:\21STCENT\SYN\
a002
388
C:\21STCENT\SYN\FATV10.BNK
C:\21STCENT\SYN\FATV10.BNK
E
0

Question: Do I change the third and fourth lines from the bottom to C:Syn also, or do I leave those alone?

Folks, I'm almost there---the game almost started up, but at the very end I got an "error initializing music driver" message. Does this mean that I just need to mess with my sound settings in the setup and that I have chosen wrongly? Would any other changes need to be made apart from my doing that (if I have chosen wrongly and change it?)

And yes, Qbix, I'm using the DOSBox here---thank you for that!