Wrong mounting?

is gen.dat marked as 'read only'?

Rekrul wrote:

Cannot open main file: C:\SCREAMER\data\GEN.dat

I've verified that the file IS there and can be opened.

How?

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Wrong mounting?

I don't think so. Screamer is in: C:\SCREAMER, so in DOSBox, I typed;

mount c c:\screamer

Then I switched to "C:", ran the setup, then tried to run Screamer.

stumped wrote:

is gen.dat marked as 'read only'?

Nope, no 'read only' attribute.

MiniMax wrote:

Rekrul wrote:

Cannot open main file: C:\SCREAMER\data\GEN.dat

I've verified that the file IS there and can be opened.

How?

I looked in the Data directory and saw that Gen.DAT exists. Then I opened it with a hex viewer and scrolled through the entire file. Windows didn't report any errors accessing any of the data. If I can load the entire file into a hex viewer, I don't see why any other program would have trouble accessing it. The error it reports shows that it has the right path and filename.

UPDATE:

I got it to run without DOSBox, however it's very unstable and crashes a lot.

Previously I couldn't run the game because you have to run Setup first and Setup wouldn't run. I discovered that if I deleted Setup.pif, then it would work, although it takes a fairly long time for the screen to appear (leading me to think it had crashed again for a while). Once I do that and save the prefs, I can run the game from a plain DOS window. Unfortunately it crashes at random, always in the middle of a race though.

However, even though the game will load and run in Windows, it STILL does not work in DOSBox. I mount the game's directory as C, switch to it, run setup (or even skip it, since it's already been run in a DOS window), try to run Starth.exe (or Startl.exe, doesn't matter which) and it tells me that Gen.DAT can't be opened. I've tried setting the options to both VGA and SVGA, I've tried it with and without sound, etc. The game simply refuses to run in DOSBox 0.72.

mount c c:\
instead of mount c c:\screamer

Wrong mounting.
Create a directory c:\dosgames and move the screamer directory in there. Then in DOSBox mount c c:\dosgames.

Rekrul wrote:

I don't think so. Screamer is in: C:\SCREAMER, so in DOSBox, I typed; […]
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h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Wrong mounting?

I don't think so. Screamer is in: C:\SCREAMER, so in DOSBox, I typed;

mount c c:\screamer

Then I switched to "C:", ran the setup, then tried to run Screamer.

stumped wrote:

is gen.dat marked as 'read only'?

Nope, no 'read only' attribute.

MiniMax wrote:

Rekrul wrote:

Cannot open main file: C:\SCREAMER\data\GEN.dat

I've verified that the file IS there and can be opened.

How?

I looked in the Data directory (...)

Looked how?

Qbix wrote:

mount c c:\
instead of mount c c:\screamer

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Wrong mounting.
Create a directory c:\dosgames and move the screamer directory in there. Then in DOSBox mount c c:\dosgames.

Yes, that was the problem. I figured that the game would just use a relative path and look for Data\Gen.DAT rather than use the full path. I understand now that it failed because DOSBox saw the Screamer directory as the root directory and the game was looking for a sub-directory named Screamer in the root directory.

Thank you.

Unfortunately, my system apparently isn't fast enough to run the SVGA version smoothly and the VGA version is pretty ugly. I tried playing with the cycles and setting the core to Dynamic in the config file, but it didn't help. It also seems to take a fairly long time to load, both initially and when going from the main menu to the race.

MiniMax wrote:

Looked how?

How does one normally look for files on a computer system? I went to the root of the C drive, I double-clicked on the Screamer directory to enter it and display its contents, then I double-clicked on the Data directory to enter it and display its contents. I happened to be using the program Total Commander, but I have no reason to believe that it wasn't showing me the actual contents of the Screamer\Data directory, especially as I was able to view the hex contents of any/all the files in the directory.

Here is what I was looking at when I said that I looked and saw that the file was present in the Data directory;

Even though the others have already told me what I was doing wrong, I wanted to answer your question because your messages seem to indicate that you doubt my ability to provide accurate information about whether or not a particular file exists in the specified directory. I know that I made a fairly obvious mistake in mounting the virtual C drive in DOSBox, however I haven't used DOSBox that much and the few programs that I have run with it have worked fine being run from the root directory of the virtual C drive. Screamer would have worked as well, if the program had used a relative path to access the Data directory instead of using the full path. When it reported that the file couldn't be opened and gave the full path, I interpretted that to mean that it had found the file, but encountered some problem with it.

Or were you subtly trying to tell me that I had the DOSBox mounting wrong by implying that I was looking in the wrong place?

Rekrul wrote:

Or were you subtly trying to tell me that I had the DOSBox mounting wrong by implying that I was looking in the wrong place?

Yes. As you have discovered, C:\SCREAMER\data\GEN.dat can mean one thing when looking from the outside, and a different thing when looking from inside DOSBox.

How does one normally look for files on a computer system?

The "normal" was exactly the problem MiniMax was pointing out, as the game
sees files relative to the mounting (that's what the whole stuff is all about).

When i try to start the screamer game on Dosbox, I get a message "cannot initialize sound driver".
If I try to run Setup, then Dosbox gets hanged, but the setup doesn't begin at all
Please help me out

You have to reduce the cycles to no more than 150000 for the setup to work: https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=723&letter=S

Even if I reduce the speed to 10 cycles, the setup doesn't begin
Please help

I set cycles to 20000 and have to wait about 20 seconds before setup does open.