VOGONS


First post, by ssybesma

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Hello all,
I have this game working, but two issues I wanted to improve:

1. I've seen in some cases that people have got the graphics resolution setup such that the houses, etc... show up as squares rather than tall rectangles and the apsect ratio shows a wider window than 4:3 shows.
I haven't been able to figure how how to do that yet after many attempts.
See example here: https://www.dosgames.com/game/simcity
I tried asking the person who operates the site but their contact form is broken however I did post that question on their forum. If I get an answer I'll post here.

2. The specific audio allowed on this game is IBM, Tandy Digital or Covox Sound Master. The first one sounds terrible, Tandy Digital seems a tiny bit better but not working as it should, and Covox Sound Master is not available.
Has anyone ever figured out how to setup audio with Tandy where it sounds MUCH better than IBM (PC Speaker). Also wondering if Covox can be added to audio options for DOSBox as that seems the best overall solution possible and was a very common sound card back in the day.

Incidentally, you can run the SimCity configuration by executing INSTALL.EXE and it will still save the SIMCITY.CFG file to a subfolder of the folder that INSTALL.EXE is in (default subfolder is named "SIMCITY"), then to use the new config you move that SIMCITY.CFG file up one folder to the main SIMCITY folder and you will see the changes you made to the configuration next time you start the game. When you run INSTALL.EXE and it gets to the part where it tries to copy files from A: drive, just hit ESC. The SIMCITY.CFG file has already been saved before you get to that point.

Steve

Reply 3 of 5, by ssybesma

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In the two experiments I tried using your suggestion for Tandy machine type, the game tries to display but only shows flashing cursor under the command line.
To prove the game really loaded in memory, I used SimCity's Ctrl+X hotkey and then 'Y' to exit the game and it worked to return control to the DOSBox prompt.
So something about the Tandy machine type doesn't sit well. If I can figure out how to get the game to load and display that is half the battle.
Steve

Reply 4 of 5, by ssybesma

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Tinkering around quite a bit with this in the DOSBox Game Launcher settings I finally arrived at square city blocks and very improved audio using Tandy:

Config for SimCity version 1.07 that produces square city blocks and very noticeably improved sound using Tandy (setup in DBGL profile). Small variations of this may also do the same but this is a good start:

First, use INSTALL.EXE in SimCity to select Tandy Digital for sound and make sure to overwrite the SETTINGS.CFG file with the one created in the SimCity subdirectory after you ESC from INSTALL.EXE

Display tab:
Output: opengl
Scaler normal2x and forced is checked
Fullscreen/Window Resolution: 1280 x 1024
Aspect Correction unchecked

Machine tab:
CPU section:
Machine: EGA (VGAonly didn't produce square lots and Tandy wouldn't even display)
(rest are defaults)
Memory section:
Size: 16
EMS: true
UMB: max

Audio tab:
PC Speaker section:
Enable checked
Sample Rate 44100
SoundBlaster section:
Type is none
Tandy section:
Enable is on
Sample Rate is 44100
General section is default
Gravis Ultrasound is not checked
Disney Sound Source is not checked

Reply 5 of 5, by ssybesma

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I pushed the CTY file I created to the absolute limit and added 320 airports and 30 nuclear power plants (yeah, I did give myself a lot of extra money) and unleashed a torrent of earthquakes until it finally crashed.
Before that it was crashing much more easily just in building the test city.
The SimCity manual here suggests turning off extended/expanded memory and not using putting video ROM into RAM so I modified from above by making EMS and UMB false, reduced Memory Size to 1MB and changed CPU Type to 386.
https://oldgamesdownload.com/wp-content/uploa … nual_DOS_EN.pdf
Seems very stable.