dune wants like 16mb xms, it has a bug that it cant detect over that much and it goes negative.

OK, I allready expected something like that. Is there a patch, or workaround for this problem ?

Allocate a large ramdrive perhaps?

himemx.exe allows setting an XMS limit (regardless of actual memory)

https://sourceforge.net/projects/himemx/

Or... you can try removing ram from the computer. I have 16mb of ram and have no problems running Dune II, and as far as I know 8mb is more than enough for DOS.

OK, I managed bringing my expansion Memory down to 16MB using RAMDRIVE (two RAM Drives, 1x32MB and 1x16MB) . Now the Setup is fine with the expansion memory, but I still have a problem... I want to play the game in german language. The ingame voices are ok and speak german, but there is no speech in the Intro. If I set the game to english language, the speech in the Intro is there, but in german it is not.

There does not seem to be an original intro audio in German, your best bet is to use subtitles for this.

There was also a clone of this game made, called 'Dune Legacy', which used the original sound files, but there was no German intro listed among those files either.

I did find a home-made German intro audio on Youtube, but it sounded a bit too corny for my taste. Only suggested if you cannot use subtitles at all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJmo0ZMwb8I

I know, back in the days, I had a version with german speech in the Intro... It was spoken by a male voice... A bit loveless, the english version was far better...(not so bad as in the Video you linked to )

Could it be that this Intro voice was not "original" made by Westwood ? Maybe a fanmade Version ?

I have the CD version of Dune II and there is no german speech in the intro. Maybe you're mixing it up with Dune 2000, which was localized to German entirely? Though Dune 2K had a female narrator (except for the emperor's lines). Or indeed a fanmade version, though in the 90s they would have been hard to come by.

No, it was Dune 2... Not Dune 2000. I remenber the first Part with "Land of Sand", which sounded a bit Strange in german... "Land aus Sand".

I think, then it really was a fanmade Soundfile...

Frank Umberto's Ramdisk package is probably the best solution for such situations:
- it can be loaded/unloaded via command line
- with the /t switch it will occupy memory above the 16mb limit so software that has such issues will run fine (Realms of Arkania 2 for example)
- no need to experiment with other memory drivers/providers

http://www.geocities.ws/politalk/rmdrv/fu_rd19i.htm

Hey, thats a good Tool, thanks ! I allready thought how I should implement the solution with ramdrive... (Bootmenu in config.sys...) But this one seems to be much better. So i can put a batch in the game directory, in which i load the ramdisk, start the game and unload the ramdisk when quitting the game. Cool !

Snocksman wrote on 2023-12-31, 17:40:

[...] So i can put a batch in the game directory, in which i load the ramdisk, start the game and unload the ramdisk when quitting the game. Cool !

exactly!
some like this will work fine:

XMSDSK 55000 /y /t
GAME.EXE
XMSDSK /u /y

it will use 55mb of XMS for ramdisk, launch game and on exit it will unload ramdisk

Ok, I have tested the xmsdsk program in a run.bat file for Dune 2. Works as supposed. Very nice !