Zone 66 \ VOGONS

Zone 66

Topic actions

Post a reply

First post, by Gramcon

Posted on 2012-11-05, 04:06

Gramcon Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 41
Joined: 2012-11-05, 03:59
Location: NC, United States

Hi, new to forum here, just had a quick question that's probably been discussed before: I'm having trouble getting Zone 66 to work with sound in DOS. I've tried a couple sound cards, a Yamaha YMF715 and a Crystal Magic S23A. The game runs without sound when I boot clean, but once I load a sound driver into memory, the game won't start and the computer locks up.

The game's help file says to boot with nothing in memory, but how am I supposed to get sound without loading a driver????

Perplexed, I played this game back in 1996, wish I could remember how I did it.

Reply 1 of 3, by mr_bigmouth_502

Posted on 2012-11-05, 04:38

mr_bigmouth_502 Offline

Rank Oldbie

Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 1959
Joined: 2009-05-16, 19:43
Location: Canada

Theoretically for most dos games you only need to put "SET BLASTER=a220 i5 d1" or something else along those lines into your config.sys file to get sound working, as most games have their own customized drivers built in.

Reply 2 of 3, by Jorpho

Posted on 2012-11-05, 19:20

Jorpho Offline

Rank l33t++

Rank: l33t++
Posts: 8168
Joined: 2003-02-14, 19:50
Location: Canada

Zone 66 is notorious for being difficult to run. You might want to just stick with DOSBox in this case.

Gramcon wrote:
The game's help file says to boot with nothing in memory, but how am I supposed to get sound without loading a driver????

Perplexed, I played this game back in 1996, wish I could remember how I did it.

Some drivers load differently than others. (SBINIT.COM and SBEINIT.COM, used for PCI Sound Blaster cards, require EMS, for example.)

You might be able to get away with loading a driver and then doing a soft-boot with CTRL-ALT-DEL (but not by pressing the Reset button or shutting down the computer), being sure to specify the appropriate SET BLASTER line.

Reply 3 of 3, by Gramcon

Posted on 2012-11-05, 23:43

Gramcon Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 41
Joined: 2012-11-05, 03:59
Location: NC, United States

Thanks for the suggestions, but I'm still getting nothing. Just setting the blaster variable without a driver does nothing with these sound cards. I also tried an ESS1868. I'm going to try a Creative ISA card next, but I'll have to purchase it. I would like to go oldschool and not use emulation...

The computer I'm working with is kind of a kludge -- a Compaq LTE/Elite 4/75 laptop connected to a docking station. The docking station adds an IDE hard drive, cd-rom, and two ISA expansion slots, one of which I've populated with a sound card.

The cool thing with this setup is there's a switch on the back that lets me choose which hard drive to boot -- the notebook HDD which loads WIN95, and the docking station HDD that loads DOS. I like this old rig -- built to last.