Originally posted by krank Angel Devoid - I bought it years ago, and I have as of yet never managed to make it work. At all.

Woof. FMV game that needs UniVBE. Major pain to run on an old machine, much, much worse on a new machine.

It constatnly tells med "cannot initialize UNIVBE" - although I have run the "uvconfig.exe" that came with the game many times, and it reports no problems.

UniVBE frequently just "didn't work" on old machines, don't expect it to ever work on an XP machine.

I've tried VDMsound's many different options, but no luck.

Don't forget what VDMSound is: audio card emulation. If you can't get the game to run at all, trying to get it to run with sound is pointless. You need to concentrate on getting it to run at all first.

I have it in storage somewhere, but may not be able to get to it just yet. Will let you know.

ANGEL.EXE /NOUNIVBE disables univbe.

Well, with the help of /nosound and /nounivbe (thanks!) I have noe managed to get to the point where the game does abselutely nothing, as opposed to when it actually told me what was wrong...

When I run in XP, it tells me "@ouldn't find>2.c". And that text is VERY garbled.

When I run in Dos7 (VirtualPC), it just does nothing at all. It shows me the "DOS4GW stuff", and then just a flashing "_".

When I run in Win98SE, it gives me a runtime error, something like: DOS/4GW Professional error (2001): exception 00h (divide by zero) and so on. I have been unable to take a screenshot of this.

Goodness, a 1GHz Celeron is too much for it? Hrrmm...
I can't recall, does it use DOS4GW separate from the main executable? If so, try replacing it with some of these.

Unfortunatily, it appears that it uses an internal version...

After wasting way too much time finding and testing this, I'm convinced that there's no way of running this with a GeForce video card, regardless of the OS.

The only way I was able to even to get some response was to try it on my 566-Celeron2 rig which has a Lightspeed128 video card (using the TSENG ET4000 chipset, which UniVBE likes) and an AWE64 ISA soundcard for maximum "old-game" compatibility. Even then it had major issues.

No surprise that UniVBE isn't needed, as I got the same results with or without it. Using Win98 at the DOS-level, it repeatedly locked up on the 1st frame of video. If I forgot load a mouse driver it would display the main menu...then lock. This was with or without sound.

The funny part was that it was the soundcard causing the problem...even though it wasn't being used. The patch called newangel.zip fixes the soundcard issue (even got SB16/AWE sound), but from the ReadMe:

IMPORTANT: This patch will cause a lock at the beginning of the second disk. To address this problem, a saved game is included in this archive. This game will start you just after the lock point. When you Unzip this patch into the ANGEL directory on the hard dirve, the files for the saved game named "workaround" will also be copied, and you will see this in the first saved game slot. DO NOT SAVE OVER THIS GAME. When you reach the point in the program at which the lock occurs (shortly into the second disk, after you disarm the grenade), load the "workaround" game and continue from there.

This update fixes a problem using the Creative Labs PnP (Plug and Play) sound card and it also contains an earlier patch which fixes a problem accessing disk #2 with older Sony CD-ROM drives like the CDU 33A.

So they traded one problem for another...

In any case, I believe that the video card is the key...

Hmmm... I might still have an old 486 somewhere on which I could try this...

Anyways, the patch did this for me: I got the same DOS4GW error as I did in win98...

You can always try forcing it to use a different DOS4GW by calling "DOS4GW.EXE ANGEL.EXE"

I'm hoping I can come across a (really) cheap copy of this for the Mac. Would be so much easier to deal with...no VESA, no SoundCard issues, etc... Just load the emulator and click the icon.

I had the Mac version of it...(it also just happened to have the PC version on it...)... then one day I found the PC version and got hammer happy and smashed the discs into little bits.

Originally posted by Snover I had the Mac version of it... smashed the discs into little bits.

*glares*
*throws spoon at Snover*

Only the Mac discs were hybrid?

Originally posted by Snover Only the Mac discs were hybrid?

Mac-only or PC-only. No hybrids.
*goes to look for more spoons*

Snover wrote:

You can always try forcing it to use a different DOS4GW by calling "DOS4GW.EXE ANGEL.EXE"

DOS/4GW fatal error (1008): Cannot load executable format for file ANGEL.EXE [1]

Snover wrote:

You can always try forcing it to use a different DOS4GW by calling "DOS4GW.EXE ANGEL.EXE"

Nono, use PMWBIND to strip ANGEL.EXE, then try different extenders (and different versions of DOS4GW)

showthread.php?postid=11663#post11663

E:\ANGEL>pmwbind /r /sdos4gw.exe /woldstub angel.exe
PMODE/W Professional Bind Utility v1.33
Copyright (C) 1995-1997, Charles Scheffold and Thomas Pytel.

Executable Type: DOS/4G Professional EXE
Executable Size: 972296
Extender/Stub Size: 228596 (23% of total executable size)
Program Data Size: 743700

- Binding DOS4GW.EXE [ ]
[PMWBIND]: Error Reading File!

Is this because I am trying to use the latest DOS4GW in stead of what apparently is DOS/4G? Should I try to find a DOS/4G extender?

No, I have a feeling some weird executable packing is going on.

And the Mac CDs definitely had the DOS files on them, heh, since I didn't have a Mac but I had the Mac CDs and it worked. (And then I tried it on a neighbour's Mac and it worked as well.)

Originally posted by Snover And the Mac CDs definitely had the DOS files on them, ...

Great. Sounds like a minimal-effort port.

Snover wrote:

No, I have a feeling some weird executable packing is going on.

Anyone game on finding out what it was?

Or do ya think this is a wrong thing to pursue?