Maybe try using a slowdown utility since the game is designed to run on 25MHz 386 machines?

get DOSBox 😀

I will try a slowdown utility, thanks for the suggestion.

I actually tried Dosbox but it does not work properly in Dosbox either. All sounds work in Dosbox but the game is very VERY slow. I'm already at max CPU cycles but it's not playable (1/2 frames per second I think). Even the music is played in slowmo! Al tried several Dosbox versions and a lot of systems, all the same issue.

core=dynamic ?

No way that DOSBox will be usable on a 200MHz machine. It wasn't usable on a PIII-550 when I first tried it.

Wow the core=dynamic actually fixed Dosbox! Thanks a ton, that is awesome. (Of course Dosbox is running on modern systems 2Ghz+)

But still, now for the real deal. I want to be able to play this without any emulation (e.g., on my legacy dos 6.22). Tomorrow I will look into the Slowdown utility called MoSlo, it's getting too late to mess around with floppy disks now. 😜

omega_supreme wrote:

But still, now for the real deal. I want to be able to play this without any emulation (e.g., on my legacy dos 6.22). Tomorrow I will look into the Slowdown utility called MoSlo, it's getting too late to mess around with floppy disks now. 😜

This makes no sense. If you really want to play it "without emulation", you should get a 25 MHz 386 machine. MoSlo can be just as problematic as DOSBox.

Get into bios and disable every cache out there, including CPU L1 and L2 caches.

This makes no sense. If you really want to play it "without emulation", you should get a 25 MHz 386 machine.

Well tecnically I'm not using any emulation yet. But I agree, I should have picked my words more carefully. Something like MoSlo can be considdered emulation.

Anyway, slowdowns of the machine do not seem to help. I tried moslo which slows down the machine tremendously but there is still no sound. Disabling both internal and external chache has a similar effect. Loading the game takes ages but there is no sound. So it seems that the issue is not related to speed.

Any other ideas?

it might be related to the speed.
moslo and other slowdown utility don't slow everything down. Usually they slow down between blocks
and sound detection is one smalll block that is probably executed at full speed

omega_supreme wrote:

I read in the manual that "sampled effects" are used when there is enough memory. I have plenty of RAM so I guess the game uses these sampled sound effects.

I didn't notice this before. The game probably doesn't care that you have 92 MB of RAM; when the manual says "enough memory" it is probably referring to "conventional memory" below 640K.

The "manual" (its actually the installation guide) says that EMS (expanded memory) is used for the sound effect. The guide mentions that at least 800K is needed but only when there is at least 1MB, the sampled effect are used. Anyway, my memory manager tells me that thre is 32MB of free EMS, so it shouldn't be a problem.

The conventional memory required for the game is also quite a lot. It uses 588K so I had to disable quite some stuff to even get this game to start.

The speed issue seems more and more plausible to me. The odd thing is that other games from that time are not affected by this. I will try other slowdown utilities and if that fails I might have to build a 386 or 486 system to see it it really is the speed that causes the problems.

Does it use the DOS4GW DOS extender? Someone was just mentioning that older versions of DOS4GW can be problematic with large amounts of RAM.

Just thought to search for patches and found this: http://dlh.net/cgi-bin/dlp.cgi?lang=eng&sys=p … atch.zip&ref=ps

Not sure if it's applicable or not but may be worth looking into.

Does it use the DOS4GW DOS extender?

No, I wish it did. *All* the DOS4GW games are far superior to the ones that are not. I think this game is too old for DOS4GW, I only see that technique appear in Duke3D and the likes. Do you think the amount of memory can be related to this sound issue?

The patch seems promising. Looks like it's from OCEAN themselves. I will definately give it a try as my version is just the one from the original floppies.

Thanks again guys.

Bump with exactly the same problem and no solution after searching. The game runs fine with music but no SFX with sound blaster selected. You start the game with a tazer gun and it should make a digital sfx when firing.
The setup install.exe lets you select music and SFX separately, the only requirement is the game needs 1MB of EMS available.
Tried using a CT2800 and CT4180 , IRQ 5 or 7, dma 1 and io port 220. Disabling L1 cache for 386 - speeds doesn't help, still no sound sfx.
The game has a lot of versions, 1.32 to 1.37 (and a later cd version), same problem, all of them won't produce sfx though.

Finally found a fix to this. As the game needs EMS(expanded memory) which is not that common, i though it must be related to EMM386. I replaced emm386 with Jemm386 (Jemmex also works) and the game now plays all digital SFX with soundblaster selected.
First game I have come across since using Dos in 1994 that needs EMS memory and doesn't work correctly with emm386. Jemm386 wasn't around back then and I'm pretty certain game devs would make sure their game was 100% compatible with Emm386.

I tried to find the cause of the emm386 problem and used all the parameters, (apart from ones that disable ems, like NOVCPI and NOEMS) but nothing worked. Then I though it could be emm386's management of UMB, so I enabled EMS memory but disabled UMB with DOS=HIGH,NOUMB , still not working.
Also the page frame for both Jemm386 and Emm386 was at the same location, FRAME=E000.

Posting from 2023 to say THANK YOU Riikcakirds! This solution worked great for me using the latest version of JEMM386 on top of HIMEM.SYS and MSCDEX. I was battling with running this game on a 1ghz Pentium III with a Soundblaster Live and Soundblaster Pro Emulation on Win98SE DOS Mode. It sounds perfect, even with the emulation, now that I'm using a different expanded memory manager. Even CD audio works correctly.

InsufficientPostage wrote on 2023-04-12, 16:51:

Posting from 2023 to say THANK YOU Riikcakirds! This solution worked great for me using the latest version of JEMM386 on top of HIMEM.SYS and MSCDEX. I was battling with running this game on a 1ghz Pentium III with a Soundblaster Live and Soundblaster Pro Emulation on Win98SE DOS Mode. It sounds perfect, even with the emulation, now that I'm using a different expanded memory manager. Even CD audio works correctly.

I have it working now also with EMM386. The problem seems to be related to the amount of EMS available. The maximum supported EMS in DOS is 32MB and most people use that today (with the huge not period correct amount of memory they run). Jurassic Park came out in 1993 and seems to have a bug with these large amounts of EMS - clearly not found by the developers when they tested the game (probably ran on 8MB machines, or used maximum of 8MB EMS when testing).
If you limited EMS in emm386 to around 13000KB (13MB), the game and SFX works fine.

Actually with regard to EMS and Dos i'm not aware of any dos games that will use or take advantage of more that 8MB of EMS (unlike later dos games that will use 32+MB of XMS though).
It's probably more compatible with dos games that need EMS to limit it in emm386 to 8MB or 16MB max. Instead of the default which is maximum at 32MB.