VOGONS

Search

Common searches

Pirates: Captain's Quest Menu Bar Rendering on Top of Game window

Topic actions

First post, by ArthurDent42

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

I have been playing "Pirates: Captain's Quest" lately, a point and click educational adventure game about pirates from the Discovery Channel which I had when I was small and am quite nostalgic for. One thing I have noticed about running the game in DosBox is that the game's Menu Bar at the top of the screen (File, Options, View, Help) renders *on top* of the uppermost portion of the actual game graphics, occluding them from view. This is mostly not a problem but does result in obscured text in several menus (for example, when bartering for goods the label for "Silver" is mostly blocked by the menu-bar and the player has to guess what that button does by the icon of a pile of silver coins beneath.)

It has been some time since I've played this on original hardware, but I do not remember this being an issue with the game. Short of building a 486 PC and installing from the original CD, what would be a good way of going about diagnosing whether Dosbox itself is to blame for this problem? (As opposed to it being a bug that existed on original hardware which I simply don't remember.) And, if so, is there any likely way to fix it?

I should point out that the game officially supports both Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 and that I am currently running the Windows 3.1 version on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in DosBox (running on Ubuntu) with S3 video and Soundblaster 16 drivers installed and Windows set to 640x480 in 256 color mode (the game's native settings.) I have not verified whether the same issue exists when running the game on Windows 95 (this would explain why I don't recall the bug from childhood as I was likely running in under Windows 95 (we did have a 3.1 system early on, though.)

Reply 1 of 3, by ripsaw8080

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank DOSBox Author
Rank
DOSBox Author

That sort of thing is almost certainly a behavior of the game, or perhaps of Windows, rather than an issue with DOSBox. Perhaps there is an option to "hide" or otherwise not show the menu bar. For example, the menu appearing only when the pointer is moved to the top of the screen.

Reply 3 of 3, by ArthurDent42

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

@ripsaw8080: Solid advice! Turns out (as Makus notes below you) that this behavior results from setting the system resolution to the same value as the game's native display mode. If you set the system resolution to be higher, the menu bar displays over the resulting black bars without occluding any game graphics. (This does result in simultaneous letter-and-pillar-boxing of the actual gameplay screen, though thankfully not by too egregious a margin if you set the system display resolution to just 800x600.)

@Makus: You are correct. I noticed this a while after posting when playing around with the system resolution. I wish Windows 3.1 included support for arbitrary resolutions, such that you could set the system display to be 640x480 + the exact height of the menu bar, resulting in properly pillar-boxed visuals that fill the entire screen vertically without occluding any graphics and while preserving the proper aspect ratio. But obviously Windows 3.1 has no such built in support.

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to DOSBox Games/Apps
Close window
Close window