I know you only mentioned DOS and no Windows of any sort, but just in case you do try run it from within Windows: Don't. This is a very picky title.

Does Ultima 8, which is on the same engine, show a similar issue? Maybe there's a fix for that one that's applicable to you.

Yeh, I am running on MS-DOS 6.22. No Windowses.

I don't have Ultima 8 to test, that's a good point to know that it uses the same engine.

This makes me wonder if there was a graphics issue with the game that the devs fixed by the sequel, or maybe the demo package is just busted somehow. Or my Cyrix is no good, or something else..

Since ScummVM now supports Crusader games, it might be useful to see whether ScummVM can run the No Remorse demo. If it can't, that might be an indication that there is something peculiar about the demo files, and the ScummVM devs would probably want to know about that and they might be willing to look into the issue.. See the ScummVM wiki: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=Crus … der:_No_Remorse

Also, you might consider getting your demo from another source in case your source for the demo has a corrupt image. The January 1996 PC Gamer Magazine Cover Disc #14 is supposed to have a copy of the demo, and the demo is available on the ScummVM Demos page.

Hi there clb!

I'm having exactly the same issue with the CD version.

Very little online about the sprite issue. Did you ever sort this out?

I'm also curious about potential similarities between our setups.

Are you using a Quantum Hard disk with the Quantum dynamic drive overlay?

Any chance your bios was set to IDE LBA, block or 32 bit mode?

Thanks

Closed report.
Although site linked is a so called "abandonware" site, the linked game is a demo.

rgart wrote on 2025-02-28, 03:24:

Did you ever sort this out?

No, I never quite did find a solution.

rgart wrote on 2025-02-28, 03:24:

Are you using a Quantum Hard disk with the Quantum dynamic drive overlay?

No Quantum Hard disk. I am using this StarTech Compact Flash reader as a hard drive: https://www.startech.com/en-fi/hdd/35baycf2ide

And in it I have this Transcend TS4GCF133 card:

rgart wrote on 2025-02-28, 03:24:

Any chance your bios was set to IDE LBA, block or 32 bit mode?

Yes, my BIOS is set to LBA mode:

I had deleted the Crusader demo from my CF card due to not having enough space for other projects.

Though now I was thinking about testing a different hard drive mode to see if that might make a difference. So I redownloaded the demo from the same URL in first post to my CF card, and copied it to C:\GAMES\CRUS, and then ran INSTCRUS.BAT to install it to the default location C:\CRUSADER. (This is what I did the first time around as well, although tried different things in between in order to get there)

To my surprise, everything works out of the box, i.e. I did not yet change anything in the BIOS HDD settings.

Some things are notably different compared to my test run. I have a different graphics card now installed in the system, a WDC WD90C31A-LR 1MB ISA graphics card:

You can search for the card at https://oummg.com/manual/adapters.html for details.

and I have upgraded the system from 16MB -> 32MB of RAM and 256KB -> 512KB of cache con this system. (Details here: Any hope of getting 64MB of RAM on my Cyrix 486 PC? )

And also, I think I have modified CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT since I first tested.

So, I make the following conclusions:
- I don't think the hard drive settings would be the root cause here,
- even though I tested two different graphics cards before, it might still be a graphics card thing,
- could be a RAM size issue, although feels a bit unlikely, since game says min req: 8MB RAM, and recommended: 12MB RAM, and I had 16MB already before,
- could be some config thing in CONFIG.SYS / AUTOEXEC.BAT
- could be that on the first time I installed the game, something got botched up by randomly running all EXEs and BATs in the demo directory, before realizing to run INSTCRUS.BAT and then C:\CRUSADER\RUNCRUS.BAT to run the game.

I'm using a VLB Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424 1MB

After reading your post I swapped out to a Trident VGA ISA 512k card - same sprite issue.

I'm using the original CD for Crusader No Remorse.

I already have 32MB of RAM and 512K cache.

I shredded my config.sys and autoexec.bat to a bare minimum and got the same sprite issue so thats not it.

Im lost.

Ok, I now found out the reason.

For good measure, I restored the earlier Hercules Stingray Pro (Ark Logic ARK1000PV, 2MB VRAM) graphics card in the system, with which I had problems before. And now that works as well. So it was not a graphics card problem.

The root cause for the bug is: If one runs CRUSADER.EXE from the installer directory, the demo self-destructs, by corrupting its source data file STATIC/SHAPES.FLX.

In more detail, the way to blow up the game demo is:

1. Unpack the demo to e.g. C:\GAMES\CRUS.
2. Without installing the game, run C:\GAMES\CRUS\CRUSADER.EXE.
3. The game will very briefly flash an error at the loading screen:

showing an error "Unable to open file (null), in file FILE\FASTFLEX.C, line 38.".

After this the screen will go blank and the PC will hang. The problem here is that the game should have been installed first, but the game file structure and installer/launcher is a bit janky to not really make this obvious.

4. When this error occurs, the game launcher will also corrupt the file C:\GAMES\CRUS\STATIC\SHAPES.FLX. The file modification date will change:

although the size remains the same.

After this, the game backgrounds will be corrupted, as the data is now bad.

I used WinMerge on a Windows PC to compare the game installer directories before and after this crash, to find out what had changed. WinMerge points this file out:

And when binary diffing the file SHAPES.FLX, it looks like the game has zeroed some bytes inside the file:

At this point the source data is bad, and the game demo won't work.

So to properly play the demo:

1. Unzip the game demo file remorse-dos-demo-en.zip to some other directory than C:\CRUSADER. I had used C:\GAMES\CRUS above, so I'll use that as example here. (think of this as the "installer" directory of the game)
2. Run the bat file C:\GAMES\CRUS\INSTCRUS.BAT.
3. Install the game demo. I installed it to the default location C:\CRUSADER that the installer proposes, just to not jinx things. I did a full install with subtitles and high-res video.
4. Launch the demo from C:\CRUSADER\RUNCRUS.BAT.

Do not ever run the file C:\GAMES\CRUS\CRUSADER.EXE directly, or the file SHAPES.FLX will self-destruct.

It looks like running C:\CRUSADER\CRUSADER.EXE is fine, though better to use the file RUNCRUS.BAT instead.

If at any point in time the game startup has failed to a PC hang with black screen, with the brief error message "Unable to open file (null), in file FILE\FASTFLEX.C, line 38." showing on screen, the data files will have gone bad.

Wow. I never would have noticed the new time and date stamp on shapes.flx.

It worked perfectly. Thank you sir!