First post, by clb
Heya,
I am trying to get the free demo of Crusader: No Remorse from https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-ga … emorse&gid=1160 to run on my 80 MHz Cyrix 486 DOS 6.22 PC with 16MB of RAM.
Scouring eBay for big box of the game suggests that my specs should be enough to run the demo:
The demo starts well after running INSTCRUS.BAT to "install" it (sidenote: to anyone getting a black screen right at the startup of running CRUSADER.EXE, the game must be reinstalled to e.g. C:\CRUSADER even though the demo .zip file looks like an already installed to-go package), and I get to watch the intro FMV video ok:
and get to the main menu, and settings, which I have at:
But when I start a new game, the game does start and runs OK, but none of the game background graphics get drawn, and as result, all the game characters sprites do not get cleared, and leave a moving trail on screen against a black background:
I have searched a fair number of topics about Crusader: No Remorse at Vogons and elsewhere, although could not find any mention about the above problem. Trying to search for "black screen" or "black background" or "trailing sprites" on the game left me clueless without hits. (black screen searches lead to other black screen issues about installation/CD, which I believe is not related here)
I've tried two different SVGA graphics cards: Hercules Stingray Pro (Ark Logic ARK1000PV, 2MB VRAM) and Diamond SpeedSTAR24 (Tseng ET4000AX, 1 MB VRAM), but both give the same artifact, making me think this is not a graphics card issue.
Also, I have "FILES=40" and "BUFFERS=40" in CONFIG.SYS as suggested by the README.TXT in the demo.
In addition to the built-in VESA BIOS support, also tried UniVBE 6.70 and the bundled UniVBE that the demo comes with, these do not at least have an effect. So I'm a bit clueless as to what might be the cause.
The version number of the demo is "V1.12D" it seems.
Finally, there is also a free demo of Crusader: No Regret at https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-ga … Regret&gid=1721 . Interestingly, that game works ok (tested on the 1MB Tseng ET4000AX), with backgrounds rendering correctly:
Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot? Anyone else hit this issue of missing background graphics?