VOGONS


First post, by Xenphor

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Hello,

Here is some upfront information:

# Motherboard
-Unknown - It's a Toshiba Satellite Laptop M45 S-331

# Processor type and speed
-Intel Pentium M (Centrino) 1.60ghz

# Amount and type of RAM
-1 Gig PC 2700 DDR 333 SDRAM 2.5V SODIMM

# Video board w/ RAM amount and type
-Mobil Intel 915GM Express Chipset 128MB

# Sound board
-Soundmax Audio

# Operating system
-XP Service Pack 3

# Game name (and version, if applicable)
-Star Wars Rebel Assault v1.7

# Description of problem (be detailed: saying "it's jerky" doesn't help, saying "the player sprites seem to be jerky when I'm pressing any of the arrow keys" does)

My problem is getting Rebel Assault to work with Gravis Ultrasound in Dosbox. I should first note that I have set up the Ultrasound directory as per the excellent guide provided by Huggybaby at this link Install Gravis Ultrasound Properly, All files, No Errors (With Pictures!). I have successfully gotten GUS to work in a variety of games such as Doom and Descent. Therefore, I believe that my installation of the GUS in dosbox is in working order.

One of the first problems I noticed when trying to setup GUS in rebel assault (through the Rebel.bat file) was the lack of a DMA option. When I selected soundblaster everything appeared normally and I could select the IRQ, Base, and DMA. However, when I selected the GUS option, the DMA menu was instantly grayed out and unusable.

Not knowing what to make of this, I decided to start up the game with the default dosbox GUS settings of IRQ=5 and DMA=3. Following this, a setup screen appeared that showed the options I had selected as well as a loading bar at the bottom. This was the screen that prevented me from loading into the actual game as the game frooze under the default GUS configuration.

I noticed that, while I was not able to select the DMA at the screen, the game seemed to have defaulted to 1. So I edited the dosbox config to set the DMA to 1 and tried again. Using these options the game crashed at the same screen.

I then proceeded to try all sorts of different combinations of IRQs, DMAs, and Base ports. I happened to discover that, for whatever reason, setting the IRQ to 11 would allow me to move past that troublesome screen. Unfortunately, as the Lucas Arts logo appeared and the title scroll thereafter, I realized that I still had no sound.

Knowing that setting the IRQ to 11 would at least get me to the title screen, I then began trying many different combinations with the IRQ as a constant; however, it proved to be a fool's errand.

After this I took a look at the readme and saw that I could run the Assault.exe directly and manually set the sound options in the command line. So, after making sure I had all the correct syntax, I loaded Assault.exe as follows:

Assault /c7 /d3 /i5 /b240

(c7=Gravis d3=dma i5=irq b240=base)

As you can see I went back to the default settings of dosbox for the GUS but it did not work. I then immediately went back to IRQ=11 and dma=3 and that didn't work. So, even though I thought the DMA might've been the problem, it seems manually configuring it did not work.

Running the Reb.bat utility didn't really help me because it would just output whatever I had recently saved in the configuration menu. Obviously I made sure that those settings and the ones in the dosbox config matched.

Well, I should note that the game runs fine with Soundblaster but obviously I would like to use the GUS if at all possible. Since everything else runs fine when selecting soundblaster, I have ruled out any other problems (CPU settings, Video settings, etc.) in relation to my dosbox configuration.

I should also say I tried dosbox.65 and that also did not work.

# Sound mode used

Gravis Ultrasound through Dosbox -did not work
SoundBlaster through Dosbox -worked

# Video mode (Software, OpenGL, Direct3D, or Glide, and resolution)
Surface output

# Version of emulator (for VDMSound, probably 2.0.4 or 2.1.0; for DOSBox, 0.58+)

Dosbox 0.73

Reply 1 of 4, by ADDiCT

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Ehhh... Why not just use SB? I don't think there's any benefit from playing the game with GUS. The game doesn't use MIDI music and is probably not optimized for the GUS anyway.

Reply 2 of 4, by HunterZ

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If it's anything like Rebel Assault II, it streams digitized sounds and music from the CD-ROM and thus shouldn't sound noticeably different on one sound card versus another. Definitely try using Sound Blaster instead of GUS.

Reply 3 of 4, by Xenphor

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Ok well I decided to just play the game but now I've seemed to run into another problem. I guess I should ask: is this game supposed to be playable with a mouse? I can't even get through 5 seconds of the first level without smashing into the walls constantly. Even when I'm not touching the mouse my ship moves around the screen. I'm aware that this is a rail type shooter but I never had this type of problem playing Rebel Assault 2 on the psx.

I know this can be a problem in some games that use a joystick but I have it disabled in dosbox. I also set the CPU cycles as low as they could go to run the game. Anybody know if this is supposed to happen?

Reply 4 of 4, by ADDiCT

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Hmmm i've only tested the game quicikly to see if it works at all in DOSBox, but i can't remember that kind of behaviour. I remember that the game was a b*tch to play with a joystick on real hardware because the controls were too sensitive, though. You could try playing around with the "sensitivity" parameter in dosbox.conf. And maybe there's a way to tell the game that no joystick is attached, via config setting or function key?