First post, by Darth Marsden
Hi there. I've seen people having trouble getting Discworld II working in Windows XP, and having had a bit of search through the forums I didn't really find a definitive solution, so I thought it'd be nice if I told people how I got it working using DosBox.
What you'll need:
- A version of DosBox. Preferably the latest version, since we're going to be using a command which isn't in the earlier versions.
- The original Discworld 2 CDs. I own these, and so should you!
- An image ripping tool. I personally use ImgBurn, which you can get here.
- About 1.2 GBs of hard disk space.
First of all, you'll need to 'install' Discworld II. Since this is tricky enough as is, all we're actually going to do is copy a bunch of files from either of the CDs. Create a folder on your hard drive (I personally use C:\Discworld\Discworld II\, but anywhere's fine), and copy over the following files into that folder:
- AILDRVR.LST
- DOSCONF
- DW2.BAT
- DWB.EXE
- RM.DRV
- SBLASTER.DIG
- SETSOUND.EXE
Once you've done that, run SETSOUND.EXE. If you 'Select and Configure Digital Audio Driver', you'll find there's only one option, so select it and let the system autodetect the settings. Once it's done so, select 'Done' to save and quit. A file called DIG.INI should now be in your main DW2 directory.
Next, we need to rip those original CDs. We're going to make .bin files out of them, so do so now. If you've got ImgBurn, then it's a simple matter of setting the mode to 'Read' and then selecting where to create the ISO file. Save both discs, in turn, as Disc1.bin and Disc2.bin.
One you've made the two .bin files, create a subfolder called 'CD' in your main DW2 directory (In my case, that'd be C:\Discworld\Discworld II\CD\) and place both .bin files in there.
Now we need to install DosBox into your DW2 directory. We only really need a few files, so if you've already got DosBox installed elsewhere, you can just copy the following across into our main folder:
- dosbox.conf
- dosbox.exe
- SDL.dll
- SDL_net.dll
Once you've got that all set up, open dosbox.conf in something like notepad. Delete everything inside, and replace it with the following:
[sdl] fullscreen=true […]
[sdl]
fullscreen=true[autoexec]
mount C "."
imgmount D ".\CD\Disc1.bin" ".\CD\Disc2.bin" -t iso
C:
call DW2.BAT
exit
Save and quit. Now run dosbox.exe, and Discworld 2 should now run. Whenever you get to a 'Please insert CD X now' screen, just press Ctrl-F4 and wait about 10 seconds. And since that's so important, I'll repeat it in bold and capital letters.
EVERY TIME YOU ARE PROMPTED TO CHANGE THE CD, PRESS CTRL-F4 AND WAIT.
...and that should be it. It took me a good deal of time to figure out how to get this working, but I've played and completed the game using this method and I've had no problems with it so far. Hope this helps out those who are still struggling to get this fine game working.
EDIT 4/1/09: Following a reformat, I've had to use this guide again myself. Re-reading it, I figured it could do with a little editing, so I replaced UltraISO with ImgBurn (which I've been meaning to do for a while), tidied up the text a little and changed the title of the thread from 'Discworld II' to 'Discworld 2' to make it easier to find when being Google'd. Nothing major, just a little tweak here and there.