VOGONS


First post, by NewRisingSun

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Rank Oldbie
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Oldbie

Has anyone ever gotten "Extreme Pinball" to run on a real GUS with less than 1024k of GUS memory? On my UltraSound MAX (rev 2.1) with 512K RAM, I can get to the menu, but upon starting to play a table, the game exits with the oh-so-helpful message "*** ERRORS -- please run HELPME.EXE". The game creates the file STDERR.LOG, which at least conveys the information "Could not load sample". The game runs perfectly under normal DOSBox, but if I compile DOSBox to reduce the emulated GUS to 512K, the same error appears under DOSBox. If I compile it with 768K of memory, "Medieval Knights" runs, but "Urban Chaos" does not which, incidentally, also has the largest sound effects bank (SND_C.BND). And yes, all tables run fine with (crappy) Sound Blaster sound, so it's not a case of any files being corrupt.

Could Epic really have been so sloppy to only make the game compatible with fully expanded UltraSound cards, or am I missing something here? HELPME.EXE makes no mention of requiring a fully-equipped card.

Reply 1 of 1, by JayCeeBee64

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Rank Retired
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Retired

Looks like Extreme Pinball does need a 1mb GUS NewRisingSun. My GUS ACE was already upgraded to 1 meg when I got the game back in late 1996, and both the manual and game box don't mention anything about specific GUS requirements, so I decided to try a little experiment: downgrade my GUS ACE back to the original 512k it came with and try to run Extreme Pinball. The result was the same error message and log. Restoring the GUS ACE memory back to 1mb lets the game run without any problems. Unless someone else knows otherwise, a 1 meg GUS is needed to run all 4 tables in Extreme Pinball.

Ooohh, the pain......