VOGONS


First post, by zjorz

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Hey all,

I've decided I'm going replay the whole Terra Nova Campaign and finally finish it. After looking into the different options I've decided to use dosbox games launcher. I'm a noob at dosbox, and this allows me to easily install the game. Posting here to share my experience with setting up the game. Info on this specific game is quite rare, so hope this will be helpful to others.

Audio
So first step was setting up the sound. After reading about this on different forums I came to the conclusion that the game has the best sound and music with the soundblaster AWE32. There is no emulation of this complete chipset, so I set it up in a way that allows the same sound quality.
MIDI: Installed VirtualMIDISynth on windows and added the 8mb AWE32 soundfont. Dosbox device was set to general midi.
Sound: Dosbox was set to SB16 for sound.
After installing the demos and the main game i noticed something strange. Demo 1 allows setting the game to use general midi. Demo 2 and the main game allow clicking general midi, but the game settings automatically switch to the Roland SCC-1 card. When testing the music sounds the same, so it sounds like it no influence on the sound quality. Anybody have any idea what can be causing this switch to the SCC-1 card? Its not that important, but I'm still interested in finding out whats causing this.

Resolution
So after installing the game, patch and both demos The next step was setting up the game resolution. I'm using a 1080p screen, so i realize i can't use automatic upscaling or it will turn into a blurry mess. The in game menu runs at 640x480 and the gameplay itself runs at 320x400 (set trough options menu). I want to have pixel perfect upscaling, so this would leave me with just normal2x for upscaling to double the resolution with black bars. I'm okay with this.
I changed my video card setting to allow letterboxing. Tested this, and it works at the default game resolution.
After that I set the game to use opengl with normal2x forced.

The dosbox window and the game menu rund at double the resolution, so that works. Problem is the gameplay resolution is still at the default 320x400. I'm not sure what i can do to force this to upscale. Does anybody know what else I can do to solve this? Thanks!

Reply 1 of 1, by Rwolf

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The GM midi switch to Roland SSC-1 is described in the readme.txt on the CD:

4) If you select General MIDI in the Choose
New Card menu, the display in the lower left
will read "Roland SCC1". Don't worry. This
is supposed to happen.

Also the hires mode is described in the readme, you might need more memory (>8MB) or a launch parameter to use it "tn +hires".