Barking Iguana wrote:
1) The mouse barely moves.
Uh-oh. The curse of the "General" has returned. I noticed this in the demo of "Panzer General", although it wasn't nearly as bad as you have described it (it was, however, very annoying). There have also been issues where the mouse will become "stuck" in the top 1/4 of the screen.
2) I haven't gotten this far, (I've only been to the campaign startup screen and quit) but I know that on the battle screen I won't be able to scroll reasonably without a slow-down utility. Does moslo work under XP?
I believe so. Never been a big fan of these, since playing with them running is much like driving around with the emergency brake on. They hinder everything else as well as the thing you want hindered.
Doing some quick checks I've found that map-scrolling is indeed, very fast. However, it seems workable with some practice.
Also, we got very different results on the installation.
1) The installer didn't complain about a missing file.
I figured this one out. It's a compatibility issue where you can't use the right-click "Run with VDMS" with some SSI installers. When you run the "Fantasy General" install, it comes back with A and B options. Apparently this (somehow) is being interpreted as A: and B: drives. The solution is to just run the installer alone, then run VDMSound on the SOUND.BAT file in the FG directory before running the game.
2) The installer did warn me of a memory insufficiency, which I ignored,...
That should be fine, it's just that it wants more XMS memory than XP gives it by default. That's fixed by either using VDMSound GUI or by editing the .PIF file for the game's executable to give it more memory.
3) I get the audio for the intro just fine.
Interesting. Is it streaming from CD-ROM? Can you tell?
I see that fgvesa.bat runs barena and that fg.bat runs barena with the flag n as part of the command line
FG.BAT is supposed to be the "normal" method of starting up. The "n" parameter is to signify that there is no need for a VESA driver. The FGVESA.BAT is there as an alternate if FG.BAT doesn't work. You're supposed to run UVCONFIG to choose a VESA driver, which is placed in the FGVESA.BAT file so it is run when you start the game.
Note that UVCONFIG was meant for graphics cards of the time (1996) and for DOS/Win9x. It probably won't help in NT. If you are actually getting the visual portion of the game, you can disregard all the VESA stuff now.