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Wizard! demo title screen glitch

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First post, by MrFlibble

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I've been playing around with various pre-release demo versions of Hexx: Heresy of the Wizard (originally known simply as Wizard!). There's one early demo (WIZARD.ZIP) that's bugging me because the intro/title screen animation does not play properly in DOSBox:
3PKyE8g.png
What it should do is show the Psygnosis logo, then fade out and display the title screen, but instead you have the garbage shown above.

I have tried, in vain:

  • running it in vanilla DOSBox v0.74-3, DOSBox SVN Daum and DOSBox ECE
  • setting machine type to vgaonly
  • setting cpu type to 386
  • setting cpu core to simple
  • turning cpu cycles down to 1000 and below
  • setting memsize to 4
  • turning off xms and/or umb
  • turning off all extended memory and using Jemm
  • using loadfix with various parameters

If I replace INTRO.ANM with a similar file from another demo version of the game, there is no glitch. But from this post it seems that the demo in question can work fine. Any help?

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 1 of 4, by ripsaw8080

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Doesn't appear specific to DOSBox; same thing happens in other emulators.

AFAICT, the animation file is corrupt. The damage can by repaired by modifying the bytes in INAN.ANM at offset 472E from 00 00 1B 1D to 3C 7F 3C 7F. The four pixels are perhaps not original, but they look okay.

The copy you link to might not be what was used for the 2012 post in the other forum, but the zippyshare link there seems no good now.

(Found on CD Player 02/94, a special issue of PC Player)

Reply 2 of 4, by MrFlibble

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ripsaw8080 wrote on 2020-05-02, 15:42:

The copy you link to might not be what was used for the 2012 post in the other forum, but the zippyshare link there seems no good now.

(Found on CD Player 02/94, a special issue of PC Player)

I suspected as much, thank you for verifying this!

I don't have access to that CD Player coverdisk but I have the file listings in the catalogue, and at least the file size and file modify date/time stamps appear identical. But of course the file from cd.textfiles.com might have got corrupted somehow.

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 3 of 4, by ripsaw8080

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Comparing pixels to the tower graphic in the animation of the release version, the damaged bytes in the demo's INAN.ANM starting at 0ffset 472E should be changed from 00 00 1B 1D to 3E 7F 3E 7C. You could use this as an "educated guess" until an unbroken copy surfaces, at which point you can check the accuracy of my repair job. 😉

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