VOGONS


Sam and Max Hit the Road

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First post, by dondrei

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Okay, I'm running a P4 3.0 with 512Mb RAM, SB Live (OEM unfortunately) and Win98SE. I'm trying to run Sam and Max but my sound card doesn't have a legacy device so although it runs fine it won't play sound or music.

So I figured I could use DOSBox since it has a built-in SB16 emulator. I ran the sound setup utility and it recognised an SB16 (the sound and music tests ran fine). But then when I exit the utility I got the following error message:

assertion failed: infile != NULL file init.c line 1650

I have no idea if this is a DOSBox problem or not. Anyway, it seems not to have saved my sound settings because when I then go to run the game it just says "sound drivers failed to initialize".

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Reply 1 of 6, by MiniMax

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problems with sound in sam n max

DOSBox 60 seconds guide | How to ask questions
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Reply 2 of 6, by dondrei

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Awesome, thanks.

Reply 3 of 6, by LoneLines

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Hmmm... while playing Sam & Max through ScummVM is a solution shouldn't DOSBox also be able to play the game?

If not, I should add this to my broken list...

Time to test 😀

LoneLines list of workarounds for various games in DOSBox:
http://ADogsBox.jellofishi.com

Reply 4 of 6, by avatar_58

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I believe there is a patch on Lucasarts website that may or may not solve this issue. Try it before assuming its 'broken'.

Reply 5 of 6, by LoneLines

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Odd game, I tested this with my original Sam & Max CD (I believe from the Lucasarts fun pack).
Installation (creation of an ini file in C:\SAMNMAX.CD goes well, I get to the main menu and play around with it.
If I try to play some Audio tracks eventually DOS4/GW crashes... DOS32/A also doesn't help.
I leave CD Audio for CD players and move on to the game itself, it loads, it plays, and all is well, I leave the comp alone for a bit and when I come back, yup, DOS4/GW crashed on me... weird...
Took me a while to remember that Sam & Max has a built in screensaver that goes off after a few minutes of idleness, this seems to be the reason of the crash, changing DOS4/GW to DOS32/A seems to disable the screensaver (feature or bug?) and the game seems fully playable 😀 (Though truth be told, I'll still play this on ScummVM 😉 )

Edit: I did not use any patches from Lucasarts.

LoneLines list of workarounds for various games in DOSBox:
http://ADogsBox.jellofishi.com

Reply 6 of 6, by Wintermute

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I remember playing this game back then in the old days on my old computer. 😉
It was really kind of unstable. Besides some crashes, it happened to me several times, that digital sound and speech stopped working after a while. I had to exit the game, start setup, change the digital driver to something else and then rechange it to the old setting.
On newer systems the automatic sound card detection would crash the computer during install.

So ScummVM nowadays is definitely the best solution!