StarfireTBT wrote on 2020-10-04, 18:25:
I am having a similar problem to this thread: Metaltech: Earthsiege intro problem
I want to play Earthsiege 1 but my intro is showing just the slide and nothing else. I got the game from some websites and all versions seem to have just the slide intro while one copy is allegedly even missing cut scenes and I wouldn't be surprised if the other is the same.
Where is this FLIC folder with the Intro and cut scenes? Also what is an ISO version of a game?
The entire Earthsiege/Starsiege universe is free, for the most part, from the legal owner just in case you did not realize. An ISO is a full image file of a CD/DVD so you can either burn it to your own CD/DVD or run it through a virtual optical drive utility like Daemon Tools. The light version of Daemon Tools is free. Also, to make a CD or DVD ISO image into a real disc there is a free utility called ImgBurn.
Earthsiege and it's expansion pack do run in DOSBox, but I have found it runs best in version .74 on my system for some reason. The intro plays fine as well as long as you have the ISO mounted in DOSBox. You basically want to mount your C: drive in DOSBox and then mount your optical drive which is usually D: drive in most configs. You do not need Daemon Tools to mount your ISO in DOSBox as it has it's own internal commands to mount ISO images. I also found CPU cycles in in the DOSBox conf file do need to be adjusted from "auto" to a slower speed. I find 50000 cycles pretty good. Maybe even a lower number. Earthsiege ran really well on my Pentium 90MHz system back in 1994.
The command within DOSBox to mount your C drive would be something like: "mount c c:\<path>" where path = where you want DOSBox to consider your C: drive. I usually setup a folder called "dosfiles" and make that my root DOSBox C: drive. So that would look like: "mount c c:\dosfiles" So now anything in the folder "dosfiles" is now my C: drive in DOSBox while DOSBox is running. To mount your ISO file it would be something like this: "imgmount d c:\dosfiles\<filename>.iso -t iso" So the imgmount command tells DOSBox to make D: the optical drive using the iso file in the "dosfiles" folder that you copied there. From there you can just switch over to your D: drive in DOSBox and start the install process of Earthsiege or whatever DOS game you mounted. The -t switch like "-t iso" just tells the command imgmount what you are mounting. Another example would be "-t floppy" if you were mounting a floppy image which can come in the form of an .ima or .img file as two examples. DOSBox figures out what size virtual floppy drive to use by the size of the floppy image file you are mounting.
Definitely read the DOSBox FAQ at the DOSBox website on how to use it. You can even setup scripts to launch different variant configurations of DOSBox so you don't have to constantly type these commands in. So one shortcut could be DOSBox with a mounted virtual floppy drive and 16MB of virtual RAM and another shortcut could be DOSBox with a virtual CD-ROM drive and 32MB of virtual RAM. etc.
Here is the official link to all the free Earthsiege/Starsiege games and it even has the Sony PS2 game as well that you can run in a PS2 emulator or burn and play on a real PS2.
https://www.tribesuniverse.com/
The downloads are slow because they are hosting the files on archive.org which is also the Wayback Machine. Be patient. Also, you can thank Hi-Rez Studios for releasing all of these for free. A couple of notes about the downloads. Starsiege: Tribes says "two games in one", but it only has the download for the Starsiege game and NOT the Tribes 1 game. It was a two CD game with each game on their own respective CD. Unfortunately, Hi-Rez Studios only uploaded Starsiege and not Tribes 1. Luckily Tribes 2 is there, though, and is the better game anyway. Starsiege is basically Earthsiege 3 just so you know. It runs rather well in WIndows 7 64, but I don't know about Windows 10. You may want to hunt for patches for these games on the internet so the games run better. Earthsiege 1 does have an expansion pack of missions, but unfortunately it was not released on that download page. You will have to obtain that on your own. It's a very good expansion and worth looking for.
Hope this helped and if anyone sees a better way than I have here please, by all means, correct me. Btw, Earthsiege is the game that made me upgrade from a 486 DX4-100 to a Pentium 90 and it was well worth it.