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Bloodstone troubles

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First post, by DeadManFlailing

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Hello everyone, in the recent months I discovered the joy of the games of old!

Moving straight to the problem, this is how it's going down currently. I had an older version of DOSBox and D-Fend v2. I downloaded the Bloodstone game because it sounds interesting. It runs fine albeit the sound and music is machinegun-style choppy. However the main problem comes when I run into the first group of enemies in the game. Whenever I recieve the message of gaining a +1 in my axe skill or whatever skill I gain in, the game just freezes up right there. I have no idea what could be causing this.

I send the game to my friend, and she tells me that she had no problems even after recieving the gaining a point in a skill message. I emulate her setup in D-Fend but I'm still recieving the same freezing problem even after upgrading to the latest DOSBox. Any help is appreciated.

I rely on a small book for my quippy quotes. That book is lost, therefore I will put in my own quote, "HELP!"

Reply 1 of 6, by eL_PuSHeR

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*** Moving to DOSBox Games/Apps Section ***

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Reply 2 of 6, by Valli12

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Hi DeadMan.

I faced the same troubles as you and was able to find the sourse for the crash. In the "edit profile"-menu of the game in D-Fend open the Environment window. There you must disable XMS.
DosBox will prompt an failure with HIMEM.SYS but the crash wont occur.
But why XMS is causing such an error I can't imagine. 😕
Whatever, let's PLAY. 😁

greez Valli

Reply 3 of 6, by ege010

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If you disable XMS, the result will be the game complaining about not having sufficient memory and automatically disabling sounds (at least SoundBlaster ones).

The solutions I found (on DOSBox 0.73, DBGL 0.67, using SounBlaster 16) to avoid disabling XMS:

- be sure the game sound settings (setup by "SETD.EXE") match those set on DOSBox (in my case, SoundBlaster IRQ was different)

This should be enough to make the game run fine. Otherwise:

- disable sounds at all (same result of disabling XMS, but at least the game doesn't complain) 😉

On DBGL, I had also to set "Early 90's" template to let the game start properly.

Enjoy one of the most fascinating RPGs ever (at least for me!)

P.S. a fantastic site for Bloodstone / The Magic Candle series fans: http://jason.wumple.com/Interests/Gaming/MagicCandle/

Reply 4 of 6, by wd

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If you disable XMS, the result will be the game complaining about not having sufficient memory and automatically disabling sounds (at least SoundBlaster ones).

Maybe additionally disabling ems works (since memory is accessible through
the int15 interface then, maybe the game is checking for it that way).

Reply 5 of 6, by ege010

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Maybe additionally disabling ems works (since memory is accessible through the int15 interface then, maybe the game is checking for it that way).

Sorry, my mistake. The game was not complaining about not having sufficient memory, it said "XMS driver not detected". I tried disabling both XMS and EMS and SoundBlaster sounds do not work.

Anyway there is no problem, the solution is simply configuring the game sound settings to match DOSBOX ones, keeping XMS on, and everything works! 😀

Reply 6 of 6, by catchaserguns

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I found that it is a soundcard problem. Change your soundcard in the setup and see if that solves the problem.

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