Whenever starting up Conquered Kingdoms, the following commands can be used: (ie. CC A if you want Adlib sound) A - use […]
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Whenever starting up Conquered Kingdoms, the following commands can be used:
(ie. CC A if you want Adlib sound)
A - use Adlib sound.
B - use Soundblaster sound.
N - disable all sound.
E - no EGA page flipping (for EGA cards with less than 256K memory).

Be sure your mouse driver is loaded before starting the game.

"e" makes mouse work in both games

The QQP games that use EGA work more smoothly with page flipping, however. Loading an MS mouse driver in DOSBox is a way to avoid the cursor problem while still using page flipping.

The code in DOSBox's mouse driver that causes the cursor to alternately appear and disappear is this:

1// Check video page. Seems to be ignored for text mode.
2// hence the text mode handled above this
3if (real_readb(BIOSMEM_SEG,BIOSMEM_CURRENT_PAGE)!=mouse.page) return;

I have suggested to the devs that it be removed, because it is ostensibly only for "optimization", and it's not a good assumption that pages will be flipped with BIOS calls that also change the page variable. The QQP games are cases where BIOS is not used to flip pages. Actually, if you load CTMOUSE instead of an MS mouse driver, you will get the same cursor issue, so I suspect the current code was based on its behavior.

Great, thanks the E option is a good workaround but the game is pretty rough without page flipping.

I've tried loading MS mouse.exe in dosbox before running CC but it tells me the "driver is already loaded", and the disappearing pointer persists. I put mouse.exe and mouse.lan from Microsoft DOS mouse driver 11.00 into my CC folder and ran it before launching... Am I doing it right Ripsaw, or do I have to disable the Dosbox driver somehow?

try the mouse i enclosed here
Der Patrizier: Mouse Problems
it is working too

Later versions of the MS mouse driver check to see if a driver is already active, and they detect DOSBox's internal driver. You can disable the internal driver with a utility program found here. The MS mouse driver 8.20 and below should work in DOSBox; but I get strange mouse behavior with 9.0, so later versions might have similar problems.

Fabulous. Thanks Robertmo that driver seemed to do the trick.