If you perform a search for "beneath" on the board, you'll see this is a "problem child" (or my personal term, pig) with modern PC systems.

The only person I've heard of (so far) that could run it was "Clam".

You might try contacting Clam.

Another possibility is emulating the Amiga version. Of course that requires an Amiga emulation setup with the proper OS, etc...

well I get it to run using a win98 boot-disk. But of course, completely without sound.

Yeah, I'll contact Clam on that topic, thanks for the advice 😀

I've gotten it running under Windows 2000 SP3, but not without really bad problems, including, but not limited to, sound effects cutting out too early, introduction movie not playing, etc.

I heard that there was an Amiga CD version that had 256 colours (as opposed to the more "public" one that only has 32), but that it was basically impossible to find.

I wonder if they'd ever consider releasing the source, or if VIE has it under lock and key (you know they would, too -- they're a record company, FFS).

Snover wrote:

I heard that there was an Amiga CD version that had 256 colours (as opposed to the more "public" one that only has 32), but that it was basically impossible to find.

Correct. Actually, it was also released on floppy for "regular" Amigas as well.

Trivia item here: In the floppy version there appears to be a missing disk 11, but that's actually the way it came back from the (mass) duplicators. It would've been extremely expensive to correct it, so they just placed a note in the install documentation instead).

There were (apparently) 2 CD-ROM versions. The 32-color version (I think) could be played on a CD32, a CDTV, or an Amiga with the proper CD-ROM setup. If so, that would explain why the 256-color CD32 version would be so hard to find. Stores would much rather stock the version that would sell more (not a whole lot of CD32's were sold).

*cry* I want the 256-colour version! I hate that it doesn't work properly in Windows.

Wow, I never knew people had problem's running beneath a steel sky. It runs (and always has run) perfectly on mine.

Is there a certain point in the game where it gives that error? Or does it happen as soon as you run the game?

Works for me as well (intro is OK, gameplay is OK as well although a bit too slow for my taste). Running Win2k SP2 + VDMSound 2.0.4 "Update 1" (VDMSound version shouldn't make much of a difference).

I think there was a trick with the game's configuration (like EMS?) that made the difference between crashing or not crashing.

My game's install is set to "English" and "SoundBlaster/AdLib" on IRQ7. Using default VDMSound/LaunchPad options (i.e. EMS enabled). Works fine. BTW, just found out that the speed can be increased from the game's control-panel (press F5) and everything runs just swell like that. Save often since the game may freeze from time to time for no apparent reason (IIRC it happened to me under true DOS as well). Sound effects are OK as well, no "interrupted" or "partial" samples.

BE VIGILANT!

V.

I guess I'll try it with the default VDMS settings and see what happens.

Hey. I hate to drag up an old topic but I've just been trying to run BASS on my Win2000 machine. With VDMSound it works fine until I get out of the furnace and have a choice of going 4 ways. Back down stairs; in the door with Sam and Norton; to the left; or to the right. When I go either left or right, the game throws me out into Windows and I get the following error message:

Fatal System Error
cs:eip = 1b7:8d89
Sorry!

Any ideas?

The way BASS uses memory makes it impossible to run in ANY Windows environment (not just NT, as my recent thread in The Guide > DOS shows). Page faults are the name of the game until DOSBox supports it.

I have recently examined BASS, looking for the reasons why it doesn't work at all under XP. The problem is Flashtek/DosX/X-32 Dos Extender and shitty implementation of DPMI host in XP. Flashtek uses nasty hack to allow client program to access low 1MB of memory and it's simply not compatible with XP DPMI. it works this way: the client program code is not relocatable and it starts at address 0 (the same for data section), so the base address of code and data descriptors isn't 0 (like in 99% of other dos extenders) but points to the actual beginning of the code. If the descriptor base is let's say 2000000h, you cannot access dos memory which is located at base address 0. So the client program uses negative offset to reach that memory. Let's say we want to access video buffer so we need to write to address 0A0000h-2000000h = FE0A0000h. Unfortunately this requires the descriptor limit to be 4GB and XP's DPMI host won't allow it. Only descriptors with base address equal to 0 are allowed to have limit of 4GB, all the others are automatically limited, so any attempt to read/write to such negative address results in page fault. XP DPMI host isn't also 1.0 compatible so there's no way to map lower 1MB somewhere in the address space of the client program. And that's it.

Having the game's source code, it should be pretty easy to make the game compatible with Windows XP (at least as compatible as in Win9x, I'm not sure about the possible crashes/problems later in the game). You'd just need to use another dos extender and replace all the flashtek-specific code with normal, dpmi-compatible system calls. As an exercise I wrote a simple wrapper for the flashtek syscalls using standard PMODE/W dos extender which I normally use for my own code. It took me 2 hours so it's really easy. I haven't emulated everything (I was too lazy to emulate realmode->protected mode callbacks) but the game started, showed me the whole intro and allowed to enter the 1st room. There was no sound or mouse support (due to lack of RM->PM callbacks) so I was able to press F5 to get into the options but nothing else as I couldn't use the mouse to quit the game 😉 Unfortunately it's still incompatible with XP due to the memory addressing problem (I couldn't relocate the code). It is surely possible to change the whole game code to use different way to access low 1MB without having the sources (using special selector provided by the extender) but it's plenty of work 🙁

-Mok

I also ha that problem in the scene right after leaving the furnace, both in running in DOS 7 and with VDMSound. But then I came across a solution on the internet: try switch off the Scroll lock. That worked for me. Another solution seems to be to reconfigure to run w/o sound but I can run it with sound and all under VDMSound. Now i just like to get Innocent Until Caught to work!

Was just about to post that. 😀

May work for 2000, useless for XP of course...

bass out on abandonware:
http://www.revolution.co.uk

need ScummVm for it

Gee, thanks, because, that wasn't like, released here before anywhere else, like, a month ago. Nope.