I meant the "machines" in the config file, not other computers. You can choose between these: "hercules, cga, tandy, pcjr, ega, vgaonly, svga_s3, svga_et3000, svga_et4000, svga_paradise, vesa_nolfb, vesa_oldvbe", svga_s3 is standard. I tried a few of them, but it only made it slower.

Oh, no - the default (vgaonly) is fine here, and changing them won't matter much to Daggerfall, which is a vga mode game. All indications are your machine is simply too slow for emulated Daggerfall. Your options are a) find another physical machine to try it on b) install DOS and play from that or c) not play Daggerfall =(.

If you really really want to play, you can contemplate installing DOS on your machine. Again, I have to warn you this is quite complex with modern Windows, and involves repartitioning your drives, backing up and probably re-installing Windows entirely, that kind of thing. It's also much too complex to describe here in brief, but if you google something like "install dos modern machine" you'll find some examples of people doing it. Many people just create a dedicated low-end machine to do this.

Daggerfall does indeed have severe timing-related bugs on faster systems, including my old PII-450 and my modern systems running DOSBox at high cycle counts. These bugs include slow or nonexistent strafing/backwards movement in cities, much lower/shorter jumping, and greatly increased difficulty in getting the game to realize when you're attempting to climb a wall.

Also monsters will get confused because they "think" too often, and jitter around corners/get hung up on terrain in ways they don't on a slower machine. Of course, just turning the cycles down is the easy way to fix that in Dosbox. Since mjolner is having problems just getting it to run at a good frame rate, it's unlikely he's having any of these problems though.

The OP is screwed.

Best solution is to either build a really old system (like a 233MHz Pentium or whatever) or a newer one that can run DOSBox.

Second-best is to install pure DOS and use a slowdown utility (even 450MHz is fast enough to see speed-related bugs in the game, so 900MHz is definitely going to be an issue). Note that using slowdown utilities on my 450MHz computer back in the day wasn't that great an experience because they tended to make the game stutter.

Ok, thanks everyone for the help!

Doing those complex operations like installing real DOS isn't an option really because I'm not too knowledgable about computers.

And I can still play the game, walking in towns and in the wilderness is flawless, but if there are many NPCs nearby (like in a castle or a popular inn) or when I face more than one monster at once it can get a little slow.

I tried to install dosbox 0.73 and daggerfall on another computer which is a little better, 1.6 GHz, but it didn't work much better.

So I'll just complete the game and get it over with.

Oh, and one more question. When I watch instructional videos for installing the game on dosbox, many do one thing that Bethesda never instructed you to do. They created a file named 'daggerfall.bat', what does it do?
Check out this video, at about 0:47: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbfEBTwwOrE

Mjölner wrote:

I've read that playing it on XP's DOS is not recommended because there are many bugs that appear. […]
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I've read that playing it on XP's DOS is not recommended because there are many bugs that appear.

I've tried scaling:none and changing output, but none seem to make it smoother. I've also tried different machines, but it seems the standard machine is the best.

temptingthelure wrote:

Why not run it on a computer with dos installed. MS-Dos 7.1, the one that came with win98.

How do you install it? I suppose you don't mean the one that came with XP.

Yeah, there's no DOS in XP. That command prompt may seem like DOS, but its not. The easiest way is to just get a copy of win98, install that on one hard drive, and exit to dos mode to play. You could try dos 6.22, but that's too old. Or maybe some of the dos clones, but i dont know if they are good for games.

HunterZ wrote:

Comments:

- Daggerfall does indeed have severe timing-related bugs on faster systems, including my old PII-450 and my modern systems running DOSBox at high cycle counts. These bugs include slow or nonexistent strafing/backwards movement in cities, much lower/shorter jumping, and greatly increased difficulty in getting the game to realize when you're attempting to climb a wall. I reported these issues to Bethesda around 10 years ago and they never believed me, but now anyone can replicate them in DOSBox at sufficiently high cycle counts.

- Daggerfall is indeed complex and buggy. Bethesda has a long and continuing legacy of making huge, complex, and buggy RPGs.

Hehehe, and they released a buggy product to retail stores, and people didn't complain about it? 😜

HunterZ wrote:

- Daggerfall is a Quake-era engine, capable of full texture-mapped 3D polygon graphics. Arena is built on Wolf3D-era technology although they put enough tricks in it to make it comparable to Doom IMO.

Yeah, I read about daggerfall's engine, X-ngine, being actually the first true 3d engine to be used in a game, before Quake in fact. I wouldnt have believed that before I read it, since AFAIK, everything in Daggerfall is 2d flat sprites, right? Didn't know Arena used a ray-casting engine either. That's a first one for me. 😀

temptingthelure wrote:

Hehehe, and they released a buggy product to retail stores, and people didn't complain about it? 😜

Pfft, Bethesda released one of the worst NES games in existence, releasing crap into the market is something they're most familiar with!
The only thing keeping them around is the reflecting water in Morrowind saved their butts' reputation in the (then suddenly pathetic) gaming press for being super revolutionary for having high system requirements as if it were the most special thing.

temptingthelure wrote:

X-ngine, being actually the first true 3d engine to be used in a game,

Ultima Underworld, Descent, System Shock, etc. says hi.

leileilol wrote:

Pfft, Bethesda released one of the worst NES games in existence, releasing crap into the market is something they're most familiar with!
The only thing keeping them around is the reflecting water in Morrowind saved their butts' reputation in the (then suddenly pathetic) gaming press for being super revolutionary for having high system requirements as if it were the most special thing.

I didnt know about that NES Where's waldo game, I thought their output of crappy games was only confined to Elder Scroll games. 😵

Ultima Underworld, Descent, System Shock, etc. says hi.

That Ultima Underworld engine was awesome, but was it true 3d? I think Descent was 2.5d as well. Stygian Abyss and System Shock are still awesome games, that share an awesome engine.

That Ultima Underworld engine was awesome, but was it true 3d?

It used sprites for monsters, but the terrain was mapped textures over polygons, and the engine allowed for things like true Z expression in terrain (you could stand on a bridge looking down to another traversable point) and pseudo real time lighting (I think it just affected the single ambient light). Doom et al optimized that away by having a 2d map that faked Z - you could go up/down, but not stand above another path point. It even had a form of transparency. In these technical respects it was quite superior to Doom, which came later, but was lower performance as a result. I doubt you could have done Doom on the hardware at the time using the UW engine; which is probably exactly why Carmack made the type of refinements he did.

-Frob

I took the amazing features of the Ultima Underworld engine at the time, in 1992, compared to what Carmack had to offer back then, which was wolf3d and early doom, as a sign of Carmack's lack of versatility, but apparently he made those engines less powerful than the Ultima one not because of lack of skill but for slower CPU's compatibility sake, then, right? Wow, this has gone somewhat off-topic hasnt it? :p I wonder if they would make the source code of than engine available as GPL or something like that.

I don't know what was the reason for Carmack's work. I have heard that Ultima UW *would* run even on a 286 provided there was enough EMS memory. Correct me if I am wrong.

It ran on almost anything, but the tradeoff for it's abilities was a lower absolute FPS, and a smaller draw area (Ultima Underworld was preconfigured to draw to a very small area of the screen, Doom drew most of the screen with a bar at the bottom, although you could adjust Doom to also draw a small area).

If you look at the original source code for Doom, it's clear that Carmack was optimizing aggressively for FPS, the most important technical feature of a shooter. I think the Underworld team was trying for a more immersive environment, so they went with a few features that were somewhat costly. It's too bad we don't have the Underworld code, that would be a great game to native port, although I believe there are some folks trying to do a reverse engineering job out there.

-Frob

That's probably the reason why the original version of wolf3d had features like carrying dead bodies, and stealh, but they were removed at the last minute. What I'd like to know is, Carmack wrote those engines, wolf3d and doom, but who wrote the UW/System Shock one? Was it an entire team?

ontopic, I think the best way to run daggerfall these days is either if you have a fast i5-7 grade cpu and use dosbox for it, or get a pIII and play it natively with dos on it. I'd recommend dos 7.1, not the last standalone 6.22 one, as it supports fat32 and long file names.

temptingthelure wrote:

but who wrote the UW/System Shock one? Was it an entire team?

Doug Church was involved from Ultima Underworld up to Thief II. The engines of all their 3d games feel similar to UW and each other, especially going from System Shock to Terra Nova, especially with the fact all of the particle systems in the games involved large translucent circles. Flight Unlimited was the least similar though.

It's too bad we don't have the Underworld code, that would be a great game to native port, although I believe there are some folks trying to do a reverse engineering job out there.

Is there still such a project? Once there was "The System Shock Project" (I think that was the name, doing that for System Shock, which apparently used the same engine as UW, but that project died AFAIK...

temptingthelure wrote:

Hehehe, and they released a buggy product to retail stores, and people didn't complain about it? 😜

Of course people complained about it, it was impossible to run the unpatched Daggerfall for more than 10 minutes without it crashing. What makes you think they didn't?

Freddo wrote:

temptingthelure wrote:

Hehehe, and they released a buggy product to retail stores, and people didn't complain about it? 😜

Of course people complained about it, it was impossible to run the unpatched Daggerfall for more than 10 minutes without it crashing. What makes you think they didn't?

Yeah, but what i meant to say is, they got away with releasing and selling a borked up game? Nowadays they probably would get sued. 😜 I think it was shortly after that game, during the Battlespire and Redguard days, where they got bought out by Zenimax, since all those crappy releases had put them in the brink of bankruptcy, right?

Nowadays they probably would get sued.

sure, that must be right since nowadays all games are released in perfect, bug free versions.

Dominus wrote:

Nowadays they probably would get sued.

sure, that must be right since nowadays all games are released in perfect, bug free versions.

Well, not completely bug free, but at least playable for longer than 10 minutes before the next crash. It'd be great if bethesda released the source code of their Xngine so that people could fix the damn bugs finally. 🤣 I know they lost the source code to Daggerfall, but they can't have lost the source code to the other Xngine games right? The future shock and skynet ones, battlespire, redguard, and such.

Is there still such a project?

Apparently the UW one died as well: http://uwadv.sourceforge.net/ which is too bad, it seems they had made some progress. One of the reasons listed is that it was easier to run Ultima Underworld in Dosbox =).

-Frob

Yeah, uwadv has been out of development for quite some time. That Dosbox is at fault is only part of the reason... A major part was also the lack of interest of the author and no one willing to really step in and help it along...