First post, by Banjo
- Rank
- Newbie
Several years back, I bought a (new, sealed, store-bought) copy of this game, and today I dug it out and decided it was high time I gave it a shot. Given my other choice was Win95 and I run XP, I felt the DOS version under DOSBox would be a safer bet for this old game.
The thing is, although the disc printing clearly claims "MS-DOS compatible" and the manual explains to type "CD\DOS" on CD 1 (of 3), there IS no "DOS" directory on the disc!!! All the setup exes, etc. are "windows only" executables!
EDIT: Okay, so it seems there IS at least two "versions" but they're labled the same (?!?!): I got hold of another Spycraft CD#1 and its contents is indeed different to my legit retail version (it DOES have a "DOS" folder with DOS installer and sound config utilities, as well as what appears to be different installers for Windows that I didn't try), although discs 2 and 3 are identical to mine. Thought this was very interesting!
Now, however, I have a different problem: playing in DosBox, the audio seems to have a nasty layer of white noise over it when I use Gravis Ultrasound for midi. It took a lot of tinkering to get the Ultrasound recognized (set it to port 220 as that's all the game recognizes for the GU) and it test-plays midi okay, but digital audio with it sounds horribly distorted. Sound Blaster 16 (now set to port 240) gives no sound in the test, but regular old Sound Blaster does just fine. However, starting the game = white noise over audio!
I can get nice sound with Gravis disabled (it recognizes the SB16 as an AWE32 for some reason, but it works) but not with a Gravis/SB combo. And yes, I ran loadpats.exe first. 😁
Has anyone else managed to get Spycraft working under DosBox with Ultrasound midi?