Has anybody succeed in making this game to work under Dosbox?
At the beginning I thought it was a joystick problem, now I think that it is solved by writing in the conf file Joysticktype=2axis timed.
However, after the calibration of the joystick the game freezes and do not respond anymore.
Somebody has a soluition or I have to undertand that Pacific Strike is incompatible with Dosbox?
Thanks in advance.

[merged]

Did you try it without a joystick? That is start up the computer with the joystick unplugged?

Yes, I tried with the Joystick unplugged, I only get a frozen black screen

That is with joystick it freezes, without joystick it freezes+displays
a black screen?

Maybe you need to run some installer/setup program (or a runtime
switch of the executable) to disable the joystick detection.

wrong sound setup?
Your cycles and core settings?

There is no switch to avoid joystick detection. When it is unplugged it is not detected.
The settings for sound card are the following:

port 220
Irq 5
DMA 1

this is according to the game manual. I run the install.exe program of the game and set above mentioned data, I also modified the Dosbox.conf file accordingly. Still the game refuses to start.

Thanks your help.

Dunno why you use the values from the manual, but the settings
of dosbox are irq7/dma1 (see dosbox.conf).

core: dynamic
cicles: 3000

it doesnt work either with
irq 7 dma 1

Ok, for further testing, please turn off the sound completely.
Try to play with the ems/xms settings (one/both off) and the
core/cycles (cycles=auto for the 0.65 release).

With dynamic core, you can (and in this case, should) use a cycles value much greater than 3000. As wd said, try cycles=auto. If this doesn't fix it, then you could try numbers on the order of 10000-50000 perhaps (10000 might make it run like a nice system from 1994... 50000 is probably closer to what you want, because this is a 3D Origin game and systems powerful enough to run it smoothly probably didn't exist until 1996 or so 😀).

Using the normal core could offer better stability, but it'll be slower because you'll be limited to a lower number of cycles. It is possible that dynamic core doesn't work with this game, so this is worth testing if you're not able to get it to work with dynamic core.

I remember Origin had a flying game around 1994 that everyone complained had ridiculously high requirements, and that many people couldn't get it to run. Perhaps Pacific Strike is that game (?).

With 3000 cycles maybe it isn't frozen but takes half an hour to load 😉

> Using the normal core could offer better stability, but it'll be slower

Well of course it would be slower, but that's not really the point
when trying to get something to work at all. The dynamic core
has some weak points when it comes to preciseness of some
things, so it's always worth to try both.

I just tested the game and it runs fine, with default settings, with
highly modified settings, couldn't get it to not run.
Maybe you can re-install the game under dosbox 0.65, if it still
doesn't work maybe try 0.63 but there you'll have to set ems=false.
If still no luck, you could get MyJemm though i don't know if it
works (stable) under XP.

Thanks your help.
I finally managed to have the game running in Dos Mode of Windows 98 without a problem. But with Dosbox it has been impossible, it runs but awfully slow and I was tired of trying.
Thank you very much.

As i said, it runs at normal speed with just standard dosbox configuration.
Don't know what's wrong for you...

WD:

oK thanks, now please tell me what you call a standard dos box:
Please fill the empty spaces below, I will try the configuration you use:

Game needs loadfix= yes or no?
Amount of DOS memory=
Enable XMS= yes or no?
Enable UMB= yes or no?
Enable EMS= yes or no?

CPU settings

Cycles=
CPU Core=
Frame skip=
Video card=

Thanks

dosbox 0.65, no dosbox.conf, start up dosbox
type "cycles auto"
mount the game directory (mount c c:\games or whatever)
go into the pacific strike directory, possibly configure sound
(wavblaster/sb16 with 220/7/1), run the game

> dosbox 0.65

> calibrating the joystick. Every attempt failed

nope he'll need a CVS 😉

I think he has the joystick deattached.