VOGONS


First post, by MrD

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I'm trying to play the German DOS platform game Tailchaser in Dosbox.

https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/tailchaser/

After installing the game, the prerendered publisher logo and intros play, but when I select Start from the menu, the game fades to black and the game crashes to the DOS prompt with a "MegaBuffer2 OVERFLOW!" error.

The playable demo version of the game works perfectly - I can play the Haunted House level. (I'm guessing the Scroll Test screen switches between several vga register settings behind the scenes to get hardware scrolling working correctly?)

I'm using Dosbox 0.74 and I've tried a svn staging version.

Reply 1 of 3, by MrFlibble

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MrD wrote on 2020-07-25, 14:53:

After installing the game, the prerendered publisher logo and intros play, but when I select Start from the menu, the game fades to black and the game crashes to the DOS prompt with a "MegaBuffer2 OVERFLOW!" error.

I had a similar error (not sure about the message but it crashed upon starting a level) with a different demo I found on a German magazine coverdisk. I did not try to figure out what caused it though but I will welcome any solution for your problem too 😀

To avoid any confusion, the full version of the game was made available as a free download by its developer, Markus Mück:
http://markus.muck.free.fr/tailchas.html

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 2 of 3, by MrD

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Using dosbox 0.74-2:

Regardless of 'core=' setting, it seems like the hard drive installation for Tailchaser is just broken.

Komplett auf Festplatte (full hd install) is broken since it reads a list of files from komplett.lst to install, which requests SEQS\LOGVGA_.PC twice when the real files are SEQS\LOGVGA_0.PC and SEQS\LOGVGA_1.PC. If you just copy the contents of the CD to the hard drive on top of the incomplete full installation and run the game from HD, the game will start but will crash if you pick Start from the menu as I said in my first post. The same happens if you change komplett.lst to fix the mistake first.

However, Teilweise (partial hd install) and Einfach von CD starten (run from cd) work fine and the game starts!

On the author's website it does say

Create a CD with all files in the root directory (you cannot play the game from harddisc)

so this must be what was meant by that. I thought it was referring to something else. I wonder if it's a software bug or a CD check that's gone funny since the files were supplied as just a rarred directory rather than an ISO.

Reply 3 of 3, by MrFlibble

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Thanks for investigating this!

MrD wrote on 2020-07-25, 21:07:

On the author's website it does say

Create a CD with all files in the root directory (you cannot play the game from harddisc)

so this must be what was meant by that. I thought it was referring to something else. I wonder if it's a software bug or a CD check that's gone funny since the files were supplied as just a rarred directory rather than an ISO.

Some DOS games have certain rare quirks that are not supported by DOSBox, perhaps this is one of them. At least the game can still be played using the CD option.

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