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Problems with "Gunship 2000" in v0.65.

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First post, by Neville

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Hello there. I'm an old-school gamer and once in a while I like to play with those old MicroProse titles. I think I have a bug to report.

The game "Gunship 2000" works like a breeze... except for one thing: once you enter the mission section, if you choose to read the mission orders the graphics become sort of corrupt and the game enters a endless loop. Here's a screenshot I just took:

gs002nt6.png

The good news are that if yo choose NOT to read the mission orders and just proceed into the mission itself everything works fine:

gs2001je0.png

gs2003pp0.png

See? Hope it's nothing important. I'm using the updated and cracked game version that's around the net, the one that includes the Islands & Ice addon.

Reply 1 of 27, by wd

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Tried loadfix?

Reply 2 of 27, by Neville

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Why should I try that option? I though it was for games that require very few memory. GS2000 seems to work fine save that particular item. Do you think this behaviour is memory related?

Reply 3 of 27, by wd

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Well then don't try it.
Loadfix was present in later msdos versions as well and cares about
buggy programs that don't expect that much free memory thus corrupt
something. No idea if that helps with this game though.

Reply 4 of 27, by MiniMax

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Neville wrote:

Why should I try that option?

Because wd's title is l33t and yours is Newbie?

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Reply 5 of 27, by Neville

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I'm not questioning wd's authority, MiniMax. I just don't see any relation between the bug and memory use. I remember playing GS2000 on DOS with more than 600 kb base memory and it never caused any problem.

Reply 6 of 27, by wd

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Um if you want to know exactly what's going on get the debugger-enabled
build of dosbox.

Reply 7 of 27, by wd

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In fact the game runs fine for me. Be sure you have sound correctly
configured and try with a clean dosbox.conf

Reply 8 of 27, by Neville

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I use DBGL, by which I assume it has an individual dosbox.conf per game. I'm doing some more testing as we speak, and looks like the bug occurs far less if I choose full core emulation and / or change scenarios.

Reply 9 of 27, by MiniMax

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Which DOSBox version do you use with DBGL? The internal CVS build from 2007-01-22, or the official 0.65 ?

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Reply 10 of 27, by Neville

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The official v0.65. Is the other one newer?

Reply 11 of 27, by MiniMax

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Irrelevant. wd said it ran fine on his system with a clean dosbox.conf, which I assume means the standard, unmodified dosbox.conf that comes with 0.65.

Did you change anything in the standard 0.65 dosbox.conf ? If not, you can trick DBGL into using only the standard configuration by going to the Edit version tab, edit the 0.65 entry, and mark the "Multiconf support" box.

DBGL will then try to launch DOSBox 0.65 with 2 configs: The standard config, and the game-specific config. But since 0.65 do NOT support the multi -conf feature, it will only load the 1st config - the standard config. You will then need to manually do the mounting operations and starting Gunship, but you will be running the same config as wd.

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Reply 12 of 27, by Neville

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Alright, I won't entertain you any longer.

Reply 13 of 27, by wd

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Not sure, but it seems to have happened a few times here as well.
It didn't occur when using the keyboard only though. Not much
else you can do about it, looks odd.

Reply 14 of 27, by Neville

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Well, we're not alone. The bug is listed on the gamelist in the mian site. One of the posters thinks it's cycle related, but I disagree, because I've tried the game at both 3000 and 5000 cycles. The only thing that stopped was trying different scenarios. The bug, for some reason, occurs more often in the European scenario.

Reply 15 of 27, by Neville

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The bug continues under v0.70... It's a good thing it doesn't affect playability.

Reply 16 of 27, by remowilliams

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I can confirm the mission order scrolling bug occurring with Gunship 2000 and .70 Gunship version is 469.02 installed directly from original floppy images.

Reply 17 of 27, by Neville

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My version is the one found at HOTU, with the "Islands & Ice" addon. I think it's the latest released.

Reply 18 of 27, by remowilliams

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After imaging my I&I expansion floppies and installing them, I can confirm the bug as well with the expansion and higher rev level (469.07) in Dosbox .70

Reply 19 of 27, by remowilliams

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Okay, lots of testing various permutations has done little to find an exact cause - but the one consistent culprit seems to be having sound enabled in GS2000.

While I've had the funky briefing bug occur in many different dosbox/GS2000 configurations (including stock), I've yet to have it occur with the sound turned off in GS2000.

Also of note, is that I've had the briefings work perfectly at random intervals while the sound is enabled. Sort of a crap shoot really. Would be nice to be able to pin this down to a specific root cause within 'sound' though.