did you mount a folder as c: drive? You need that. And to be on the save side mount your cd-rom as d: drive not as e:

Read my 60 Seconds Guide to DOSBox (and don't just read it - follow it too).

If that doesn't help, come back with details on how you mounted your C and D drives, how you did the install, how you configured sound, music etc.

Sorry but I'm not a Dosbox 'newbie', as I'm using it since the very 1st release. And I've read all your instructions and everything I did is 5 by 5 according to your posts.

- I've mounted the c drive as c:\temp\supremewarrior

- I've mounted my CD drive as d

- I've disabled Gravis sound system and I'm working with SB16

- The amount of memory configured is more that the game needs

- I've tested ALL the CPU cores (auto/normal/full/dynamic) with different clocks

The game has a "setup.bat" file that opens a graphical screen, so I can select my sondcard in the menu and I hear the samples correctly. After that, the setup pops up a screen asking me if I want to play the game, I answer "YES" (see screen attached - note at the bottom that it takes my soundcard settings automatically correct), then it goes to another screen, where it shows me the text: "Universal VESA driver loaded!(see the 2nd screen attached). At this point, when I hit any key to continue, the screen becomes white and after 2 seconds, it closes with that error I've posted in my first message here.

This setup creates a folder inside my c:\temp\supremewarrior folder called "DIGPIX" with a sound.cfg file. So my c is mounted correctly and the game setup engine is saving my settings. Also the setup program only let's you to select the soundcard; video modes and input settings are selected on-the-fly and are ok aswell.

Just to mention, that 1st screen I posted here before is the Test Screen, that is another file inside the CD that allows you to test everything and show the results on screen, so I can see that the keyboard is compatible, the sound card is properly selected and is working, the amount of memory available is ok, the vesa video drivers are ok and it also has a self-test, where it tests the entire CD contents, and the test runs flawlessly, with 0 errors!

I've pushed it to the limit, by creating an ISO image of the CD and I've used a Virtual CD program to mount the ISO as a second CD drive (like I do with The Need For Speed 1 (and it works), but neither this worked. It gives the very same results.

If you have another suggestions, I'm all ears, but I have strong reasons to say that it's something related to the Dosbox opcodes not properly emulated, and not to the game or Dosbox config issue.

Anyway, thanks for the replies.
Regards,
RC.

ok, much more information than before. And it does seem that there is something wrong.
Could you post the contents of the setup.bat file? Maybe you can skip a couple of steps and start the game directly without going through the univbe loading.

...and please use a clean dosbox.conf (from an official 0.72 installation) when reporting things.

>"ok, much more information than before. And it does >seem that there is something wrong.
>Could you post the contents of the setup.bat file? Maybe >you can skip a couple of steps and start the game >directly without going through the univbe loading."

I'm at work but I'll do that later today.

>"...and please use a clean dosbox.conf (from an official >0.72 installation) when reporting things."

I always do.

Best regards,
RC.

I always do.

No you don't. Memsize is changed for example.

[quote]No you don't. Memsize is changed for example.[/quote]

Ok. So i've deleted my entire Dosbox folder, downloaded and installed the latest 0.72 version again and created one new config file from scratch (attached as .gif - remove the .gif from the filename to see its contents).

After that, I just mounted the drives without changing anything inside the original dosbox.conf, like this:

mount c "c:\temp\supremewarrior"

mount d "d:\" -t cdrom

then I switched to my mounted d:

d:\

and typed 'diag' (that is the test dialog screen - see the new screen attached). See now that the memory settings remains unchanged.

Tested the keyboard - ok
Tested the sound/music - ok

Then I click on the 'Go to game' button to start it. After clicking on the button, it shows me that "Universal VESA driver loaded!" screen and waits until I press any key to continue. When I press a button, the screen becomes white and after 2sec. it closes dosbox with that same error mentioned in my very 1st message in this thread. That's it.

I guess that now I'm not doing anything wrong... :oops:

If you want, I can send all the program files that comes in the CD root dir ans in the SETUP dir, so you can see the contents of the .bat / .txt / .exe files to try to figure it out. All these files compressed are very small. the unique huge file in the CD is the Movie itself, since it's a FMV game.

Regards,
RC.

Try what Dominus said.

Also create dummy-autoexec.bat+config.sys files in your mounted c root,
maybe it checks for those files as it has edit options.

I've created both autoexec.bat and config.sys dummy files inside my c folder but the behavior is absolutely the same. The curious thing is that it's showing another error(see another error image attached below - I really don't know why it's showing this one, since I've changed absolutely nothing during these tests to be as much accurate as possible...).

I can't follow that Dominos suggestion to try to avoid VESA settings because it sets the VESA stuff on-the-fly (as I said before).

I have some batch config files in the CD: one called 'setup.bat' that calls the Audio config screen (shown in one of my previous posts above). Another one that is called 'diag.bat' that runs the test screen shown above, and another one called 'sw.bat' that call a file named 'Dgame.exe' that runs the game directly, without config screens. But even if I run the dgame.exe directly, it loads that VESA screen, so I can't pull it out or skip it.

I've zipped a file containing all these files. If you want, send me a PM with an e-mail to where I could send it (6mb size). So you can see it for yourself.

Regards,
RC.

Try starting dgame.exe with some weird options to see if there is something you can disable, E.g.

dgame.exe /?
dgame.exe -?
dgame.exe /h
dgame.exe help
dgame.exe qweqweqweqweqweqe

[quote]

Try starting dgame.exe with some weird options to see if there is something you can disable, E.g.

dgame.exe /?
dgame.exe -?
dgame.exe /h
dgame.exe help
dgame.exe qweqweqweqweqweqe

[/quote]

No need. The game manual shows all available commandline options and none of them works (there are only two: "f" for flickering and "k" for force keyboard input device). Other things mentioned in the manual are related to remove memory managers, such as QEMM, EMM386 and to mess with some lines in autoexec.bat and config.sys.

In fact there's one other option I forgot to mention: "n" to disable sound. I tried this one but the result is still the same, so it's definitely not sound-related.

It looks like that this crash is something related to the VESA video mode. I saw that I saw that the current Dosbox VESA status is at about 80%. Since this game is made to run with VESA, there's a lot of chance that one of its instructions is falling in the 20%. D#@n!!

You could try to run the game with SDD (Scitech display doctor). I've never tried this, but there are varous threads here on VOGONS about that VESA "driver".

YEAH man! I tought about it just yesterday. I used to run games through SDD and it helped me a lot on increasing games performance. I'll give it a try.

Also, this game uses Dos4GW to run, and I'm trying to bind the dos32a to make it more stable, but it refuses to bind my .exe since it's on the CD!! How can I do that?

Ok, here are the results using the latest Scitech Display Doctor (653):

- The SDD installation was easy and painless. All the SDD tests worked fine, with every single video mode (320x200, 320x240, 640x400, 640x480, 320x480) in 8, 16 and 32bbp.
- The SDD VESA bios driver loaded and it updated all my video specs, including the VESA driver itself, from 2.0 to 3.0(see attached image below).
- After loading it to the resident memory, I tried to run the game, and it presented a different crash(see attached images below), ending with an Illegal opcode 7.

After that, I downloaded a file from the same Scitech called UNIVBE67, which was the latest file produced by them at that time, available for free download, and installed it through Dosbox. Until here, everything was fine but after completing the installation, when I try to load it to the memory or configure it though the UVCONFIG.EXE file, it shows me an error saying:

"No supported SuperVGA chip detected!" (see the image below)

After this, I decided to take the game box and look the minimum system requirements, that are the following:

IBM or 100% compatible computer with a '486 33mhz processor
Double speed CD-ROM drive
VGA display card
(VESA Local Bus or PCI Bus preferred)
Sound Card
4 MB RAM
(3 MB available extended memory)
MS-DOS version 3.2 or higher, or Windows 95.

I hope that now you guys can figure something out on how can I get this game to work under Dosbox.

Best Regards (and thanks for all your patience here :),
RC.

Univbe 5.3 is the recommended version for DosBox.

Not looking for an easy explanation, but:

> IBM or 100% compatible computer with a '486 33mhz processor

I think a 486 is beyond the emulation in DOSBox.