Do you have QuickTime installed? Many old games relied on it for their video playback.

[MOVED]

yes, I do have quicktime installed in my windows 3.1 version.

AVI files are not played using Quicktime, at least not a version that old. Try looking for old Video For Windows codecs.

I have problems under Windows 3.1 as well. However, I was able to play it flawlessly in Windows XP.

Skardavnelnate: I have vista and when I play vista it goes fullscreen. Whole screen is black except a small window in the upper right corner which is the game.

Wildweasel: I installed video for windows 1E, and Windows media player. Both under windows 3.1. It didn't help.
I repeat that when I am under windows 3.1 and click the .avi file, it does play normaly. It just won't play within the game for some reason. Other than installing qt, wmp, and video for windows, I don't know where else i can get the codecs.

Whole screen is black except a small window in the upper right corner which is the game.

Yeah, mine too. I either adjusted my resolution to compensate or changed a setting to play windowed. Cut scenes and voice were good. It just didn't scale on it's own.

what setting made it windowed? As far as I know it cant be done when running it on xp or vista without the use of a 3rd party software.

There should be a VfW installer on the cd, which is automatically executed
during the ds2 installation. Don't know what can go wrong at that point though.

I must have just changed my desktop resolution to the lowest setting then. This should make the view area larger by comparison.

Eh, I should really investigate more before posting. Dark Seed 2 doesn't use Quick Time, it does use Video for Windows and WinG.

I haven't been able to get AVI or voice to work in DOSBox. However I have been trying a few things with Virtual PC 2007 lately. VPC running Windows 3.1 gets AVI but still no voice. Instead use Windows 98. This gives both AVI and voice.

The game requests 640x480 at 256 color, which is what I set Win98 to. There are also two VPC settings.
- Adjust screen resolution so the host operating system is the same as the guest operating system
- Use guest operating system screen resolution
With these VPC makes full use of my monitor when put in full screen.

works fine in dosbox. the catch is to use a minimum install, not a full.

Just retested this in DOSBox with Windows 3.11. The issue is with Heavy install. Minimum and Medium do work. Although I'm noticing an audio stutter right when a character starts to talk so everyone's voice sounds shaky at first.

I installed the game in my Win 3.11 DosBox just yesterday and noticed the stuttering as well. After changing the resoltution of Windows 3.11 to the desired 640x480 8Bit and disabling all the sound hardware not needed for Darkseed 2 (Speaker, Tandy, Disney, GUS) in the .conf-file, the audio now plays perfectly. Though I don't know which of the actions caused the "fix". I'd go with the resolution change first.

Da Easy Mitch wrote:

I installed the game in my Win 3.11 DosBox just yesterday and noticed the stuttering as well. After changing the resoltution of Windows 3.11 to the desired 640x480 8Bit and disabling all the sound hardware not needed for Darkseed 2 (Speaker, Tandy, Disney, GUS) in the .conf-file, the audio now plays perfectly. Though I don't know which of the actions caused the "fix". I'd go with the resolution change first.

Can you post your conf. file, because i can't rid of speech stuttering. Thanks in advance!

Sure, here it is:

Though I'm pretty sure the resolution change had more to do with the game working than the actual config. Did you set your Windows 3.1 to 640x480 and 256 colors?

Yesterplay80 wrote:

Sure, here it is:

WIN311.conf

Though I'm pretty sure the resolution change had more to do with the game working than the actual config. Did you set your Windows 3.1 to 640x480 and 256 colors?

Yes, i have set S3 864 1.41B5 640x480 256 colors in display settings.

Still no luck with your config, maybe its something with how Win 3.1 is configured and what drivers installed, i don't know.

Excuse the bump, but I found a solution to the Dark Seed 2 stutter problem and I thought I'd post it for future reference. After the game has installed, there should be a file in the Windows directory called wavemix.ini. Inside that file is a bunch of settings that Dark Seed 2 seems to use for audio playback, and if you scroll down a bit you'll see that there are settings for specific sound cards, however, those do not appear to be being applied. What you'll want to do is alter the default settings to the ones for the SB16, so from the top of the file change WaveBlocks=3 to WaveBlocks=5, add WaveBlockLen=4096, and change SamplesPerSec=11 to SamplesPerSec=22. Stutter be gone!

If that sounds confusing, don't worry, you'll see what I'm talking about when you edit the file.