First post, by mishima666
Okay, I'm rapidly running out of ideas on this one.
Computer: Powerbook g4
CPU: 1.5 GHz PPC
RAM: PC2700 DDR SDRAM, 512MB
Video: ATI Mobility Radeon 9700, 64MB of RAM
Sound card: I'd love to know myself, but I doubt it's useful info for this issue
OS: Fedora Core 10 PPC
Game: The 11th Hour, both original release and v. 2.42
DOSBox video mode: both output=surface and =overlay, and machine=VGA, =VESA, =vga_s3, each combination thereof still has a corrupted video palette.
DOSBox version: dosbox-0.72-5.fc10.1 (ppc)
The problem is that the video palette in 11th Hour is corrupt (i.e. the colors are, er, rather psychedelic. Looks like a solarized photo). It also runs terribly slow, but that may or may not be related. IIRC this is an issue that occurred back when I first got this game and was running it under Win95's DOS, and stems from the game auto-configuring incorrect settings for the video card. The default config is apparently a Trio64, 2mb of video memory, and S3 Trio Internal 24-bit DAC. Obviously, I don't have a Trio64 on this thing 😀 but I don't know if DOSBox supports emulating one.
I've gone through every combination of output, machine, and memory options in the .conf that I can think of. Nada. Fullscreen vs. windowed makes no difference, neither does switching desktops or booting Linux with video=ofonly. Makes no difference whether I install/play from the .isos of the discs on my HD or from the actual CD-ROMS. I've tried reconfiguring the game through its UVCONFIG tool, unfortunately, without a better grasp on exactly what video card DOSBox is or isn't emulating (I'm not even sure if this f10 version supports vga_s3), all I can do in UVCONFIG is try random combinations and see if one works. So far, none has; most tend to simply crash the game before drawing the initial menu. I can run the game in "Spooky Mode" aka B/W, though it's still extremely slow (going by the cursor animation, figure 1 fps at best, probably more like 1 frame every 1.5 seconds. Also takes maybe 25-35 seconds to load following the MSCDEX check). Of course, I'm about as annoyed with being restricted to B/W graphics now as I was in 1995 😀
Right now my best guess is that I need to configure UVCONFIG with something that DOSBox and/or my ATI is happy with, and I've no clue what that would be. Anyone got any ideas on that or how to fix this, or perhaps has anyone gotten this game working on a Powerbook G4 before?