I remember WC3 to be a bitch with the CD-Roms.

What is on the DVD? I wonder how they joined the CDs.

swaaye wrote:

What is on the DVD? I wonder how they joined the CDs.

Please right click on the image > open in new tab. Or download them. Or zoom out 😀

GOG.com installation

File renamed to .ISO and mounted in DAEMON Tools Lite

Oh yeah, that's how I played and beat the game on my retro PC. It's awesome not having to swap discs!

F2bnp wrote:

Oh yeah, that's how I played and beat the game on my retro PC. It's awesome not having to swap discs!

It's the full installation CD. Installer, sound options, everything 😀

My OAK driver takes ages to boot. It seems to scan for every possible port and channel...

Mau, can you test with the attached CDROM.SYS ?
load it with "devicehigh=c:\utils\cdrom.sys /d:CD0" after adapting it to your setup...

For you Keropi: Anything 🤣

PS: You mentioned a ISO mounting DOS utility? What name is this under?

And I will also test this FreeDOS CD-ROM driver. Heard it's meant to be pretty good.

My two CD-ROM tests are now Wing Commander III and Pinball Illusion (that one manipulates the CD track volume to switch back and forth between Sound Blaster and Cd tracks).

heh, thanks!

no iso mounting, cd-rom "emulator" I'll attach them here... it's just fakecd and it's advanced brother fakedr... fakedr works nice for me
I once tested the FreeDOS cd-rom drivers, had a bunch of probs and went back to the normal ones.

Well that driver works fine in WC3 😀

But what's worse is, I tried the Toshiba driver again, and now that's also working 😵

So today I can't reproduce the issue anymore. It's the same disc and I haven't changed anything on this machine 😢

maybe it was the drive after all?

I have no idea 🙁

Same drive as always. Nothing has been changed.

Oh well, I will keep an eye out for any CD-ROM related issues 😀

BUT another observation I made in regard to graphics card.

The DOSBox version has this weird screen flashing issue when transitioning from game to video and back. It's very noticeable. And my FX-5200 does the same thing! The TNT2 and Matrox don't have this problem.

With the Logitech mouse driver WC3 throws an error when launching.

CTMOUSE works fine 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

With the Logitech mouse driver WC3 throws an error when launching.

CTMOUSE works fine 😀

That's strange - I use the Logitech mouse driver and I tried WC3 a little while back, and don't remember this issue. Maybe I have a different version of the driver, or different hardware makes a difference.

Is this the logitech driver that 'cloaks' itself?

Yea late one. I also had HIMEM.SYS loaded. Not a big deal, I have batch files now to load everything I need. Just in case someone else runs into the same issue.

And yes that game is picky about CD-ROM drives. But so are many other games that use CDDA. The older the better it seems. I will keep an eye out for old DVD-ROM drives 😀

badmojo wrote:

That's strange - I use the Logitech mouse driver and I tried WC3 a little while back, and don't remember this issue. Maybe I have a different version of the driver, or different hardware makes a difference.

Is this the logitech driver that 'cloaks' itself?

Bit of a bump because played the game over the last few days and found a few more things that others might find useful!

- Regarding the Logitech mouse driver, it's that CLOAK.EXE (loads it in upper memory) that causes issues. Load just MOUSE without CLOAK and it works fine.
- Screen flicker between cutscenes. I observed this with DOSBox as well. On the real machine this affects pretty much all the Nvidia cards I tried. There is a compatibility graphics mode which you can set in the setup. The instructions are only visible on cards that aren't compatible with the standard graphics mode (Voodoo 3 for example). But this also doesn't fix it. Solution: Don't use Nvidia. I tried V3, Matrox and ATI Radeon and they all worked without the glitches
- ALT-F shows the frame rate. 24 fps is the cap of the engine. No point having a fast PC for this game, just a bit of buffer for the missions with large ships.