VOGONS


First post, by Jorpho

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Motherboard: ASUS TUSCL-2
Processor type and speed: Celeron 1.3 GHz
Amount of RAM: 256 MB
Video board: ATI All-in-Wonder Pro, 8 MB
Sound board: SoundBlaster Live
Operating system: Windows 2000

The bosses do not seem to be appearing in Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom. (I've tried 2.5 unregistered, 2.7 unregistered, and the registered version available at Underdogs.) In Level 21, the ship appears, but it just flies off afterwards. I've tried DOSBox 0.60 and 0.61 with the default options.

Admittedly, when I try to run the game from a DOS bootdisk, it freezes up completely at the same spot. The reason I suspect that this may be a DOSBox problem comes from when I tried to run the game with DOSBox 0.61 (the MT32 version): DOSBox crashed completely with the message

The instruction at "0x00242ec7" referenced memory at "0x0331b3a0". The memory could not be "read".

Many lines reading "Write 1 to rom at c0401" also appeared in the console prior to this crash.

Any ideas?

Reply 1 of 4, by jal

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I remember the game crashing or hanging in (real) DOS before or during the appearance of a boss, or the boss not appearing at all, or getting stuck at a certain unreachable location. Though you might experience a DOSbox problem (it shouldn't crash of course), the cause is probably a bug in MSBoD.

JAL

Reply 2 of 4, by Jorpho

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Thanks for replying.

The game does indeed freeze up completely when I try to run it using a DOS bootdisk, but I definitely remember that it ran properly back on my old 486 or so.

If Zone 66 (which was very strongly dependent on features in old hardware) can be made to work, perhaps getting this to work would not be impossible either?

Reply 3 of 4, by jal

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Well, I searched the net and found many versions of MSBoD, mostly the unregistered version. One version was registered, which allowed me to play up to level 21, and on one occasion, the boss did not appear (I went to round 22) and on one occasion it did (tried twice), but I vaguely recall that's not unusual behaviour (when hitting the boss off screen, it disappears instantly, so hitting it just before/when it appeats is enough). So it seems at least a version works correctly with DOSbox. I appended a ZIP-file with the working version, hope that helps.

Edit: the enclosed version isn't registered either, but just a very old version that asks you to register without interfering with the game play 😀.

JAL

Last edited by jal on 2004-05-06, 08:21. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 4 of 4, by robertmo

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for Zone 66 you have to set:
xms=false
ems=false