Dune 2 + AWE64 Gold \ VOGONS

Dune 2 + AWE64 Gold

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First post, by HunterZ

Posted on 2019-09-28, 20:31

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Trying to get Dune 2 working on my PIII-550 with AWE64 Gold booting into pure DOS 7 from a Win98SE install.

The game is 1.07 installed from an old CD-ROM compilation pack, except I'm also using the enhanced sound setup utility.

First problem is it wouldn't use XMS RAM, presumably because I have 512MB of RAM installed. Used XMSDSK to eat up all by 12MB or so at the top of RAM, and it seems to help.

Second problem is no digital sound. Turns out it's because Dune 2 requires IRQ5, and CTCM was setting IRQ7. This was a bear to fix, because CTCU refuses to run in DOS7, even with SETVER loaded. Turns out I needed to edit a CFG file in C:\WINDOWS before running CTCM, as the IRQ is stored in there.

Next up was music. Apparently AWEUTIL.COM needs to actually be resident in RAM. This got music working, except that it freezes in the intro. Any ideas?

Finally, the game reliably reboots the computer whenever I try to exit, even in PC Speaker sound + no XMS configuration. Any ideas?

Reply 1 of 5, by dr_st

Posted on 2019-09-29, 19:35

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To get CTCU/CTCM to run under DOS 7, you can use my modified utilities here or hex-edit them yourself to change the winbootdir string to something else so it will stop detecting that variable.

AWEUTIL must be resident for MIDI emulation and only that. MIDI emulation does not work well in DOS. For FM music (Adlib/OPL3) AWEUTIL /S just initializes the card and exits. Which music device were you trying to configure?

I happen to have a copy Dune II and can try it tomorrow on my old DOS7/Win98SE PC. Maybe even with the AWE64.

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Reply 2 of 5, by maxtherabbit

Posted on 2019-09-29, 19:38

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AWEUTIL /S is also required to initialize the card prior to using games that have native AWE32 music support, not just the CQM FM synth

Reply 3 of 5, by Errius

Posted on 2019-09-29, 19:51

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IIRC, you won't get synthesised speech in Dune 2 with more than 16 MB RAM.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 4 of 5, by dr_st

Posted on 2019-09-29, 19:54

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maxtherabbit wrote:
AWEUTIL /S is also required to initialize the card prior to using games that have native AWE32 music support, not just the CQM FM synth

That's true in general, but irrelevant for Dune II which does not support AWE synth.

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Reply 5 of 5, by HunterZ

Posted on 2019-09-29, 19:56

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Thanks for the replies. AWEUTIL was indeed not resident (thought it was), so the same was freezing on startup.

I actually got it working with and without XMS being limited to 16MB via use of an XMS RAM disk, but it tends to freeze if you don't limit XMS.

I still haven't figured out what causes the reboot on exit, but it doesn't happen in all configurations or maybe it's just inconsistent.

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