You're right, it's easier to just run it in Dosbox.

But I'd guess the cause is memory-related, as many games are fussy about it.
I would see how much memory you get in pure DOS with the mem command.
Also post your autoexec.bat and config.sys contents.

Not sure which version you are running, but I have tried the one from gog with both machines in my sig with their "native" sound drivers and both main game and American Revolt worked. I remeber crashes when I started it from the launcher on the newer machine with PCI soundcard, but if I went to the game directly bypassing launcher and intro (separate executables) then I remember I could play fine. Sorry if this does not help much, but if you have questions about my configuration, disk layout and such I'll be happy to tell. Good luck.

I remember there was at least one version of Syndicate which shipped with a version of DOS/4GW that always crashed when 32MB or more of XMS was available. You could just replace the extender .exe with one from a different game.

Interesting. I have the same crashes on pretty much every machine I tried it on. In my case, it crashes near the end of the intro cinematic. However, that was the disk version. The CD version works fine. I'll do some experiments with less memory and with an upgraded DOS4GW and report here.

If the game actually starts it's not likely to be a problem with DOS/4GW.

I've had problems with Syndicate on fast machines - it's sound driver related I suspect because the problem goes away when I don't configure sound blaster.

Slowing the machine down to ~66Mhz 486 speeds fixes it for me.

Thanks for all the replies, guys. It loads up to the part where you pick normal Syndicate or American Revolt, and then just goes black when I select. I can't even get to the intro cinematic. This is the CD version. I'll copy my autoexec.bat and config.sys contents over to this machine shortly.

I found a different execute file on the CD, which seemed to load into the original game instead of going to the splash screen. The intro plays, and the game works, but only the music. There's no sound. I can't see any sort of installer with it where I can pick sound options... Does anyone else see a sound setting file within their CD?

JamieReleases wrote on 2024-08-26, 18:12:

I found a different execute file on the CD, which seemed to load into the original game instead of going to the splash screen. The intro plays, and the game works, but only the music. There's no sound. I can't see any sort of installer with it where I can pick sound options... Does anyone else see a sound setting file within their CD?

In the original floppy version the sound is set during installation and the address/IRQ stuff can only be changed by editing SYND.BAT once the game has been installed, so I suggest taking a look at your installation folder and see are there any .bat files there.

As far as I know the original floppy version only supports Sound Blaster 2.0 and the later Syndicate Plus CD edition added SB16 support. I remember reading about someone upgrading their SB2.0 to SB16 which immediately caused the CD edition of Syndicate to not work anymore, there might be something odd about how the CD version handles sound.

Sombrero wrote on 2024-08-26, 19:37:

JamieReleases wrote on 2024-08-26, 18:12:

I found a different execute file on the CD, which seemed to load into the original game instead of going to the splash screen. The intro plays, and the game works, but only the music. There's no sound. I can't see any sort of installer with it where I can pick sound options... Does anyone else see a sound setting file within their CD?

In the original floppy version the sound is set during installation and the address/IRQ stuff can only be changed by editing SYND.BAT once the game has been installed, so I suggest taking a look at your installation folder and see are there any .bat files there.

As far as I know the original floppy version only supports Sound Blaster 2.0 and the later Syndicate Plus CD edition added SB16 support. I remember reading about someone upgrading their SB2.0 to SB16 which immediately caused the CD edition of Syndicate to not work anymore, there might be something odd about how the CD version handles sound.

It looks like the CD install just creates a folder to place saves with an INF file for the audio, but editing it everything looks correct - IRQ, DMA etc...

If anyone knows why FMV cutscenes are so macroblock too on multiple games, I don't remember this back in the day, but maybe I didn't realise at the time. I'm using a Dell E771A CRT.

Macroblock?

feda wrote on 2024-08-29, 16:54:

Macroblock?

Macroblocks are the square areas (8x8,etc) that video codec operates on.

The bitrate was kept low to allow realtime decoding on the hardware of the era, so when there's lots of motion in the scene - there are not enough bits to express all the changes in a frame, the video codec has to prioritize large changes first (means the base color/gradient of all blocks in affected areas), and then the details would be gradually refined in a calm scenes as more data is pushed through.

Well, IMO Sierra's FMV compression was probably one of the worst during its time (e.g. see Phantasmagoria and Urban Runner). Their later title increased the HW requirements and thus improved the quality (Phantas 2, Gabriel Knight 2). If you are running on a 17" monitor or larger, I recommend avoiding the full-screen video option. It will make things much worse with its simplistic upscaling and black lines.

Syndicate's intro FMV is not blocky at all though. It sacrifices frame rate instead of image quality.
But yes, those blocky artifacts were noticeable to me since their days, but the entire technology was super exciting to see emerging for the first time (memories of Windows 95's Weezer video 😅)

I don't recall exactly what codec Bullfrog (Syndicate, Theme Hospital, Theme Park, etc.) used for their videos, it was probably Smacker, but I definitely remember it would just blindly skip decoding frames if the CPU was too slow leading to very obvious blocks left on screen from older frames.

wbahnassi wrote on 2024-08-31, 05:28:

Well, IMO Sierra's FMV compression was probably one of the worst during its time (e.g. see Phantasmagoria and Urban Runner). Their later title increased the HW requirements and thus improved the quality (Phantas 2, Gabriel Knight 2). I recommend avoiding the full-screen video option if you are running on a 17" monitor or larger. It will make things much worse with its simplistic upscaling and black lines.

Syndicate's intro FMV is not blocky at all though. It sacrifices frame rate instead of image quality.
But yes, those blocky artifacts were noticeable to me since their days, but the entire technology was super exciting to see emerging for the first time (memories of Windows 95's Weezer video 😅)

Yeah, some games look great and you don't get a lot of compression on the FMV scenes, but some have been awful. Alone in the Dark New Nightmare is pretty unplayable even in-game, all the dark scenes look messy like they were done in paint. I don't know if there's Codex that can help or some drivers. I've had many of my big box PC Games for years, just waiting for the time to finally go back and play them natively. Rogue Squadron looks amazing on this PC, and I've been able to play lost games like Dark Omen and War of the Worlds again. When I move out in the future I'll probably build a dedicated 486 machine for DOS games, and maybe a smaller monitor would be better for that to help the FMV scenes. Finding monitors seems hard these days though. Alone in the Dark and older dos games are quite troublesome due to the sound I suspect. I'm branching off onto all sorts of convos here though, but a lot to learn and talk about sorry haha.

For me FMV sequences in Syndicate don't look blocky, but they also don't always looks FMV-ish, at times resembling "spriteesh" digitally painted animations of the "before prerendered" times, so I wouldn't know if technology was not really sprite animation layered on top of pre-rendered backdrop frames. Again, I have GoG version, so CD may be different.

If one looks for a really outworldly video codec, by the way, look no further then Cryo's Dune CD-ROM. They stuffed in clips from Lynch's movie in a rather peculiar way. I am using these clips as reference for scaler testing these days. 😀

ludicrous_peridot wrote on 2024-08-25, 09:14:

Not sure which version you are running, but I have tried the one from gog with both machines in my sig with their "native" sound drivers and both main game and American Revolt worked. I remeber crashes when I started it from the launcher on the newer machine with PCI soundcard, but if I went to the game directly bypassing launcher and intro (separate executables) then I remember I could play fine. Sorry if this does not help much, but if you have questions about my configuration, disk layout and such I'll be happy to tell. Good luck.

It worked for me also 😀
I started the game from syndicat folder, main.exe file and everything worked normally....

The proper way to launch the game is synd.bat , not via any of the direct executables (original version, I don't have the GoG version).