VOGONS


First post, by VenomSpark

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Hi there everyone 😀

Idk if was already asked or anyone care about it, i wanted to talk and ask for help for this beautiful forgotten gem of game. Most of you surely remember this game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckTales:_The_Quest_for_Gold) from Incredible Technologies, released in 1990 for amiga and MS DOS, which is the version im caring about right now.

Will go straight to the point and asking if there is a possible way to fix the timing issue this game have (as i suppose it ain't have one). Problem is, under real hardware (But i remember i had issues even with emulations), some sections of the game, expecially the mini games after you land with the airplane section, are literally impossible to beat\win as the game runs EXTREMELY fast, even disabling the L2 cache don't work for me and im talking on real dos ambient. There is a way to play this game how it was meant to be with a faster or modern CPU? I didn't tried MOSLO but the IA says it was meant to run on CPU's running at 10Mhz, which is hard to slow or emulate expecially like in my Athlon 64 which is running at 2.40Ghz. I was wondering if someone here still play this awesome game and found a way to finish or play it with real framerate and not rocket crazy frames which makes it too fast and impossible to complete. Was hoping in a sourceport, fork, SDL, fixed EXE or any patch. Slowing cycles on DOSBox (which actually i don't care much as i'd always liked to play it on real modern DOS ambient) sometimes didn't worked for me years ago when i tried to play it again, frames on the mini games sections (expecially the mountain one, is impossible to use the rope on rocks for climbing up) were or too fast or too slow.

If someone can help or knows, let me know and thank you!

ASRock 939S56-M
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ 2.40Ghz San Diego\Toledo (Single Core) 1000Mhz HT FSB
1024MB DDR400 Dual Channel (512x2)
ASUS Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT PCIex 256MB GDDR3
ESS Allegro-1 (ES1989S) PCI
Win98SE+XPSP3+VistaUltimate
HP 56 15" CRT

Reply 1 of 4, by wbahnassi

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I guess you mean disabling L1 cache? L2 cache won't make a huge perf hit as L1. But yes, it is very time sensitive. It plays nice on 12-16MHz speeds. An XT is too slow, and anything beyond 20MHz makes it unwinnable, as a single press on the up key makes the duck jump the entire screen forward.

I would start by using SetMul with L1D switch and see how close things get.

Turbo XT 12MHz, EGA, MFM HDD
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
IBM BlueLightning 100MHz, CL5428, SB16, 4x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, RTX2060

Reply 2 of 4, by Pickle

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you might look into pcem or 86box as an alternative to dosbox that might give you a closer experience to running on a real AT/XT ibm.

here is a hardware solution and google search suggests athlon64 does have the pin STPCLK#
https://github.com/scrapcomputing/ThrottleBlaster

Reply 3 of 4, by rmay635703

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I played it on a 10mhz Tandy 1000rlx for me that was the ideal speed or the game was too fast on faster 286/386sx machines for my taste.

If you play in dosbox you might be able to slow it enough .

Reply 4 of 4, by Pickle

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rmay635703 wrote on Yesterday, 17:34:

I played it on a 10mhz Tandy 1000rlx for me that was the ideal speed or the game was too fast on faster 286/386sx machines for my taste.

If you play in dosbox you might be able to slow it enough .

id start with setting cycles=fixed 1000