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Dumpshock Forums _ General Gaming _ I need help running SSI Gold Box D&D games

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Oct 2 2007, 11:29 PM

I've been trying to run some SSI Gold Box D&D games recently on Windows XP and I've been having some problems.

Essentially, if I run the game using Windows XP the game runs in massive fast forward. But if I run the game using DosBox 0.70 the game runs at the right speed but for some reason I get an error message whenever I try to create and save a new character; I do not get this error mesasge when I try to save something using XP.

Also, I can't seem to control whether the game is wanting to use CGA or EGA graphics. Sometimes it looks colorful and sometimes blue and purple and white and black. I'm not sure what's affecting that.

Does anyone have any advice or help for me? I figure that on this forum there must be some Gold Box affectionadoes.

Posted by: Crusher Bob Oct 3 2007, 02:05 AM

http://www.hpaa.com/moslo/ should help in slowing the games down.

Did you get the latest version of dosbox? The older versions did have some problems along these lines.

Also, are you mounting the game directory directly?

The game might be looking for something like c:\ssi\gold box games\saves and if you've mounted the ssi folder as drive c:\ it'll complain.

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Oct 3 2007, 02:10 AM

QUOTE (Crusher Bob)

Hmm. I think DOSbox .70 is the latest but not totally sure.

Perhaps the problem is the one you articulated relating to the location of the c:\ mount. DOSbox gives you a warning if you mount c:\ as your actual hard drive though so that in case "you or DOSbox" makes a mistake your hard drive as a whole is not affected. Do you have any idea what the actual risk is?

I'll also go and look into MoSlow.

Incidentally, do you know what's weird? The original Sid Meier's Pirates! seems to run nearly perfectly on WinXP.

Posted by: Crusher Bob Oct 3 2007, 02:23 AM

What I did when I played old games was to make an 'old games' folder. (so something like d:\old games\ssi\etc)
Then I just mounted the old games folder and was good to go.

Posted by: darthmord Oct 5 2007, 04:11 PM

WR, for lots of help with any old game...

Do a Google search for the term 'vogons'.

It's short for Very Old Games On New Machines. You'll find just about any advice one would need to make an old game work on a new machine.

Me? I've got an old Athlon 600 that I'm going to make into my MS-DOS 6.22 / Win98SE machine and run my old games there.

Though I do have Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, and The Dark Queen of Krynn all properly set up so they will run under WinXP Pro SP2.

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Oct 5 2007, 09:27 PM

I've found a solution to my problem. I was able to open the .cfg file for Champions of Krynn using Notepad and manually adjust the path for save files so that I would be able to use DOSBox and not mount the root directory while still being able to save correctly.