IG1 Help (yes read the n00b thingy)

[n00b101]

Hi, i have not played IG1 in years, and yesterday i stumbled accross the CD's while doing some cleaning out of my wardrobe (weird place to find my IG cd if you ask me). Anyway, on putting it into my computer and trying for about an hour trying to get it to work on WinXP Pro, i decide to hit the net and try and find out some info, i came here and find out that you need DosBox (or theres another one). But when i try to run Install.exe off the cd (after mounting it and everything in DosBox v0.60) i get this error message.

Loader Error (0023): invalid exe format

I noticed that the bottom of the cd's are slightly scratched but i was wondering if there is any way i can get this excellent old game running again???

Before anybody asks yes they are original copies, i got them for a birthday present from my Nan and Pa about 6-7 years ago.

Thx.

[Rory]

They have just recently re-released that Impirium Galactica and it works, minus the sound, it sounds to me like it’s the scratch you mentioned....

[n00b101]

could anybody email me the install exe so i could play around and see if i can get it to work?
its a great game and i wish to play it once more. my email is
corranhorn@bigpond.com
Thanks

[Karthik]

You can use the patched version installer!

[n00b101]

ok, now that its semi-running.....
i get these errors
internal or external error 216 (followed by an address)
or i get
invalid cpu instruction

now the computer im trying to play the game on is a
AMD XP 1800
512mb DDR Ram
200GB HDD (1x80GB and 1x120GB WD HDD's with 8mb cache's)
nVidia Geforce4 Ti4200 VIVO (and digital monitor out)
Windows XP Pro

If i run from windows then i get the invalid cpu instruction, if run from DosBOX i get the internal or external error 216.

Anybody got any idea's? :)

[Gregorius]

In DOSBox it will never run, unless there will be a new version released. In XP make sure Me compatibility is turned on. If it is, then dunno, maybe soundcard.

Edit: Actually, I just checked, there's a new version. :up: :up: :up:

[Inkvisitor]

Well, i write from hungary, and i don't speak very good the english.
The Imperium Galactica I is not running under Windows XP. If you want to play with it, you must use Win 98 or 95.
And newer maschines needs the 1.2 and 1.3 patches to install and run the game.

[Gregorius]

IG1 runs under XP with Me compatibility mode, see the thread for troubleshooting called Newbies look here before posting!

I checked the new DosBox, and it can run the game now from any operating system. Linux, NT, 9x kernel and so on... although you will need a fairly fast computer because emulation is slow. With the use of the opengl function now you can have the game to run in infinity resolutions with full scene antialiasing. Looks great.

It runs with sound, animations and everything. Great stuff. You don't need any patch for running it under DosBox 0.61.

[Karthik]

Originally posted by Gregorius
IG1 runs under XP with Me compatibility mode, see the thread for troubleshooting called Newbies look here before posting!

I checked the new DosBox, and it can run the game now from any operating system. Linux, NT, 9x kernel and so on... although you will need a fairly fast computer because emulation is slow. With the use of the opengl function now you can have the game to run in infinity resolutions with full scene antialiasing. Looks great.

It runs with sound, animations and everything. Great stuff. You don't need any patch for running it under DosBox 0.61.
You still need it, cause the retail version has a building limit! The patches fixes this of course!

[Gregorius]

What retail version, I have a Hungarian and an English original version of the game, and a copied as well of both and they all run without any patch 1.2 or 1.3, just fine.

[n00b101]

ok, now that its running in DOSBOX .61
and i have cranked the CPU Cycles upto 40,000
is there anyway to 'speed up' the sound?
the sound happens in slow-mo as does the video (messages).
Anyway to fix this or is this just how it runs for everybody? :)

[Karthik]

Originally posted by Gregorius
What retail version, I have a Hungarian and an English original version of the game, and a copied as well of both and they all run without any patch 1.2 or 1.3, just fine.

I meant these:
-Fixes the "RUNTIME ERROR 200".

-Issues with Sony CD ROM drivers appear to be resolved.

-In the rank of Commander, the traders leaving the Zeuson planet (if it wasunder blocade) did not have the correct text appearing is space war. This isfixed.

-If you played the game for a very long time, it might have happened that oneof your last ground battles have not ended. This bug has been fixed, theground battles will always end.

-There was a limit to the number of buildings that could built in the galaxy.This number was 5000 which some players found not to be enough (specially atlonger games).

-Also, on one of the planets the enemy forces could deploy their tanks intopositions from where they couldn't exit. This has been fixed as well.

[Gregorius]

Yeah, but the runtime error and Sony CD-ROM error does not happen in DOSBox, so the game runs wihtout the patches. Yeah the bugs are not corrected, but you don't need them, only if you want them to be corrected.

If the sound skips, increase the blocksize in the config file. You might need to slow down the emulation afterwards. The problem is that in different video modes you need different emulation speed. Set the increase and decrease emulation speed to 100 and then within the game you can adjust it with CTRL+f11 and f12. If you use surface instead of opengl it runs faster, you can use slower emulation speed and have less sound glitches if any.

[Inkvisitor]

Gregorius, You said: Dosbox need a strong computer. What does it mean? My computer has an Athlon xp 2500+, 768 MB DDRam, RADEON 9600 videocard, but Ig1 is very slow, vhen it runs under dosbox (OS: Windows XP)

[Karthik]

Originally posted by Inkvisitor
Gregorius, You said: Dosbox need a strong computer. What does it mean? My computer has an Athlon xp 2500+, 768 MB DDRam, RADEON 9600 videocard, but Ig1 is very slow, vhen it runs under dosbox (OS: Windows XP)

Damn, that's not good! So far the only Digital Reality game I managed to get running under DosBox is Reunion!

[Gregorius]

That's exatly I was trying to point at. DOSBox is an emulation that means it uses pure CPU. The faster your CPU is the faster the emulation's gonna be. It does not support 3D or audio hardware so it doesn't matter what the rest of your specification is. It is only the CPU that counts.
Under XP even computers such as yours could perform utterly low as XP is supposed to be such an advanced OS that it uses really sophisticated mechanism of application defense. To run an application under XP takes almost twice as much resource as in eg. Millennium. Under a 9x OS the game would run much faster.

[Gregorius]

Originally posted by Karthik
Damn, that's not good! So far the only Digital Reality game I managed to get running under DosBox is Reunion!
So that means no Platoon under DOSBox? :D
Seriously how can you not run IG1 under DOSBox?

[Inkvisitor]

But dosbox does not run under Win98.

[n00b101]

but if your running windows 98, all you need to do is boot up in DOS to get a true dos environment. for those of us with Windows XP, we can't do that.

[Karthik]

Originally posted by Gregorius
So that means no Platoon under DOSBox? :D
Seriously how can you not run IG1 under DOSBox?
I didn't get you're joke!:weird:

[Gregorius]

Originally posted by Inkvisitor
But dosbox does not run under Win98.
Oops! I was not aware of that. So then the above mentioned things are for Win9x(!8) then.

[Inkvisitor]

My computer has two OS: Win98 and Win XP.
But:Under Win 98 IG1 has no sound (Soundcard is SB128+integrated)
Under XP with DOSBOX too slow.

[Gregorius]

Have you looked at the Newbies look here thread? You can find some information there about sound issues! :up: (VDMSound)

[n00b101]

well my comp only has XP, i did do a Dual-Boot for a little while, but recently i've been loading on the Longhorn Alpha Builds to have a squiz (on the partition that i had 98 on). And yes, i have same problem with DOSBOX running IG1 too slow, waaaaaaaaay too slow, no matter how much i play around with the settings, i've gotten the sound sped up, but its still a bit laggy (from event to sound playing). Video, don't even try. And normal gameplay, unreliable and really really slow.

[Gregorius]

If VDMSound + patch + compatibility mode don't work, under NT kernel you will have to wait for the next version of DOSBox to upgrade speed. Otherwise the only thing you can do is to play with the playback sample rate and buffer size or something similar that might speed things up as explained in the cfg file itself. Other than that you can only hope and wait. Or ask someone else, cuz I'm outta ideas, sorry. :(

[Karthik]

Those with WIN98 need to have a bootdisk to run IG1!

[Chrysalis]

Hi these are the problems I have (have read the noob thing)

If I use dosbox 0.61 the game runs but extremely slow, probably not very playable, also resolutions are messed up as in not been full screen.

If I use compatiblity mode and vdmsound it has some sound desynch, the sound is a bit lagged but if I then tweak it to lower ms the sound is too fast so I leave it slightly lagged, now when I get into the game after 1-5 mins it crashes out, I got this error the last time.

External or internal error!
Error code: 216
Error address: 0008:069F

Also this as well

16 bit ms-dos subsystem
MAIN
The NTVDM CPU has encountered an illegal instruction
CS:c000 IP:35c0 OP:c6 cc d8 f0 f0 Choose 'Close' to terminate the application.

I am using the patch as well, and am using Windows XP.

Is there particular vdmsound options people use if so please share thanks. :)

[Gregorius]

The new nVidia driver doubles Direct3D perfomance under XP, you might want to give that a shot for DOSBox cuz it uses Direct3D for fullscreen and I think for windowed mode too if selected.

[Karthik]

Originally posted by Gregorius
The new nVidia driver doubles Direct3D perfomance under XP, you might want to give that a shot for DOSBox cuz it uses Direct3D for fullscreen and I think for windowed mode too if selected.

You're joking, right?! Cause the only acceleration it supports is OpenGL and that one is still buggy. The defaul setting is just software mode!

[Gregorius]

Yep, I forgot there was no Direct3D support, sorry.

[Chrysalis]

yeah opengl the screen is gibberish here and its not an option for me, out of interest has anyone got IG1 working with sound succesfully in XP without dosbox?

[Chrysalis]

Ok I done a few things and noticed this.

IG1 runs fine with no sound direct from windows XP
IG1 runs in DOSBOX but because the way dosbox works you have to enable a setting to see videos at full screen which slows them down, also dosbox is slow in general and my 1.8ghz cpu is not enough to run smooth.
IG1 crashes with sound enabled direct from windows XP
IG1 crashes with sound enabled from vdmsound

when I changed the soundcard irq to 7 from 5 in vdmsound settings the first time I ran the game it didnt crash, this was for 5 mins until I quit, I then tried it again and it lasted approximately 2 mins and then crashed on irq 7 the sound also kept cutting out, irq 7 is also used by my graphics card.
Irq 5 is used by a usb port

I think the irq conflict could be the problem I am going to try disabling usb ports to free up irq 5 and see if I can get the sound device its own irq and then try again.

---edit----

also want to add this is in vdmsound error log

@W - 00:49:56.781 - SBController
HandleTransfer: DMA updates too infrequent (unable to keep up with
desired transfer rate), requesting boost

[Karthik]

Until DOSBOX supports hardware acceleration and improved support for protected mode, playing IG1 in DosBOX is out of the question. The only way is create a partition and install Win98SE!:(

[DukeStarseeker]

http://www.sciencefictiongames.net - Please have a look at!

This page should not only work as a fanpage but also as a IG2 Community Page, where you can register as a member and still active IG2 Online Player today.
The more mebers the page gets, the more known it will become.
i beg all still active ig2 online players to register, so that there will be a list of still active ig2 player on that page.

the Page is not only for IG2 Fans, but also for moo2 and homeworld players. The sense of this page is, to make old games online even today still attractive and top play them as a gaming-community.

I would be very glad if all people in this forum joined the community and to help to make ig2 even today an actual online game! you just have to klick onto "Join/Contact" and fill in some few details about you. You can leave your email adress private to me, so that it will be not shown on the browser
my icq number is 160276985


Thanks for your attention!
Duke Starseeker

[Chrysalis]

Hmm we talking about IG1 not IG2, I got the game to run with sound for about 20 mins this is how, set DMA polling in vdmsound to 0ms min and 15ms max, in thoery 0ms should allow it to go as fast as it needs and initially I thought I cracked it, but it still crashed after 20 mins with the usual error, and vdm log showing dma polling not fast enough. :(

I also had vdmsound using irq5 for the soundblaster 16 and irq5 was completely freed up.

[DukeStarseeker]

I know, excuse me, that post only was for advertisement for teh page.;)

[Driftfreak]

Originally posted by DukeStarseeker
I know, excuse me, that post only was for advertisement for teh page.;)
thats what most people call spam...and dont like it...so please dont to it

[Chrysalis]

Ok I thought I would try it on my second box which has a sblive value, main box has nforce soundstorm, the sound seems to be stable with vdmsound in XP, but I have gfx corruption, the graphics card is a 8meg ati pci rage pro, it seems there is a bug with some ati cards and there is a patch for it, but when I use the ati patch it gives the good old runtime error, so this makes me think they patched the 1.0 exe file arrrrrrrrrgh!!!!

This game could work on windows 98 on this box but I have lost my 98 cd heh so until I find it I am limited to what I can try.

[Chrysalis]

found the cd and am now running win98 on this box just for IG1, but still not got it working right. In windows XP with vdmsound thigns were running well until I got to the point of attacking the garthog planets, then it will crash promptly if I attack any of the planets, even with sound off. So I installed windows 98 and liveware for my sblive value, Now this setup used to run IG1 fine 2 years ago, I remember playing the game, but now it wont, I setup the sound in install.exe and it tests it fine (although if I load up install.exe just to test it never does any sound first time I have to click test twice) If i try to play the game or watch the intro it just stays on a blank screen, got about 590k free conventional memory which I assume is enough, am getting extremely frustrated now does vdmsound work in windows 98?

[Gregorius]

Sounds like an IRQ problem try swirching between 5 and 7.

[Chrysalis]

all working now, just switched the sb16 address from 220 to 240.

Win98 no vdmsound
sblive value
ati rage pro
pentium 3 500

this spec almost worked in windows XP with vdmsound but crashes at certian parts of the game, even without sound.

[Karthik]

Is the intro working for you on the 98 version?!

[Chrysalis]

it works but only the original intro.exe, the 1.3 patch has 2 exe files I have to use the main.exe to play the game, but have to use the original intro.exe of the cd to watch the intro.

[Karthik]

I see!