DOS Games Discussion

[Guest]

PROBLEM SOLVED

If you want to know how I got it to work with sound and improved mouse speed and save game problem I've actually installed it within DOSBox some people said you couldn't cause of the CD-ROM speed problem well I've proved something heres how

1. Create a file called STTNG in a drive (for me I placed it into my F: under another directory e.g. Dosgames)

2. Copy over all files on CD and extract sttngins.zip (do not extract sttng.zip) (Do not create a savegame folder)

3.Go into dosbox and mount the file is in as the C drive

4. mount your CD Rom drive as D:\

5. type D:\ then type Install

6. Go through installation of AFU (if it says CD-ROM speed error decrease your speed above your DOSBox window By pressing CTRL + F11 you will notice the numbers where it starts with 3000 will decrease CTRL + F12 Increases it. ) Select 14mb version and Select C: at target drive installation (DOSBox will think drive you placed your STTNG folder is in the C drive)

7. Once installed exit installer (Don't tamper with sound and video yet)

8. type STTNG to start (If all is right, game should work without sound, notice mouse speed is much smoother)

9. during gameplay click out of DOSBox window and go to STTNG folder and enter the STTNG.ini file.

10 Here are the following changes to be made once on the file
Audio=SB8
Port=0x220
IRQ=0x7
DMA=0x1
Video=LO8
Sound=ON
Music=ON
Voices=ON
Movies=ON
Advice=0x0
VolMusic=0x7fff
VolSound=0x7fff
Dialogs=ON
Scale=ON
DPixel=OFF
Path=C:\STTNG\
CD=D:\
UniVESA=OFF
Some may not need changing and may look like this

11. Save settings, go back onto game, play for a while then save. (Savegame folder should have been created after installation)

12. Quit back to dos then retype STTNG

Voila! Music should sound at the Spectrum Holobyte logo and intros and sound at various areas e.g. menus, voices, sfx
Thats the only way I've managed to get past that hideous sosDIGIInitDriver error

FORGOT TO MENTION

If you can't remember the mount formula for CD-ROM this is what I put (maybe different with other peoples Cd-Rom drive letters)

"Mount d d:\ -t cdrom"

Also when you mount to the file like this

"Mount c f:\dosgames" (Don't use this this is an example of mine)

DO NOT ADD IN THE STTNG FOLDER YOU CREATED IN THE DIRECTORY YOU CREATED ONTO THIS MOUNT FORMULA BECAUSE IT CREATES A DUPLICATE FOLDER WHEN INSTALLING AND IT WON'T WORK IT WILL AUTOMATICALLY DETECT THE FOLDER YOU CREATED BEFORE INSTALLING AND ALSO BELIEVE ITS IN THE C DRIVE

If this is done just c: then type CD STTNG and then type STTNG to start the game

[Guest]

help my xp computer will let me into install but my buffers are 40/0 and they should be 20/20 wht do i do to change it or fix it?

[Guest]

Decrease the CPU Cycles less than 3000 on DOSBox by pressing CTRL+F12 than try to install it again and it should now accept your buffers. Don't ask me why it does that but thats how I allowed it to accept my buffers it may depend on your system really you may need to do this or installation may let you install anyway without lowering the CPU Cycles.

[Guest]

If people are still having trouble with that guide view this guide if your having problems getting it to run properly on DOSBox,

"1. Download the updated installer, this will allow you to install A Final Unity with XP. Follow these instructions: Firstly get it here: http://files.filefront.com/903496 Next, extract the install.exe inside the zip, onto your hard drive. So like put it here: c:\install.exe that shouldnt be too hard. Now, open a MS DOS prompt (Start)Programs)Accessories)Command Prompt) type this without the speech marks/quotes "c:\install.exe -DD" the second D should be the letter of your CD ROM drive with Final Unity disk in. My DVD Drive is Drive E so i had to type "c:\install.exe -DE" get me? Ok good, I hope lol.

Now the installer will start. Do OPTIMAL install. When its nearly over, you should see Audio/Sound configuration menu... set it at Sound Blaster 8 whatever it is called, the one with the 8. Just set it at that. Do test sound and you should hear Picard's voice, but very crackely. Close the installer. Or you can go into Video/Graphics settings and increase the resolution to 640x480 the game is nicer that way.

2. Now the game will work, if you double click the STTNG.EXE in the c:\sttng folder. Do not use program compatability.

3. This step is only for if you want clear good sound with no crackles. Download SoundFX 2000 from erm let me get the link. http://www.softsystem.co.uk/sndfx203.zip

4. Apply the illegal crack to your soundfx 2000 installation If you dont crack it, the game will shut down every 3 minutes after starting. You can get the crack from the net, but it is rare.

5. Play A FINAL UNITY on your XP Machine!!!

[Guest]

I ran into what seem to be a couple of very odd bug on Allanor.

*possible spoilers below*






After the Chodak leave (I had the optimators guide me because I couldn't shoot out the sensors with the slow mouse speed, but didn't reveal I had the rod until the computer room), I was trying to make my way back to the ship through the Chodak transporter room. Did everything like I'm supposed to: beamed the other three people away, then the last with the delay timer... BUT after everyone materialized in the first transporter room, they were immediately transported back to the second along with.... the Chodak, who again advise me to follow their Optimators.

The bug seems to have made the game loop, except I have the new equipment (security rod instead of all-access etc.) meaning even if I wanted to replay that whole section I couldn't access the computer. I have a save right before the transport, but the bug happens every time.

The only way I could figure out how to get around this was to try the whole thing again, this time purposely revealing to the Chodak that I have the rod. Then they blind me, and the fact that the initial transport is not displayed seems to keep the bug from happening.

But after I did this, I ran into another problem. Once I got back to the drone charging station there was a drone at the entrance of the room blocking the way. It stands still and looks deactivated, but when I try the tricorder on it it says it's active and I can't lock on because it's moving.

I still haven't thought of a way around this one. Anyone know why either thing happens and how to fix it? It seems to be just the game loading the rooms in the wrong states, but it happens every time.

[Guest]

My mouse is very, very slow. What do I need to do to fix it? I'm kinda dumb, so please be exact.

Someone mentioned earlier that they made changes to the "config file." What changes and which config file?

[Guest]

If you are using Dosbox then look for the config file in the dir where you installed it

open it and find the line

sensitivity=100


change this to something like

sensitivity=450

this should work fine.

[Larry Laffer]

And if not: experiment with that value.

[JB247]

I wanted to let a few people here in on some various things that I think a lot of you were missing from the thread and just doing a bit of googling around. Hopefully I help somebody out.

First and foremost, for those of you so-called "dumb" people, this game is over 10 years old - trying to get old games to work on newer computers can be a real pain, sometimes even impossible... So, please, if you really are just simply *that* computer illiterate, then please save us all the frustration of your ignorance and continue no further.

It is assumed that the instructions that follow you will have to be doing while in your web browser, windows explorer, or the x86 emulator DOSBox (it should be obvious which one). Also, for DOSBox commands, remove the "" enclosing marks (how many times must it be said?). If you have never done anything in windows explorer before (like copy files and such from one directory to another) or type in a command at a DOS prompt (like switch drive letters and run executable programs), stop here and go play a different game, this may get to be too difficult for you to handle.

It may be a bit bold to assume that most people (especially non-Linux folk) will know what "mounting a file system" is (of which is what DOSBox does). Well, read the DOSBox documentation for more information on this if you run into problems. To put it mildly, mounting a directory as a drive in DOSBox (i.e. mounting a file system) is equivalent to alias'ing that location on your actual filesystem as a fake drive in DOSBox. In the long run it simplifies everything, trust me.

A listing of different websites related to DOSBox and STAFU will be given at the end which will help those of you computer savy enough (such as DOS32A vs DOS4GW) and possibly those of you whom suffer from "I can't google" syndrome .

Oh, and the majority of this post is aimed at people with Win2k, WinXP, etc. systems (not Win95 or Win98, which have a bit better support for older DOS-based games) using an NTFS partition for their C drive (which makes any kind of Win95/Win98 bootdisk a mostly invalid option since those only see FAT32 partitions and not the modern NTFS ones, thus "Star Trek: A Final Unity" won't be able to even see C: to play let alone install).

SOME REQUIRED TERMINOLOGY:

STAFU: An acronym for Star Trek: A Final Unity. Easier to type than the full thing every time.

DOSBox: a freely available modern-day x86 emulator which emulates (i.e. fakes) an older computer's DOS environment (the place you type in commands and such) so that you can play old 20th century computer games (like STAFU, released in 1995) on the newer 21st century computers (like a 2.0Ghz+ machine). It is freely available at http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Note that this program is very much different from "Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> MS-DOS Prompt" (i.e. "cmd.exe").

Front-End: A frontend is a seperate program which, usually, gives a nice fancy easy-to-use GUI (i.e. a normal window) as an overlay that runs a program which usually is ran/configured on a command line (such as what DOSBox does). In relation to DOSBox, this includes a few programs such as D-Fend (freely availble at http://members.home.nl/mabus) and others (a listing of which is available from the DOSBox homepage).
This post refers to usage of D-Fend since it simplifies some archaic option setting in DOSBox by leaps and bounds that is required to get STAFU to work properly under DOSBox. So, go get it, now!

INSTALLATION OF STAFU:
There are a few ways to do this. Doing it outright (i.e. inserting the CD and running the INSTALL.EXE file from windows explorer) will surely lead you to the "buffers isn't at least 20" problem when the installation program goes to do the required hardware detection phase (thus failing the check thus not allowing you to install). Trying to change the system32\config.nt file to include BUFFERS=20 doesn't seem to work (even though it really should).

Installing With DOSBox:
1) From windows explorer, make a directory somewhere that we will use to store the entire CD-ROM in (I put mine into D:\STAFU). The CD-ROM will not be required to play this game thus we can copy it all straight to the harddrive (not only that but running it off the harddrive is faster anyways).
2) Copy all contents of the CD-ROM to your harddrive to this directory.
3) From a DOSBox prompt, mount that directory as a CD-ROM drive, such as via "mount d d:\STAFU -t cdrom -label STARTREK". This command mounts a directory in your real file-system as a faked CD-ROM drive in DOSBox's DOS emulated system. Technically, you don't need the drive label, but I include it here for completeness.
4) You will also of course need your C drive mounted, usually from your dosgames directory (or games directory, whatever it may be), such as via "mount c c:\games" (in this way, 'C:\' in DOSBox will be an alias to the 'c:\games' directory in Win2k/XP).
5) Get your prompt to the CD-ROM drive, such as via "D:" [ENTER] (or replace 'D' with whatever drive letter you're using).
6) Run the installation program via "install.exe" [ENTER].
7) Install program should behave itself now (passing the hardware check) and install appropriately to 'C:\STTNG' (by default - which, given we mounted 'c:\games' as 'C:\', the full path in our real filesystem will be 'c:\games\STTNG' - keep this in mind).
8) Done.

A few notes:
1) YOU CANNOT INSTALL STAFU FROM DOSBOX VIA YOUR ACUAL CD-ROM DRIVE! That is, you cannot mount your actual CD-ROM drive in DOSBox and install from there. You *MUST* copy over the CD-ROM contents to harddisk, mount that location as a cd-rom drive, and install it from there. Why? The CD Speed-Check in the installation program will HANG if you try to install from the actual CD-ROM while using DOSBox.
2) If the CD-ROM speed check still seems to studder and report too-low a setting, try changing the cpu-cycles setting lower during the checking of the CD-ROM speed via [CTRL-F11] to slow down and [CTRL-F12] to speed up.
3) For heaven's sake, do an 'optimal install' option, 14 MB, whooptie doo. Infact, we copy over STTNG.ZIP anyways (a 638 MB file) so we can play without the CD, so we're really using about a 652 MB install (which for now-a-days is perfectly fine on most systems).
4) Technically, after installation, you don't really need STTNG.ZIP, the big 638 MB file, so you can delete the CD-ROM contents directory afterwords if you just want to play from CD-ROM. The idea was really to just copy the CD-ROM to hard drive so that you don't need it to play, since it actually improves performance that way anyways (remember we'll be playing it under an emulator), but, if you still want to play from CD then you will be making instead a temporary directory to install from and can delete it after installion.

Installing Normally:
There are two ways to do this:

First Way (Hacked INSTALL.EXE):
1) Go to this website, http://www.emulator-empire.com/finalunity.htm, and download the hacked INSTALL.EXE file.
2) From windows explorer, make a temporary installation directory.
3) Copy all contents of CD-ROM to this temporary directory.
4) Overwrite INSTALL.EXE in this directory with the hacked version you downloaded in step 1.
5) Run INSTALL.EXE.
6) The hacked install program will now allow you to proceed past the hardware check even though it will still fail, usually on the "buffers isn't 20" problem (lovely hack, isn't it?).
7) Remove temporary install directory.
8) Done.

Second Way (Manual Installation):
NOTE: I *DO NOT* recommend installing the game this way at all. It is always best to use the included installer for any game. Try at your own risk!
1) From windows explorer, manually create an installation directory somewhere on your computer (for example, I use "c:\games\STTNG").
2) Copy all contents of CD-ROM to this directory.
3) Extract the contents of STTNGINS.ZIP to this directory. This manually installs the game. (Naturally, you will need WinZIP or WinRAR to do this).
4) Manually create a sub-directory inside your installation directory named 'SAVEGAME' (important!: If this step isn't done you will not be able to save during the game!).
5) You may have to manually extract all of STTNG.ZIP to this directory as well. During normal installation, some amount of .IMG files are extracted from STTNG.ZIP and placed in the installation directory.
6) Delete STTNG.ZIP if you plan on using the CD-ROM to play, otherwise you can point the program to look in the same directory as installation for the CD-ROM file contents. The game can play perfectly fine without the CD.
7) Done.

RUNNING OF STAFU:
If things weren't hard enough with the installation, now you will have problems with the running of it as well. I find that running it as stand-alone (i.e. not out of DOSBox) is still possible, granted you have the right software and correct settings inside of STTNG.INI. Playing it on a modern system is tricky and doesn't always work so well, and people have reported a lot of problems. For instance, with DOSBox, switching to/from tactical and bridge sometimes causes crashes. Both approaches are presented, you will have to do a bit of tweaking to get things to run.

Also, from the STAFU setup program, make sure STAFU is set to *NOT* be using UniVesa. This option being enabled will not allow the game to run on modern systems. Maxing out the other options (like screen resolution and bit depth/color count) is fine.

Running With DOSBox:
Make sure you have D-Fend or a similiar front-end before proceeding. Some of these options get tricky to set up (I've tried using both the 'D-Fend' and the Java-based 'DOSBox Game Launcher' front-ends successfully).
1) Set up a profile out of D-Fend, or whatever your front-end may be, to run STTNG.EXE. In D-Fend, you can use the wizard to make a profile (recommended).
2) For general settings, I use 15,000 cycles, vga card, overlay render method, and no scaling.
3) Make sure you are mounting the correct directory as your C drive as was with installation. Also make sure you are mounting the correct directory as your CD-ROM drive as was with the installation. If different, you will have to manually edit STTNG.INI to point to the correct location for the CD-ROM drive where STTNG.ZIP exists at.
3) Default sound settings are fine. On some systems, changing the sound sampling rate to operate at 11025hz instead of 22050hz may improve performance at cost of crappier sounding sounds. With STAFU, it depends on how fast a system you have.
4) For memory settings, I use 63 MB of memory, enable XMS, EMS, and UMB. Sometimes disabling EMS can help (tweakable value).
5) For more advanced settings, you can edit the profile, and change things such as mouse sensitivity (which should be at about 400 unless you want a slow mouse cursor, of which people here have complaigned about - because it is set to 100 as default which is far too slow for STAFU), you can also disable scan codes (which isn't needed), but the most important aspect of this will be under the Environment tab with the CPU Core option. If set to "dynamic", the game will usually run really nice and fast, but the tactical screen will be completely broken and will always crash. If this option is set to "full", the tactical screen will work, but the game will suffer horrible lag. I'm still tweaking my settings, and changing rendering methods and other settings help and hinder at the same time. Hopefully the next release of DOSBox addresses some of these issues.
6) For sound settings under SETUP.EXE, use Gravis Ultra-Sound, as it seems to be the most compatible with STAFU under DOSBox emulation mode. Make sure the port, IRQ, and DMA settings are correctly corresponding to what DOSBox is using as well.
7) Have fun.

Running As Stand Alone:
In order to run as stand alone, you will need to have a way to emulate the sound system running on modern computers. With some older SB16 cards, the Ensoniq drivers included have older DOS Legacy drivers that will help immensely, but most sound devices now-a-days don't have this luxury. In that regard, there are programs available to emulate this, and one such program is VMDSound. (Note that if you have these legacy drivers installed and working you might won't need VMDSound.)
1) Download VMDSound from here, http://www.emulator-empire.com/finalunity.htm, and install.
2) You will have to manually edit your STTNG.INI to point to the correct CD-ROM drive directory where your STAFU CD-ROM is located at (you can simply use Notepad to edit this file). Set the value "CD=D:\" in STTNG.INI to the correct drive as your CD-ROM (replacing 'D:\' with whatever drive letter you're using) - this may also be to a directory where you copy'ed the entire CD over to.
If you manually installed STAFU, you will also have to set the value "Path=C:\GAMES\STTNG" to the correct path to your installation folder (replacing 'C:\GAMES\STTNG' with wherever you installed at).
3) To run the game, right click on the 'STTNG.EXE' executable from windows explorer, and select the "Run with VMDS" option. This will run the game using the VMDSound emulator which will emulate a SB system.
4) You will have to create a VMDSound profile, make sure to enable "Enable low-level CD-ROM support (MSCDEX)", may also need to enable "Enable basic VESA support" (I have to on my machine). Importantly, you will need to set the 'DSP ver' option under the 'SoundBlaster' tab to '3.00 (Sound Blaster Pro)' or less (Sound Blaster 16 will not work!), making sure the EXACT same settings are listed in STTNG.INI (with "Audio=SBPRO", "Port=0x220", "IRQ=0x7", and "DMA=0x1" to this or your specific port, IRQ, and DMA settings that you choose).

Notes:
1) Editing the STTNG.INI file manually sure can be painful, but the SETUP.EXE program likes to be bitchy under regular operation (you may have to use DOSBox to run SETUP.EXE).

FINAL COMMENTS:
The big thing with these older games is simply tweak, tweak, tweak, and tweak some more. There are 50 different ways to run the same program, and I know I haven't done them all. I've listed a few approaches and hopefully one of them works for you.

If you want to also try your luck at replacing the protected mode memory extender (i.e. DOS/4GW) with a much better one, you can look here for DOS/32A: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=6260 (although my personal trials with DOS/32A with STAFU have no produces any decent results, this may not be true for your system however).

Another speed-up, if using DOSBox windowed mode, is to set your display bit depth to 16-bit (since STAFU doesn't support 24 or 32 bit display depths).

There is also a nice little article describing some more of DOSBox's options when dealing with resource demanding games (such as STAFU) which you can find here: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?page=RunningResourceDemandingGames

The DOSBox game index page which lists STAFU (and has a few good posts) can be found here: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/comp_list.php?showID=1182&letter=S - I recommend visiting this if you are playing STAFU in DOSBox.

Another approach is to use VirtualPC and install FreeDOS onto it. That is a whole other ballgame entirely, and I haven't tried that route just yet.

Questions/Comments Welcome.

JB

[Larry Laffer]

*drops jaw* you wrote all that? Or did you just copy-paste it?

[Mr. Worm]

I really want to play this game now.

[JB247]

Oh, I wrote the whole thing - gave me something to do for an entire Saturday/Sunday :p.

Actually, I have found a few extra things noteworthy...

First off, if playing the game under DOSBox using 'full' core mode (for tactical screen to work correctly), setting your cycle count to about 4,500 - 5,000 seems to produce better results than 15,000.

Also, I've also gotten this game to work under DOSBox using the SB sound system as well - have to set it to SB Pro or lower (and not SB 16). Again make sure your port, IRQ, and DMA match.

As for installing the game by extracting STTNGINS.ZIP, turns out what is going on with a few files being extracted from the large STTNG.ZIP is simply the difference in install levels - meaning that optimal install takes a few extra files out of STTNG.ZIP whereas the smaller install options do not extract as many files from STTNG.ZIP. I'm not sure if the minimal install option does not extract anything from STTNG.ZIP, but judging that people are having success doing it this way, we're probably safe to assume such.

Using DOS/32A, in case somebody is wondering, with STAFU - what happens on my particular system is that the screen after the opening cut scenes, the screen where its of the bridge and the save game dialog opens up (if you have a save game), yeah, that screen is completely dead black, although you can hear the sound playing in the background.

If you guys are wondering what DOS/32A and DOS/4GW are really referring to, you have to know a bit about basic 32-bit protected mode addressing scheme - to put it basically, DOS/4GW extends the amount of available heap memory so that games can dynamically allocate much larger sections of system RAM (now, I KNOW I really over-simplify this, so if I offend some experts out there, boo hoo - saying this in this way was not meant for you anyways). Back in these days, memory was always an important issue to worry about. Now-a-days, with modern paging systems, we don't have to worry about this (as much - just install more RAM). DOS/4GW was sorta like a launcher executable that would set up the extra memory and then run the game, and it usually was embedded in with the game's executable. DOS/4GW was actually kinda of a shitty program, and so DOS/32A now exists which is a direct drop-in replacement for DOS/4GW which improves the basic idea by leaps and bounds (you can even extract the DOS/4GW partition out of a game's executable and drop-in DOS/32A as a direct replacement). If you go to the above mentioned website in my previous post, you can read basically everything I just wrote, plus you can visit the main DOS/32A website here http://dos32a.narechk.net/ (in case you missed that link).

Otherwise, STAFU is a really great game - it sets up a large portion of the history of the Star Trek universe that you simply cannot find anywhere else unless you play the game. Plus, because one of the show's writers wrote the actual plot line and sub-plots, it ties in beautifully with the actual show, especially with the voice-acting. I remember watching programs on TV where they were talking about this game and were showing footage of the cast in a sound-room talking the lines that would be using in the game. You simply don't see as much dedication to the small details in video games anymore. Not only that, but with the tactical screen using a small 3D engine (of which, on the systems of the time just sucked major ass - but still, was pretty damn cool for its day and age) it was really worth having the 8087 extra math co-processor so the floating-point calculations that brought that segment to life could be realized.

I'm curious to see if anybody has gotten this game to work on VirtualPC and if it works any better (or not). I'm playing it just fine on DOSBox, so... And in case anybody is wondering why the long posts - getting my gf into Star Trek so of course I *have* to have her play this game. :p

JB

[Larry Laffer]

I for one am all up for long posts... great job...

[kstein14]

LOL! I can't believe these posts-- incredible! I just read them all and now my eyes are dry and hurting. Somebody mentioned a problem similar to my problem, but no one responded.
The game is installed and the sound is excellent, thank you VDMS, but the graphics are scrambled and I can't seem to fix them. Unplayable. Not choppy or slow, but shunken and stretched and flipped and dippes and clipped. Cannot tell what the freak is going on on the screen. This happens a lot for me with dos-based games on my computer. IS there a way to combat this? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[JB247]

Probably has something to do with your video settings from STAFU (did you turn off univesa?) and possibly something to do with the VPMS options (did you enable the basic vesa emulation support?). You may also want to try using DosBOX if all else fails...