DOS Games Discussion

[mtbowman]

Hi All:
If anybody has an idea on what I am doing wrong, I would love to hear from them. I have gotten the floppy disk version of Strike Commander. I use DosBox to run the installation program and all goes well until the last disk, where it hangs up never creates the program "sc.exe"
I have tried every way I can think of and it always hangs up at the same spot; right after unpacking "strike.exe"
Thanks for any help!
Marv

[mtbowman]

PS to above:
Forgot to mention that I have an XP machine (SP2), Athlon +1800 with 256megs of RAM. DosBox is 0.63

[dosraider]

There are several possibility's that can cause the hang of the setup .
The first , but not likely , is that you mount the a drive in dosbox but not the HD drive where you want to install, when the setup want's to write to the hd it can hang, but it gives usualy a error , so i suppose you have mounted correctly your HD to.

A second is a corrupt archive, or a defective flop , run windows scandisk on it with a surface check , should give you a idea if the flop is still ok. But it will not give any info on the archive's CRC.
If the surface check is ok try to unrar or unzip the archive with winzip or winrar, they both can handle a wide range of the older dos compressors.

A possibility to try avoiding the hanging is copy the whole flop's to a folder on your hd , don't bother if you have to overwrite the " file_id.diz" or something like it when you copy your flop's to it, they're usualy unimportant , and mount that folder as your a:drive , that's works like this:

mount a x:/whatever<enter>,
the setup prog will regard your whatever folder as a:drive

If your archives are really corupted :*bump*, game over.
Winzip hase a 'repair' tab , but i never have succeed to repair a corrupt archive with that thing.

[mtbowman]

Thanks.
I mounted a drive C and a drive A (the game requires a floppy as source)and then put all the floppy files into "drive A" and ran the install program.
The install goes well, thinking it has 8 different floppies to install from.
But right after unpacking the file "strike.exe" the screen goes blank and unresponsive. I have to close that DosBox window manually. Then when I start a new DosBox and run "strike" that program immediately exits telling me to run "sc" instead. The problem is, there is no program called "sc"
Regarding a corrupt source file, I have gotten the source from two different places and had the same results each time.
It may be that service pack 2 is causing the problem. Or there is something else I am doing wrong.

[dosraider]

"It may be that service pack 2 is causing the problem", nope.
It's uses the same system as falcon, a 'chopped' archive , cutted in parts to fit on the flops.Before install they have to restore the original archive files. SP2 don't give trubbles for those.
Do you have EMS=TRUE set in the dosbox.conf ? Strike C needs ems allocated , i don't know if the install needs it , but it's a posibility.

I'm out of sugestions, if nobody else hase any reply to give you will be on your own.
If i remember ok there should be a CD version of strike commander,try to find (borrow ) one .
Good luck.

EDIT:have stumbled on this:
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/comp_list.php?showID=548&am

You ain't the first one with that specific prob , scroll down to the last entry's, if you have a Packard Bell there is a solution there.

[mtbowman]

Thanks again.
Yes, the install disk needs ems=false before it will work. I have made that change, and I have tried DosBox version 0.62 and 0.63 with the exact same results.
I agree that sp2 being the problem is a real stretch. Also, I have read the thread you reference and noticed that others are having the same problem that I am. I have not tried the "fix" mentioned in the last entry, as my machine is a newer one, not one of those mentioned.
I was hoping that having this thread would double my chances that somebody who has had this problem with strike commander would give me a solution. It certainly seems to be SC specific.

[dosraider]

The only thing i can advise you is to jump on the forum once in a while, lot's of people reads the topics, you never know one hase a solution..

[Guest]

i've had the same problem and luckly i figured out what was causing it, but i was never able to work out how to fix it.

where the installation freezes is when the program goes into the map creation stage, and DOSBOX wasnt able to give the installation the required memory it needed, something to do with the EMS XMS emulation.

i'm currently trying to get it to work cause im bored and want to play the good old strike commander, i will post my results after i get it to work

[shadowrg]

ok i got the installation to work....

and it was so simple

get rid of your current dosbox and install the 0.65 version. DONT MESS WITH THE CONFIG FILE

have one folder on you normal c:\ call it c:\strike
then have a seperate folder with the disks in it. c:\disks
then mount both in dosbox
mount c c:\strike
mount a c:\disks

the a:\install and dont mind the warning just continue on with the install
dont select the sound card or mod-for soundcard, and continue
and you should get past the freezing, lol only took me a few seconds....

*side note* i tried that with 0.63 and it wouldnt work. and i know the hassle people including myself go through...

[Guest]

I had this game when I was 16 and it died when the house burnt in 95. I can't believe I can still play it Thanks to this post!!!!!!