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-   -   Daggerfall in Dosbox (http://www.ironworksforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=64312)

Lucern 05-29-2007 05:59 PM

Hey all,

I thought I'd get back into Oblivion lately, but instead I started thinking about Daggerfall. I just wanted to let everyone know that it's a legitimate option to play the game on a modern machine, and it runs MUCH better than using the 'daggerfall in windows' approach. If you do that, btw, I noticed the following flaws:

1) Monsters in dungeons cannot move - they twitch in place, and can hurt you, but they do not run after you like in the original
2) Character cannot swim - you just bob there.
3) Climbing is not reliable
4) Quest character/monsters are always invisible!
5) You have severe trouble walking backwards
6) Jumping doesn't really work
7) The speed is way too fast
8) Projectile casting will sometimes prevent you from pulling your weapon back out. If you have no save, good luck to you.

Running it in DosBox is exactly as I remembered, without any of the above flaws (of course, with a few original flaws).

So if anyone is interested, I can try to get them up and running the most feature-heavy Elder Scrolls game to date (by far lol). See Orsinium! Climb a wall! Join the naked temple of Dibella and summon Daedra with witches! I got it running it without typing a single key in a DOS prompt.

Btw, there are many guides online. None of those got me working.

Sever 05-29-2007 06:47 PM

Had big plans about running Arena through DosBox and Hexen too. Never did get Arena to work, but Hexen was a huge disappointment through DosBox. When the readme said "the older the game, the better the performance through DosBox", i kinda gave up.

Edit: Just saw your offer. I have both Daggerfall (which i haven't played for a LONG time) and Arena (which i've never played). What do i do?

[ 05-29-2007, 06:51 PM: Message edited by: Sever ]

Lucern 05-29-2007 09:30 PM

Just needed to see one person who cared lol :D . Let's start with Daggerfall. I had Arena working a few months ago, but I need to double check to offer anything worthwhile. There's a lot here, Add with Wizard Open up this page, which got me 90but it doesn't take all of that long. If you're running a 64 bit OS...there will be hiccups, apparently. Some of this may be redundant, but you know what they say about 'if it ain't broke..." [img]smile.gif[/img]

I'm running, fyi, a Windows XP SP2 on a Pentium D 2.6 ghz dual core, a P5WDG2-WS motherboard, with a Delta 44 M-Audio sound card, 2 gigs of DDR2 800 RAM, and a Radeon X1800 GTO graphics card.

Alright, here's what I did, twice.

1) Get Dosbox .70, and install it. Every version is a bit different, and this is the newest one.
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

2) Get DFend - a Dosbox Front END (There are others, ones who have updated to .70, but what I've got works). This makes DosBox easier to cope with, and it has the added bonus of allowing us to create a unique Daggerfall configuration that coexists with others. The alternative is having a daggerfall-only installation of DosBox, which is less desirable to me.
http://members.home.nl/mabus/dfend.htm (I'm using the 2nd from the top, V2). Start it up, tell it where DosBox is.

3)Get Ykhwong's DosBox CVS linked here. This jumpstarts the speed of the game using features that aren't in the normal dosbox.
http://ykhwong.x-y.net/cvs/frame.html

Install it using the page below as a guideline if there's no read.me. If you can launch DosBox and see windows you haven't seen before, it's probably working.
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=9306=

4) Alright, you need just a few more things before you can begin to put it all together. There's a program you can use to install Daggerfall properly, released by Bethesda, carried only by Fileplanet. Get the Daggerfall XP Installer, here:
http://www.fileplanet.com/114400/110...erfall-Install
If you're like me, prepare to wait [img]tongue.gif[/img] . Run that, and it'll unpack a full daggerfall installation onto C:\Dagger. I believe this would be enough to run Daggerfall were you to double click the dagger.exe, but we're going for gold here.

5) Now we're going to do away with the need for the CD - DosBox has problems with it. Pop in the Daggerfall CD and go into the Arena 2 folder. Copy all of those files into the Arena 2 folder in C:/Dagger. This will move all of the movie files and sky files so that the program doesn't go looking for them. As an extra step, I downloaded a daggerfall no-cd patch. The file is called ME_DAGRF, and it came from here I believe: http://www.megagames.com/cracks/html/c30865_0.htm I haven't figured out whether the nocd is necessary. Copy it over anyway.


6) Let's make a special executable file for it. Click Start->Run->notepad, and paste this:

@echo off
set dos4gvm=@dagger.vmc
fall.exe z.cfg

Save it as Dag.bat

Okay, it's not an .exe, but it works like one. You've just made a batch file, which you can move over to the C:\Dagger folder.

7) Let's set up your DFend Daggerfall Profile. Open up DFEND. Click Profile->Add with Wizard. Name it Daggerfall. Select dag.bat as the 'Game EXE'. Ignore setup for now, and click right through the next page. We'll correct all of this with relative ease in a minute. On the next page hit 'auto-create' and forward, and click your way through to the end, using all defaults. This gave us a Daggerfall-only .conf file.

8) This page got me 90% of the way there: http://www.oblivionsource.com/?page=...&op=view&id=34

Open up the above page and you'll find 2 things that we need to copy into 2 separate files. Let's start with the daggerfall.conf which we just made - it should be in your DosBox .70 folder. Edit that - open it as a notepad, and from the page above, copy the big long set of instructions after the word COPY (the second word COPY, in fact). Make sure you don't end up with the smaller instruction set in there (after the first COPY). Save it.

Now let's use the other one. Open C:\Dagger, and edit the Z.CFG file, just as the website says. Copy the identical words over, just in case it's much different (This is more of a double-check). We need to change the 'pathcd' to say c:\Dagger\Arena 2, identical, in fact, to the path. Save that, too.

9) Alright, unless I forgot something, I believe we're almost there. Let's get sound. Go into C:/Dagger, and double click on 'setup'. Choose the soundblaster Pro for both "select digital" and "Select MIDI". It doesn't matter what it sounds like, this is more to give DosBox help in emulating it. Mine actally isn't quite there on movie clips, but I've learned to deal, because I have a fancy/shmancy recording audio card that I'm amazed even runs games [img]smile.gif[/img]

10) Back to DFEND - Edit the Daggerfall profile to check a few things. Go to Mounting, click the C:\ from the list and Edit. Select the mount type to "Drive", the drive to C:\, disable the input/output control, and use C as the mounted drive letter.
Under General, I wouldn't start fullscreen, but use Aspect Correction, lock the mouse, and use scan codes.
In Environment, make sure it's getting 16 mb of Dos memory, EMS, and XMS. Make sure the CPU is 'normal', and the CPU cycles are like 20,000.

11) So close! I hope anyway. At last, double click the daggerfall profile in DFEND, and you should get a long list of Dos commands, and the game should start very slowly. Under the GUI, click CPU, and go to Max cycles. If it worked, enjoy! If it didn't, we'll regroup and try again.

Push Alt-Enter to bring it to full screen.

You might try Hexen again with this new build (and a new profile in DFend, of course. Blast the Cycles up to 20,000 and, if it's slow, max the CPU cycles with that too.

Sever 05-29-2007 09:51 PM

I'm getting nightmarish flashbacks already, but that's okay. At least i KNOW this can work. Last time i was stumbling around in the dark.

I let you know how it goes. In the mean time, have a well deserved pat on back for your accomplishment. No simple task. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Sever 05-29-2007 10:15 PM

Can't seem to download nocd patch from the link in step 5. Download link redirects itself to its own download page. [img]graemlins/saywhat.gif[/img] Save target as saves an html file.

Lucern 05-29-2007 10:38 PM

Thanks Sever.

Trying to find it, but I found something else that said that if you do #6 you won't need it. I can send it to you, alternately.

Sever 05-29-2007 11:21 PM

That'd be great. sever101@bigpond.com.au

Sever 06-01-2007 07:47 AM

Thanks Lucern. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Am currently having all sorts of problems with Shivering Isles and my preferred mods. Once i've got Oblivion running the way it was (the way it should be) i'll give this a go.

Out of interest, how does my rig compare to yours: Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (dual core), 512MB GeForce 7800 GT, 2GB RAM, Sound Blaster Audigy. Acceptable DOSBox performance of later DOS games (~'94-'96) hinges greatly on Beafy CPU power. How exactly does Daggerfall perform under DOSBox on your setup? Can i expect the same?

Lucern 06-01-2007 02:35 PM

Oh oh, priorities of course [img]smile.gif[/img] I'll check back for when you do begin again and try to help if you hit a snag. In the meanwhile I made a character with only language skills as primary. He's so doomed haha.

Well, my chip clocks at 2.6 ghz. Yours apparently clocks at 2.0 ghz. It may be a little slower than my operation, but I read several people online enjoying it with AMD Athlon 3000's, but they wouldn't recommend any slower. You'll probably be fine here, particularly with Ykhwong's CVS. With an actual soundblaster, yours might even have good movie sound. My rig does slow down a bit in very complicated structures (not dungeons fortunately, even monstrously huge ones), like some kinds of very vertical Mages guilds, but it's not a big deal. It runs pretty much how I remember it.

InjaYew 06-14-2007 07:37 PM

I never got to finish Daggerfall because of all the crashing, and gods know I tried so hard...

I would love to play Daggerfall all the way through somtime. I haven't played Shivering Isles yet, so I think I'll do that first. I'm bookmarking this page though. Thanks for all the information on How To.
[img]smile.gif[/img]


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