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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Apocalypse Upon Apocalypse


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Okay, so for the last 3 weeks I have been reading these forums trying to figure out how to get Apocalypse running correctly. I have DosBox 7.2, I have Daemon Tools Lite 4.12, I have 2 different downloads of the game and 1 ISO. I have tried mounting the game in D-Tools...that worked and seemed to install fine. I can't seem to mount drives in DosBox (I've never used any of these things before trying to play this game, so yes... I'm new.) other than the virtual cdrom drive.

 

I have read this as a step on the forums:

 

-Mount the directory where you wish to install the game

* mount c c:\<whatever directory you want here> -freesize 512

(the freesize will tell the dos shell that you have 512Mb on this drive, it does not matter how much you really have as you need at least 200MB for the complete install)

 

But can't seem to do it when it states "whatever directory you want here". I must be confused on this part. I put the directory that my x-com files are located in. Regardless of what I type here it tells me the directory doesn't exist or can't be found or something.

 

I need some serious kindergarten level help here.

 

Thanks,

 

 

KJ

 

P.S. - Just don't tell me to give up or to not bother cause that wont work.

Edited by Kaellen Jace
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OK, first of all, where did you install the game? I need and exact path. What most likely happened was that you used a name that either exceeds 8 characters or has spaces inside.

 

I'll try and give you a step by step guide of what you need to do, as I recall it. I'll also assume you don't know anything, it's easier to stomp out potential problems like that.

 

Once you're in dosbox, the syntax for mounting a hardrive is this:

 

mount <name> <path>

 

I am pretty sure you don't need the "-freesize 512", but I wouldn't put my hand into flames for that. :P Do as you wish.

Now to explain what each in the above line means:

 

<name> - this is the letter you are giving to your mounted drive, it can be any English letter. It does not need to correspond to the letter of the actual drive your game/program is on, and in fact, unless I'm mistaken that wouldn't even work on Linux since it uses a different system.

<path> this is the path to the game on your real hard drive. Now, DOS didn't have some fancy naming abilities, so it could only store names that were up to 8 characters, and I'm pretty sure it didn't allow spaces either. Luckily, there is a workaround. What Dosbox will do is to take the first 6 characters of the actual folder name and add ~ and a number to the end (useful if the first 6 letters in two names match).

 

Let's clear this up with an example:

Say that your game is located in D:\Program Files\Apocalypse

 

then the mount can look something like this:

 

mount c d:\progra~1\apocal~1

 

Now you have mounted your drive into the "program files\Apocalypse" folder. The next step is to go to your new drive. Simply type:

 

c:

 

You will note that the command line will say that you're in the root of drive c: (C:\>), but you're actually in the "D:\Program Files\Apocalypse" folder. If it's a bit confusing, you can always use the name of your real drive name for the new drive. (in the above case: mount d d:\progra~1\apocal~1)

 

That leaves you with sound and music setup. I have no idea what file it was anymore, I assume it's setup.exe. So continuing where we left off, just type "setup" and it should go to the setup screen. I recommend that for testing purposes you go with no sound and no music, once you tested that the game works fine, you can play with these some more.

 

Now all you need to do to run the game is to type apoc and you're ready to play.

 

Sound and music:

Apocalypse has an auto detect feature which usually works fine. You can try a sound test but if you can't hear the sound, it doesn't mean that there will be none in the game. Your best test is to actually run the game and see if you get sound in the intro. If I'm not mistaken, you either won't get any sound or the intro won't play at all.

Should it fail to play sound then you can try setting it manually. You can choose between Soundblaster and Gravis Ultrasound. It doesn't have anything to do with your real sound card, Dosbox takes care of transferring everything to it correctly. You'll notice for Soundblaster a few different types: normal, 16 and pro. To be honest, I don't remember which one you have to choose, you'll have to try them one at a time, I recommend starting from Pro. The game will prompt you for settings, which are actually written down when you start Dosbox:

 

SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 T6

 

SET ULTRASND=240,3,3,5,5

 

The first number is the Base port. For Blaster it's 220, for Gravis 240. The second is the IRQ number, for the blaster it's 7 for the Gravis 3. The third is the DMA and it's 1 and 3 respectively. The rest you can safely ignore, I think they don't really matter. You may be prompted for Channels. It determines the number of sounds that can be played at the same time. For example, if you have a minigun firing and an alien screaming at the same time, but your channels is set to 1, you'll only hear one of them. So, you'll want to set it as high as possible.

 

A few useful tips:

 

Typing help will give you a list of the most common commands. Typing "help /all" will give you all the commands.

You do not need to type the full name always. It's enough to type the first letter or two and press tab to switch you through all the names starting with those letters. Sort of like AutoComplete.

dir/p will list the contents of a folder in a page by page manner, which is extremely handy when the folder has lots of files/subfolders.

dir *.<extension>[/p] will list all files that have the specified extension. Useful when you want to see what are all the .exe or .txt files. The /p is optional.

type <file_names>.<extension> will print out the contents of a file in ASCII, but it's only really useful for .txt and similar text files, it's useless for .exe and such.

Also, if you're not aware yet, as of Dosbox version 0.70 you don't need to set the speed, it will set itself to the optimal automatically. :)

 

That's it I think.

Edited by Gimli
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