Whatever happened to Dark Ages?

An older game that offends my co-processer!

Dark ages is a side scroller that I found on a CD of old appogee games, with oters, like Kroz, Wolf3d and Crystal Caves, Mars, Arctic, and most of them don't work, due to a bug. the games make an illegal call to the co-processer, resulting in a "Divide Error" screen.

[MrEricSir]

Dark Ages was cool, but it really won't run without MoSlo on today's machines.

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Big Brother is watching. Dress accordingly.

[Joe Siegler]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>the games make an illegal call to the co-processer, resulting in a "Divide Error" screen. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Please be more specific - are you talking about the game, or the installation program? It makes a difference.

Anyway, Dark Ages was one of the first games deleted from the product line due to it's lack of speed adapaptiveness (sp?). That's the reason a lot of old games just run way too fast to be playable.

The way we look at it is this.. If the game doesn't work "out of the box" for a customer, and they have to use something like MoSlo to get it running, we will delete it. The reason is that we can't distribute MoSlo legally (we asked, the guy wanted WAY too much money to let us do it), and it's not worth our time to have one of our guys waste their time to create such a program that we could distribute.

Someday we'll do something with these games again, but not any time soon.

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Joe Siegler - Webmaster, 3D Realms
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[moron]

I think he is refering to in game for me I can get to the main menu then I try to start a game then the eror I have a K6 3 BUt I dont think it makes any difrinse

Never heard of the game util now.

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Gamedude
Can't keep me away from GAMES!

[X-human]

That'd be cool if Apogee made their own MoSo.

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X-human.net, GZNews, EdgeGaming.com, 3D Realms Bulletin Board Fan Site Chick of the Week (Mariah Carey), Dopefish Cult, BJ's Hideout and Black Death

"Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not withall those flies and death and stuff." - Mariah Carey

[Admiral_Bob]

I was actually attempting to write my own slowdown program a few months ago using Borland Pascal 7 for DOS, however I've got tons of bugs in it, and I think I've now mangled it (has a lot of uncommented assembler, will take quite some time to get it up to scratch). If I had completed it I was contemplating just making it freeware for everyone.

The slowdown program was meant to accurately slow down your system to an exact speed (ie. menu select a processor speed to emulate such as a 16MHz 386). I'm also missing *accurate* technical documentation on how to directly program some of the hardware in the IBM PC & compatibles - what I have doesn't make it clear enough. For instance, in order to slow the processor down in a more smoother way compared to MoSlo, I need to be able to use CPU trap interrupts and the hardware timer, and I'm running into unexplanable bugs/crashes trying to implement that the exact way the documentation states.

What I'm asking is if any of you hardcore programming guys out there have any better technical spec guides for programming IBM PC's right down to the bare metal (ie. stuff mentioned above), just e-mail me - thanks

[This message has been edited by Admiral_Bob (edited 07-25-2000).]

[MrEricSir]

I assume you're writting a TSR, Bob. It's been years since I wrote one, but I want to remind you to make sure there's a way to unload the thing from your system once it's installed.

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Big Brother is watching. Dress accordingly.

[moron]

what about the aproch of a emulator rather then a TRS ? I duno

[Admiral_Bob]

No, it actually wasn't going to be a TSR (unlike MoSlo or Waste). It was going to be a shell-like program, you run it at the command line, and type your desired program name after it. You also specify your desired speed on the command line (and that speed will be the same on everyone's computer, unlike MoSlo/Waste where you had to select a percentage). It will then invoke the game and use the slowdown technique. When the game ends, it automatically unloads itself and restores your system to its normal speed.

Emulation would make it more complicated because I have to be able to interpret every single instruction that is executed, there are a lot of opcodes even for the 8086/88, and that will slow it down by a considerably large factor that you would need a higher-end machine (like a PII) just to run it normally, plus it would bloat the program so it would take up quite a lot of conventional memory. I was targeting this program to run on at the least a higher-end 486 (DX2/66) or a Pentium Classic, because these are the machines where the games start becoming too fast to be playable. That's where using the trap interrupt/system timer becomes useful.

Besides, these games run under DOS, so I would rather write it as a DOS utility.

To be more specific to any DOS programmers out there, does anyone know how to work the second timer (IRQ 8) properly? A lot of the technical documentation I have here is either incorrect or not clear, and it's resulting in some programs either escaping the slowdown mechanism or locking up the system.

Should I place this question in the software forum instead?

[This message has been edited by Admiral_Bob (edited 07-26-2000).]

[Admiral_Bob]

Oh, and Joe, assuming I get this program working properly, I'd be quite happy to let you guys at 3DR distribute it free of charge.

[Admiral_Bob]

Don't worry guys, I think I managed to find the tech info I needed, it was in a remote corner of the FTP SimtelNet archives after searching all night. I'll soon get to work on resurrecting it, and I'll create another thread when I'm ready to announce it...

That game had the best music.

[Cho'gall]

I have found out that the only way to play old games is to have an old computer for them. I use a 486SX-25 for old games. It usually works fine, but Dark Ages is still a tad fast on that machine.

[Joe Siegler]

As I recall, Keith Schuler (Paganiztu & Realms of Chaos programmer as well as Shadow Warrior and DNF mapper) did the music for this.

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Joe Siegler - Webmaster, 3D Realms
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[Lengis]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Gamedude:
Never heard of the game util now.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
You're not missing much, the game was bad, and the main character wore a speedo!

Is moslo available for download? I'm gonna check at cnet, but if u guys know of any other places, please let me know!

[Joe Siegler]

<sniff>Doesn't anyone visit the downloads page on our web site and read it? MoSlo is there</sniff>

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Joe Siegler - Webmaster, 3D Realms
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I tried Moslo, but now it says
'cannot open file17.da1'
or something in that line. Moslo wasn't on cnet, but i found the page, 'Dr.Dave's extra crispy software' (or something funny) and downloaded the trial version.

I didn't expect to get so many replies so soon!

p.s wouldn't it be easier if you guys at appogee just emailed me dark ages? I think my version is corrupted, and it is shareware
(your call)

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"I wrote a song about dental floss, but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?"
-Frank Zappa
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Although I know only a little about programming (visit my software page at
pegasussoft.web.com) is it possible to write a program that gets a pc's chipset,cpu clock, ect from the BIOS or CMOS settings? It could then slow the computer down in a much more "sophisticated" way. You could make the program in Visual C++, as a dialouge box, with a place where you could enter the command line of the desired program, and a box where you set the slow-down speed. again, I don't know much about programming, so I hope I didn't insult anyones intelligence, or mine, for that matter.

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"I went into the business for the money and the art was born."
-Charlie Chaplin

Ok, I admit- I majorly dissed on every programmers inlelligence- my dad, who programs software for printers, told me that moslo doesn't actually slow down the computer, its just a simulator that pretends to be a cpu. :confused it makes sense, but my idea didn't (just like my idea to use exponencial decay to compress files) what the...

[Admiral_Bob]

That's ok, no offence taken. Just that accessing chipsets is very complicated, because there are so many different brands/types and they all have different ways of accessing settings. Plus, mucking around with the chipset/BIOS under a multitasking [multicrashing] OS such as Windoze is rather dangerous anyway, as it can render the system unstable and cause lockups on many machines afterwards...

I actually used a debugger to dissasemble MoSlo, and it uses the exact same technique as some other slowdown programs, including Waste. All they do is execute a wasteful loop for a certain amount of time every 1/18.2 seconds. This may work on some games, but for others it messes up the sounds and does not produce a consistent slowdown( eg. jerky motion).

Here's one suggestion if MoSlo is not for you. Just disable your L1 and L2 cache in the BIOS setup, and it will pretty much slow your system down to that of a 386 (depends on how good your RAM is, this is also a very interesting way to benchmark RAM).

THe thing is, I have a 90 mhz isa/pci 1993 AMIBIOS computer, with a BIOS that old, I could seriously screw up my computer(it's kinda cool, cause the bios uses windows-ish things, and your mouse. snazzy!) the options like memory refresh (or something) could really mess my computer. My BIOS is SOOOO old, im surprised windows runs. It's an Awesome computer though, an old junker from my dad's workplace
that we managed to save. The computer was meant to be a server, with a million cords on the power supply, and room for five hard drives. It's a mammoth beast.

I remember,when the famly computer was a 486, my sister and I obsessed over that game.

I just found this game on one of my old shareware CDs. I get the "Divide error" on the screen when I go to run the game. I will see if there is anything I can do about it.

(I am using a P133 without MMX)

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Word, to your mother!

-Vanilla Ice

I got it to work! I never played it right away, but I did get it to the title screen. I was just happy to get it that far that I just had to tell you how I did it.

I disabled the internal and external cache (which I assume is L1 and L2.) I saved it and restarted the computer.

I then pushed F8 during the boot-up to bring up that menu that gives you the Windows 95/98 options.

I chose to run under my previous version of MS-Dos (whatever that last option was.) I installed MS-DOS 6.22 before installing Windows 98, so I have the benefit of a fully-loaded DOS, none of that bare-bones 7.0 crap.

If I were you, I wouldn't worry about how old your BIOS setup is. I used to fool around with it all the time on my old 386 when the turbo would disappear. Of course, do so at your own risk. Just remember everything you change so that you can change it back. In this case, disabling the cache should be all you have to do in the BIOS setup.

I wouldn't dare run Windows without the cache ram enabled; it took about 30 seconds to test my 32 MB of upper memory. Imagine how long it would have taken on a 386!

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Word, to your mother!

-Vanilla Ice

I just played the game. I wonder where Epic got the idea for Jill of the Jungle? It just reminded me so much about that game, except with a guy instead a girl. And a wave weapon (was that a boomerang) instead of a knife. And a few other things, but it still reminded me of Jill.

Anyways, the game played well on my computer. I died almost right away, because I fell in the water, and I couldn't get up! . The text that popped up when I died was all screwed up. The next screen with the high scores was all screwed up as well.

It then returned to the menu, and the text was back to normal.

I played another game and got a bit farther (in to the first cave.) When I died in there because my character didn't like being ran over by boulders, that screwed up message popped up. This time either A) My computer froze; or B It was asking for my name for a high score, and I tried pushing every button but ENTER to enter my high score. I'll bet on A. I'm sure I hit ENTER in my fury of keyboard smacking.

I will work on trying to get it to work some more if someone else want's me to, and I will tell you of any advancements that I make.

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Word, to your mother!

-Vanilla Ice

Ok, I figured out how to continue in this game.

When the first screwed-up message pops-up, press ESCAPE. A black screen with screwed-up writing should appear.

Type Y or N. I have no idea what this screen is for, but another screwed-up message pops-up.

Type Y to continue your game, or N to quit. You might have a high score if you quit.

Type something in, and press ENTER.

Press ENTER (or ESCAPE) to get to the main menu (which you can read.)

This, along with one of my past messages is all you should need to play the game.

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"I've fallen, and I can't get up!"

-that funny old lady from that Dick Clark commercial.