Running Master of Magic in emulator mode

from Stardock Forums
There's been a lot of random discusion about playing Master of Magic on current machines, and i've picked up a couple tips from those, but i'm still having problems.

Most people seem to agree that DosBox or VDMSound is the way to go. DosBox is working for me, but it is painfully slow, even after boosting the CPU cycles to 13000 or so, and there's also no sound.

Not only is VDMSound supposed to fix the sound issue, a lot of people have said that games run a lot faster under it than DosBox, so i'd like to know how to run MoM with VDMSound if possible. I've tried the right-click and run with VDMS thing, but it still results in "You must have at least 2700k of expanded memory." Checking the Advanced Properties of the VDMS shortcut shows it has expanded memory enabled, with 4096k allocated.

Failing that, it would be nice to know how to get at least the sound enabled in DosBox. However running DosDrv in the VDMSound folder before i start DosBox seems to do nothing, and trying to run DosDrv from within DosBox just seems to cause DosBox to crash.

Oh, and i'm running Windows XP on a Sony Vaio laptop with a 1.2 GHz AMD Athlon processor with 512 MB of RAM, if any of that matters.

Does anyone have any suggestions for either of those problems?

Thanks
[Message Edited]
2,505 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
I have painfull expirience with that - some motherboards (especially VIA based for Athlons) wan't allocate Expended memory no matter what you do :(

In this case you "stack" with DosBox , thaty is good program but indeed a bit slow , you need 2.5Ghz+ to play MOM and MOO with sound , disable sound and music and things will run a lot faster.
Also you can make it a bit faster by adjasting CPU cycles in DosBox INI.


~SDC~
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Right click Magic.exe and change the properties to allocate all the memory it needs (set all memory to maximum, run under Win95 compatibility mode). Run the install program from magic and disable sound. Try to run magic.exe now. If it works, run the install program using right-click VDMsound and pick soundblaster for sound. Then try to rightclick-VDMsound magic.exe

That's how I got it to work on an Athlon VIA chipset, at least.
Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Lord Kiron: Thanks for the tip about Athlons, at least i know why it's such a pain now. As i said before, i've tried setting the CPU cycles up to 13000 which helps some but not a lot. It also maxes out my CPU even with Frameskip set to 10. The turning off sounds and music doesn't seem to help much unfortunatly. Guess my CPU is just too slow.

GameHat: I tried setting both EMS and XMS to 16 megs (the max) but i still get the "need at least 2700 kb of expanded memory" message. However i don't know if i'm running it under Win95 compatibility mode. How do i do that? I didn't see anything obvious under any of the VDMSound preferences tabs.

Thanks!
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Having had the same EMS issue you're having on my Thinkpad where I don't have any issues on my home system, I'd poked around a bit looking for the answer. As Lord KiRon mentioned some hardware setups have issues doing EMS emulation and it sounds like resource issues are at the root of it. On my Thinkpad T30 at least, I can't get EMS active unless I shut down both the on-board NIC and USB support.

Found a tip at http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/emsxp.html about some of the steps you can do to get around that, but it almost always involves disabling things you probably don't want to disable.

Dosbox gets around that since it's doing native memory voodoo, but as you mentioned it has speed issues on slower PCs. Guess it's better than nothing at least and if you turn off sound within MoM, the CPU overhead isn't nearly as high.

-BiffMan

~SDC~
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
the autoexec.bat and config.sys for windows XPs DOS mode sits in the system32 folder as autoexec.nt and config.nt.

I had no problem running MoM without any emulation software and sound enabled after I screwed arround with the settings there (like remove the dos CD drivers, instead of load use LH, instead of device use devicehigh and ensure you got enough files and buffers set there).

the only problem I had was that the sound was sloppy, but *shrug*.