Month: November 2024

Despite the game itself works pretty well, the fmv videos have audio pauses due to the timing being set wrong in the DOSBox settings.

´The solution can be found in the GOG Forums posted by user Flash-Nine:

I post this for future reference of people who have this problem, because I had the same problem. After searching the internet, I found that it is a known issue that that the WC 3 video sound stutters with cycles=max setting, can be found on the dosbox compatibility page. Unfortunately, that is the setting in the GOG version.
Setting cycles to 70000 fixed the problem for me.

In November, 2024, Gog updated the game, hence the CPU settings differ a bit now:

cycles=fixed
core=dynamic
cputype=auto
cycles=50000
cycleup=10000
cycledown=10000

I run it on:
Windows 11 24H2
on a Nvidia GeForce 1070 Katana
on a AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core Processor@4.00 GHz

I also highly suggest using an analog joystick instead of a gamepad, as the thumbsticks have a different movement pattern (round instead of a rectangle), which means the deadzones are not correctly and correct calibration will fail!

To run the Steam version of the game, you need the following 3 patches:

• The SilentPatch to fix the memory leaks and crashes of the game
• The Autosave v2 mod to allow saving anywhere in the game (most reasons of failure in this game is failing to save when needed).
• The Widescreen Fix (Albeit it is suggested by community members to only apply it on ultra widescreen monitors as the game supports 16:9 natively, in Win 11 it will overlap if you minimize the game once or start the game the next time. With the widescreen fix, you can simply re-select a 4:3 resolution temporarily in the main menu and then switch back to your desired 16:9 resolution, without the widescreen fix, this will fail to fix the aspect ratio!).

How to fix the game:

1. Download and install the game on Steam
2. Download all mods
3. Install the SilentPatch (there is a .txt file with installation instructions if needed)
4. Install the Autosave 2 mod (do not forget to also download and install the mod loader from the same site, beforehand)
5. Install the widescreen fix.
6. Start the game for the first time
7. Afterwards you will receive two popups, one by the modloader and one by the DirectShow filter and Video for Windows codec:

answer the prompts in the following order:

A) modupdater: select “INI files: replace all and keep settings.
Then click on “Download and Install updates now”
B) ffdshow compatibility manager
untick: Report this exe file name via internet anonymously.
untick: Don’t ask me again.
Select: use ffdshow. (always)
Click: OK
C) modupdater: Restart Now

After that you can select the resolution as you please and all the other graphic options via the main menu. take notice about my comments regarding widescreen aspect ratios above.
Furthermore, enabling the compatibility setting in the properties of Bully.exe “Disable fullscreen optimisations” might help further improving the situation.

Also, you have to go into SilentPatchBully.ini and change CustomMemoryMgr=0 to =1 to properly fix the configuration.

They are several traps when trying to run Running Arctic Baron / Transarctica on DOSBox:

(as hinted by the DOSBox Compatibility List comments)

• When you copy over the files from the CD to HDD (because the Batch installer won’t work), do not forget to remove the read-only attribute to the files!
• The game will freeze randomly in the default setting of the DOSBox config. I do suggest to use a separated config file for the game. There adjust the CPU cycles from “auto” to “max” as suggested here.
• If you use the European version that asks you to pick a language, use the NUM block number field for this input!
• If you want to use a joystick, use a real analog joystick, analog gamepad sticks may not work.

If you need help to win the game, Scenario: how to win in Arctic Baron might help.

There is also an open source remake called “Transarctica Remake”.

Hint: As you cannot setup your details of where the soundblaster is located, it will fall back to PC Speaker if it isn’t where the game expects it to be.

To fix this, set the following values in your DOSBox config file for the game:

sbtype=sb1
sbbase=220
irq=5
dma=1
hdma=5
sbmixer=true
oplmode=opl12
oplemu=default
oplrate=44100

This will give you ingame music and sfx at the same time! \o/

These instructions of me are based on the Steam user’s Jeff Paine guide named “Fix MPEG/MIDI not working in Windows 11“.

I am just adding additional steps necessary for Win11 24H2 not mentioned in his guide.

The general difference between his guide and the additional steps I have added is, that 24H2 appears to behave quite different than earlier builds.

Preconditions:

• Make sure, any audio/video codecs or DVD players you have installed previously to redeem the issue as from other guides or comments from the Steam Community, have been completely uninstalled.
• Make sure the game files and registry entries are also in its original state. To ensure this, uninstall the game and reinstall it. (caution! Make sure, the Steam folder used has no spaces in its folder name, if it does, create a new one with the Steam Settings! (refer to the coder who fixed the game to work on modern systems in his pinned Steam community post)

The reason for the above preconditions are, because all necessary video and sound codecs are already shipped with the game installation and are inside the game folder but are ignored as Steam sets it to Windows 95 compatibility mode which means the game cannot access them, despite they are there!

1. To work around that Steam sets the compatibility mode for the game, we download Jeff Paine’s launcher from his guide
2. Open the game’s files folder and rename “OVERSEER.EXE” to “OVERSEER2.EXE”.
3.  then open its preferences and set compatibility mode to another OS like Windows 8 or so, confirm, and then send it back to “None”. Then confirm again.
4. Extract the files from the fix’s archive to the game folder.
5. Try to launch the game, you will most likely come across this error message

After that, the program will crash before you could confirm you would like to download it. Here, you can find the manual download.

6. run the game from steam, first thing you will see is the following prompt:

Be quick so the dialog won’t disappear, select “Use ffdshow. (always)” and make sure the checkbox “Report the exe file name via internet anonymously” is unset.

That’s it! Enjoy playing the game! 🙂

Now, once inside the game, we are hit with more issues.

After the intro and the cut scenes finished playing, we are hit with the following error:

Which simply means the Midi sound cannot be played, so the background music and speech is missing.

We fix this by going to the sound preferences of the game and select the fitting MIDI Mapper to use. Since I am using a dedicated Creative Labs X-Fi Xtreme Gamer dedicated PCI soundcard, I am choosing “Creative Synth B” (As “Creative Synth A” sometimes makes the game freeze)

Last but not least we want to fix the transparent textures issues, hence we set up within the game the following:

And for the Advanced Preferences, we set these:

Then we download the latest version from dgVoodoo2 and copy the following files as instructed by Steam user Below Zero:

extracted the following files into the root of the Overseer folder from the MS folder. I did NOT create an MS folder in the Overseer folder.

D3D8.dll
D3Dlmm.dll
DDraw.dll

and from the root of the zip:
dgVoodooCpl.exe

Putting the 3dfx (glide.dll) files in there as well seemed to break things, so I didn’t.

Then we set it up as written by user Datargnan:

opened dgvoodoosetup and unchecked all options about vsync and aliasing

Your setup should look as follows in the DirectX tab:

Important:
Note!: If you are stuck at the “brain puzzle”, i.e. the cut scene wont play after implant removal, you need to temporarily disable dgVoodoo as described by user dlrdgm:

If you use dgVoodoo disable it for that implant removal cutscene/puzzle. In dgVoodoo-Setup DirectX tab check “Disable and passthru to real DirectX”.

It still occationally causes freezes while being in fullscreen, I decided to leave a feedback to Microsoft about it in the Windows Feedback Hub, if you wanna read or participate, find it here.

So, Resolution announced yesterday, that Broken Sword 1 Director’s Cut going to be delisted on November 4th, 2024, as can be seen in this Steam post.

So this also means the OST of the game and the original release of 1996 will be removed, as both where part of the Director’s Cut as a DLC.

While the Reforged Edition does have the original graphics you can switch to using the Tab key, it does not contain the original cut-scenes and neither the additional scenes of gameplay with Nico of the DC and the re-recorded audio bits.

However, on the bright side, I can report we finally did an interview with the dear Charles Cecil, for our podcast:

which can be listened to / watched at https://scene.world/brokensword