Finally got Priv working...it's been awhile

P

PrivJunkie

Guest
I know there's been a lot of talk about getting the original Privateer working on new machines, specifically Windows XP etc. I didn't want to mess with emulators or virtual machines; I just wanted to get a good old DOS game to work. After about 8 hours playing with it (good way to spend my day off), it finally works, and it was worth it...

My specs:

DFI AK-75 EC mainboard
Duron 950
512 MBs RAM
(1) Maxtor 30g HDD (WinXP), master
(1) IBM 13.3g HDD (blank), slave
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500
Guillemot Maxi Gamer Muse sound card

I decided the only way I wanted to do this was a straight DOS boot, but my Win98 boot disk would not recognize my 30gig hard drive formatted under NTFS. That's where the 13.3gig drive came in. I formatted it FAT32, and the boot disk recognized it as drive C: (when it really was not, irrelevant). So now I had a working hard drive under DOS. I installed DOS cdrom drivers and DOS drivers for my sound card, installed Privateer, and (what do you know), not enough conventional RAM. I did not have access to EMM386.exe (did not come on my version of Windows), so I thought I was stuck. However, I was able to free up enough conventional memory by copying the entire game from the CD to the hard drive and then editing the PRIV.CFG and RF.CFG files to point to the C:\ drive. Then I had 604K! I started up Priv and heard the music and began to watch the movie. Then, when the pirates started talking......crash. Hoping it was a glitch, I tried again. Every time there was sustained dialogue, it crashed...hard. I turned off the sound, and it played fine. Glad it was not a memory issue, I tried different things, but my stupid sound card drivers would not let me change from IRQ 5, and the card didn't like IRQ 5, so I was stuck. Then I enabled the onboard sound from my motherboard and tried it with PRIV. It didn't crash, but I didn't get sound either. Then, for kicks, with the onboard still enabled, I tried the PCI card again, and it worked. Apparently, enabling the onboard sound switched all the default IRQs around in the BIOS, and the PCI card was then able to accept IRQ 5. Enjoying it ever since. What a great game! Thanks for all the posts about getting this game to work, again.
 
I did not have access to EMM386.exe (did not come on my version of Windows),
That's very odd. Any version that lets you still boot into DOS should have it. Anyway, glad you got it working even without it.
 
Sadly, I've been having trouble getting this gem to work. Oh, it runs fine on my Win98 box, but the sound effects and voice started crashing about three hours into the game. Now it doesn't matter how many times I reboot or play with the installation file. <sigh> This really bites. It would be nice if someone ported the basic game into one of the new fan projects being worked on. I wanna fly a Centurion again! :)
 
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