Privateer Deluxe (original) Speech problem

L

Logun

Spaceman
I hear music and I can hear what sounds like speech but it is really screwed up.

This is running on a P 120/ 64 meg ram/ SB16 PNP card/ Dos 6.22 w/step up upgrade.

Everything plays as it should but the speech, even my other games the sound is right so I know the sound settings are correct. Seems like I ran into this way back when I orignally played/bought this thing in 1994, but it's been too long now. Is the processor too fast for it? Do I need to install moslo?

I just built this PC for DOS games, never thought I'd be doing this again, I forgot what fun it was just to mess around with this crap to get it to run! XP has spoiled us all!!
 
The processor is perfect. You have too much memory. The game's sound goes corrupt if you have more than 32 megs. Add or modify the EMM386 line in your config.sys to something like this:

C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE 16384 RAM

If that doesn't do it, we'd need to know more about your sound card setup. The "PNP" nature of your Soundblaster necessitates that you have certain drivers installed.
 
Dude awesome! I had no idea about the corruption above 32 meg. I wonder what that is about....

Anyway I'm impressed and thanks!!!
 
I forgot to mention I was running QEMM ver. 8. so there is your curveball....I have copies of all this software mentioned if you guys needed a copy...if that is legal to say here......
 
No, you should read the forum rules before you say something that you think is probably against them. I don't know why anyone here would want it anyhow though.
 
Yeah, yeah that reading thing ...always good to do.

1) dropping my machine down to 32 megs worked like a charm good info, pat yourself on the back for me.

2) folks who built a DOS machine like myself might like a memory manager to help them get the XMS and EMS stuff straightened out a bit easier. Now the ones running everything off of XP, then it's pretty obvious that it's a moot point.
 
XMS is pretty automatic, and pretty much all you need for EMS is the C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE 16384 RAM line. Memory managers were mainly for people in the early to mid nineties who didn't know anything about config.sys and autoexec.bat and needed to run games. At this point I expect everyone to be able to free up the necessary conventional memory on their own or else need to ask us to do it for them. People actually running it in DOS are pretty rare compared to DOSBox players these days I think.
 
I will have to disagree with your opinon on "Memory managers were mainly for people in the early to mid nineties who didn't know anything about config.sys and autoexec.bat and needed to run games." as I was one of those people who ran it, but did know about my config.sys and autoexec.bat. I believe it is more of a lazy man's way to configure memory as well as (at least for me) it was free software (even in the mid-nineties). Statements (my opinion) like that are by people who were (possibly) just getting started on computers in the mid-nineties and don't really know what they are talking about and like to come across as a condescending @-hole.
I will agree with you on the statement of there are more DOSBox users than DOS machine users as there are fewer people who hold on to systems.

Now having said all that, I'm not looking to get into some Uber-geek internet posting battle. It doesn't prove anything and it's just a waste of space, so as I have said before, I appreciate your knowledge on getting Privateer to work and I'm sure your knowledge of the Wing Commander series of games and programming makes mine pale in comparison. Thanks for your helpful info.
 
Logun said:
I will have to disagree with your opinon on "Memory managers were mainly for people in the early to mid nineties who didn't know anything about config.sys and autoexec.bat and needed to run games." as I was one of those people who ran it, but did know about my config.sys and autoexec.bat. I believe it is more of a lazy man's way to configure memory as well as (at least for me) it was free software (even in the mid-nineties). Statements (my opinion) like that are by people who were (possibly) just getting started on computers in the mid-nineties and don't really know what they are talking about and like to come across as a condescending @-hole.
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Yeah, I was just trying to be nice by leaving out the lazy person's part. :) But if you knew how to just rem out extraneous lines and load certain things into upper memory, I would think most people would prefer to have more control over it. I tried a memory manager or two back in the day and always had to tweak it more to my situation afterwards.

Logun said:
Now having said all that, I'm not looking to get into some Uber-geek internet posting battle. It doesn't prove anything and it's just a waste of space, so as I have said before, I appreciate your knowledge on getting Privateer to work and I'm sure your knowledge of the Wing Commander series of games and programming makes mine pale in comparison. Thanks for your helpful info.
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No problem.
 
Normally "But if you knew how to just rem out extraneous lines and load certain things into upper memory, I would think most people would prefer to have more control over it." this might be the case, but in this case:

1) I haven't had to mess with configuring DOS for anything in a decade or so (thank Microsoft Windows for that) and as the old saying goes "If you don't use it, you lose it", and that so applies for configuring DOS.

2) Qemm works and always did for me in the past, so I never had to tweak anything, in this case it did it's job for me again; the difference for me in this decade was I had a lot more RAM on this machine than I did on my old 486.

I am surprised that you ever had any dealings with memory managers (considering your age), but if you did use any I would think they would have been ones that were for Windows 95 (unless your family had a DOS/Win 3.11 box for a LONG time). And they (Windows 95 memory managers a.k.a QEMM ver. 9 & QEMM 97) sucked and I wouldn't be shocked at all that it had to be tweaked A LOT. Thus Windows 95 the demise of the memory managers.
 
Logun said:
I am surprised that you ever had any dealings with memory managers (considering your age...
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What? I mean WC1 came out in 1990. I was 10 or 11 at the time and our home PC was a 386-16mhz with dos5 and win 3.0. My parents wouldnt know their way around dos for the life of them. My Brother and I pretty much learned all about dos , including editing autoexec.bat and config.sys and making batch files, on our own... At that age. In a couple years we were installing cd-roms, hard drives, ram and video cards on our own with no help or formal training. We never bothered with the memory managers cause they never really were all that usefull to get games running especially when the mem manager was using your last KB of conventional or extended ram needed for speach in wc2. (sure we were probably loading too many devices).

I don't see how age has anything to do with experience with mem managers. Chris isn't much younger than me. Even in the first few years of win 95 most games were still run in DOS. WC4, P2 included.
 
That's great that you started out at 10 or 11, as a lot of kids didn't get to, since PC's were quite expensive at the time.

Age and mem manager experience relevance:
that generally 12 yr old kids didn't have the money to go out and purchase a 3rd party memory manager. My line of thinking would be more in that a kid would learn to work the autoexec.bat and config.sys themselves to get stuff working (which is what it sounds like Chris did). And when 95 rolled out, you didn't really have to worry with it that much because 95 did the managing for you. And if you were still running DOS during Win95 area then you would still be using mem managers or configuring it yourself.

Now the exception would be that the parent was a big gamer or listened to the kid about what he wanted and bought it for him, but if the parent was anything like my parents, you came up with a work around yourself.
 
Logun said:
That's great that you started out at 10 or 11, as a lot of kids didn't get to, since PC's were quite expensive at the time.

Age and mem manager experience relevance:
that generally 12 yr old kids didn't have the money to go out and purchase a 3rd party memory manager. My line of thinking would be more in that a kid would learn to work the autoexec.bat and config.sys themselves to get stuff working (which is what it sounds like Chris did). And when 95 rolled out, you didn't really have to worry with it that much because 95 did the managing for you. And if you were still running DOS during Win95 area then you would still be using mem managers or configuring it yourself.

Now the exception would be that the parent was a big gamer or listened to the kid about what he wanted and bought it for him, but if the parent was anything like my parents, you came up with a work around yourself.
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My brother and I - with the exception of the base machine (which probably cost my dad anywhere from 3 to 5000$CDN - paid for all the upgrades out of allowance or money from jobs and such. Scrapping together savings was all part of the fun. The only game my dad ever really played was simcity.

And memory managers came standard with our machine and vesion of DOS.

Like I said, In the early days of win95, there wasn't really any games made specifically to run in it. In fact, I never once found creating a shortcut for a dos game any simpler that just rebooting into dos mode or using a boot disk. As such, to be able to set up a shortcut that rebooted and ran a dos game still required the same knowledge of autoexec.bat and config.sys as win95 basically was still running on top of an old dos system (this didnt change till XP unless you were using NT). If anything I found the system under win95 more confusing because you couldn easily see what settings you needed and such and some lines still werent added automatically for you (like trying to get the right ram settings to run privateer) So there was often half of the autoexec.bat and config.sys that you needed to write out yourself.
 
Logun said:
I am surprised that you ever had any dealings with memory managers (considering your age), but if you did use any I would think they would have been ones that were for Windows 95 (unless your family had a DOS/Win 3.11 box for a LONG time). And they (Windows 95 memory managers a.k.a QEMM ver. 9 & QEMM 97) sucked and I wouldn't be shocked at all that it had to be tweaked A LOT. Thus Windows 95 the demise of the memory managers.
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I never touched a memory manager after Windows 95 came out. I'm actually not familiar with any. I believe the only Microsoft utility I tried was "Memmaker" which came out with DOS 6.2. I used DOS on various home PCs for many years prior to Windows 95 release. My first "GUI" was XTree Pro in 1987. I was using DOS and Windows 3.11 when I first joined the online Wing Commander community more than 11 years ago. The ten year anniversary of my first website and first alt.games.wing-commander newsgroup post are just a couple months away.

AD said:
Like I said, In the early days of win95, there wasn't really any games made specifically to run in it. In fact, I never once found creating a shortcut for a dos game any simpler that just rebooting into dos mode or using a boot disk.
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Yeah, when I was 11 or 12 I had a neato system of custom config.sys and autoexec.bat files on my system. I'd type "hellcfg" and my custom config.hel and autoexec.hel files would replace config.sys and autoexec.bat, reboot the computer and launch Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. And so on for all the games I had installed.
 
ChrisReid said:
Yeah, when I was 11 or 12 I had a neato system of custom config.sys and autoexec.bat files on my system. I'd type "hellcfg" and my custom config.hel and autoexec.hel files would replace config.sys and autoexec.bat, reboot the computer and launch Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. And so on for all the games I had installed.
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Yeah, we actually wrote a super long config sys/ autoexec.bat that would actually give you a menu from which you could choose EMS/ no ems or whatever so when you booted the PC you could choose your setup and whether to boot to windows 3.1 or not. Worked really well. I think we eventualy put in choices to launch some of our favorite games too. (In those Days the PC was turned off when not in use...) If you didnt chose in 10 or 30 seconds or something it would automatically go to windows.
 
Memmaker - yuk. That one never worked right for me. Always destroyed my complex startup files or at leas gave me less memory compared to before I ran it. Qemm was/is great tho. Try to get 639K free memory without...

PS: I still have/use those complex autoexec/config files that you all remember fondly, but I have to admit since the latest DOSBOX builds I do so far less often then I used to.
 
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