Wing Commander III Qualms

C

Crusader

Spaceman
The thread title obviously speaks for itself. For the record, I have a 1Ghz K7 Athlon with 128MB of SDRAM, a Diamond Monster Fusion, and a Sound Blaster Live Platinum.

Now for the problems....

The gameflow becomes corrupted (lines form all over the place and the screen gets out of whack) when I put it in SVGA mode. The movies therafter are effected by that.

Randomly (and the rate is pretty frequent) the game'll crash with an Exception 13 "This may be the result of a bad CD-ROM read" message. Also, Processor Exception messages are about as frequent.

This only occurs in DOS now. In Windows it works fine with the exception of the controller being seriously unstable. Because of that, I'd like to know if there's any way to fix those problems. I think Scitech Display Doctor might fix the video problems....maybe. The error messages I'm almost SURE are because of my configuration, most likely because of EMM386 which the SBLP needs for the SB16 emulation.

In any case, thanks in advance.
 
I don't know whether your sound card is causing any problems, but I bet that your graphics card isn't properly SVGA-compatible... 'tis a problem I've encountered several times myself. It may be that a program called UNIVBE may be able to help you. Mind you, I'm no expert in this, so you should probably wait and see what Stinger has to say.
 
Try running WC3 in dos with the following line

wc3 -v

this option will run the unibe (or something like that). the movies look terrible, but the work.
 
A little update to the siutation.

I may have stumbled upon the reasons for the CD read errors. Yesterday, I was trying to install Alice and the installation kept quitting because it couldn't read on a certain file. I tried everything from Firmware updates to trying to clean the CD. All attempts were met with no change. It became very obvious that the CD drive had broken down.

Then again, when I first ran WCIII on my 486 when I got the game, 6 years ago, it gave me the same Exception 13 errors (though no Processor Exceptions) and tweaking my config.sys and autoexec.bat files to the way that the instruction book wanted them fixed it.
 
SW: The reason for this is that many card manufacturers no longer bother supporting certain modes (particularly SVGA, which is what WC3 uses to look good). They support the most basic mode (VGA), and they support all sorts of fancy new standards, but they just don't see the point of supporting SVGA. Nobody uses it anymore :p.
 
For those who don't know: the SciTech Display Doctor is actually the direct descendant of UNIVBE (Unversal VESA BIOS Extensions) and should still contain all the stuff that made UNIVBE work (I haven't tried it, so I can't say for sure).
 
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