The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

This is a little out of place since it doesn't directly relate to UQM. But how many other star control forums are there, eh? ;)

Just curious if there is any kind of Star Control 3 patch. It used to run great back on my Windows 98SE machine. But I've upgraded hardware several times since then. Now I have a pretty new system with WinXP. It runs...but the sound usually gets screwy and the starmap rotates extraordinarily fast.

I know SC3 isn't all that great. But after beating UQM I sorta got the urge to pop it in again.

So does anyone know of a good way to get around these technical issues? Or maybe even a patch (which I doubt exists)?

-CoeRay

Unfortuantely, there's no patch to make "SC3" into a good game. :P

Anyway, I don't know about compatibality patches.  As "SC3" was DOS based, you most likely could use a program like DOSbox to run it on modern machines.

I forget, does WinXP have a DOS mode? Or "Windows Command Prompt" only
mode?

Win XP only has a command prompt, however as i have played SC3 again (and fully remember how bad it now is), I can tell you that WinXP doesn't need a patch to get SC3 to work in it.

If you can't get it to play in a normal mode then switch the game to play in Win98 compatability mode and that will make it work fine.
Enjoy (or at least try to enjoy)
-Sky

I had same problem as you.
And it didnt help to run inn win95/98 mode either.
Simply d/l dosbox who you can find inn the link with a walkthru on setting it up
http://www.abandonia.com/main.php?nav=programs

Runs like a dream, except it aint as good as SC2 ;-)

PONAF (http://www.star-control.com/)'s discussion board, which is much more friendly to SC3, and Timewarp (http://timewarp.sf.net)'s, which is more hostile to SC3.

VDMSound (http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/) is quite useful if you want to run DOS-based games under XP without the performance issues inherent in DOSBox. The games that do really nasty tricks (e.g. SC2) don't work under XP/VDMSound, but the games that need lots of CPU power (more than a 486) run much smoother than on DOSBox.

How do you get the graphics to work right in DOSbox for SC2? I have graphics card set to 'auto' and the game keeps changing colours into some unreadable combinations.

Try running the game by typing this on the command line:

starcon2 /g:bios

This should get it to use the default BIOS colours instead of a dodgy colour palette. Alternitively, if you haven't already done so, try UQM (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/).

Actually, what it does is use the BIOS palette manipulation code instead of writing directly (and very quickly and incompatibly) to the VGA chipset.

Cool.

As long as it works!  ;D