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News: Celebrating 30 years of Star Control 2 - The Ur-Quan Masters

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Author Topic: Star Control 3?  (Read 15239 times)
Novus
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #15 on: December 20, 2009, 12:29:36 pm »

I have a modern motherboard with 128 video onboard. And it has a fast CPU. An AMD Athlon dual CPU 3.2 gig in it with 2 gig ram, and a 250 gig Sata drive, running Windows XP Pro.
That should be more than enough to run SC3 under DOSBox with no performance loss to speak of. I can also assume that whatever graphics chipset you have, it is a lot newer than anything UNIVBE has ever heard of, so that won't help. DOS compatibility seems not to be a high priority for many graphics card manufacturers nowadays, so the display just turning black is not entirely unexpected.

I recommend downloading DOSBox from the Official DOSBox site and installing that; you can have dozens of DOSBox installs on Windows that will happily coexist.

You can use DOSBox much like a normal DOS system; the most obvious difference is that you need to specify the disk drives the DOS system is to see manually. For example, with the SC3 CD in G: (the third CD drive) and D:\games containing my DOS games directory, the first things I enter at the DOSBox prompt are:
Code:
mount d: g:\ -t cdrom -usecd 2
mount c: d:\games

You can use "mount -cd" to determine which letter and number (starting from 0) your CD drive has. You can add these commands to the end of the DOSBox configuration file to execute them automatically on DOSBox startup.

After this, DOSBox behaves like a normal DOS system with a hard disk on C: and a CD drive on D:, allowing you to install SC3 normally.

Code:
d:
install

Once the game has been copied to the hard disk, select "General MIDI" for music (XP luckily includes a MIDI synth, even if your sound card doesn't have one) and "Sound Blaster 16" for digital sound, then quit the installer.

After this, you can run SC3 by starting DOSBox (mounting the hard disk and CD as above or through the configuration file), changing to the directory you installed SC3 to (using the CD command) and running SC3.

I recommend dumping the entire CD to hard disk to cut down on CD seek delays; you can use your favourite virtual CD program to do this (I use an old Daemon Tools from back when it was freeware, for example).
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NighTTripper
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #16 on: December 20, 2009, 10:04:31 pm »

I'm pretty sure that if you are on windows you can drag the application file onto the dosbox shortcut and it will run it.

That worked a treat. Thanx heaps dood Smiley
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #17 on: December 23, 2009, 11:56:24 am »

Now I can't get it to play the game as it should. The only thing I can do is, Super Melee, and have tried to start a new game, but it seems to go into a load loop, with a square at the top right of the menu bar area, with a red line at the bottom of said square, rapidly flashing, like forever! Sad I can play Super Melle all day, but that's not what the game is about!
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #18 on: December 23, 2009, 01:26:41 pm »

I'm pretty sure that if you are on windows you can drag the application file onto the dosbox shortcut and it will run it.
Yes and no. This automatically mounts the directory containing the application as C:\ and runs the application. This doesn't work with SC3, because it can't find the CD unless you mount it first as I described.
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Alvarin
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #19 on: December 23, 2009, 03:24:03 pm »

Now I can't get it to play the game as it should. The only thing I can do is, Super Melee
Actually, that's not necessarilly a bad thing...
But If you're on this forum, you might have already read the common ophinion here about SC3.

For the actual problem, you might want to try and copy all of the CD content to the hard-drive and I remember there being a .cfg where you could set path to resourses. Check this config file anyways, it might do the trick without the copy as well. It might be set up to point to a different location than your mount.
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NighTTripper
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #20 on: December 24, 2009, 02:47:20 am »

Now I can't get it to play the game as it should. The only thing I can do is, Super Melee
Actually, that's not necessarilly a bad thing...
But If you're on this forum, you might have already read the common ophinion here about SC3.

For the actual problem, you might want to try and copy all of the CD content to the hard-drive and I remember there being a .cfg where you could set path to resourses. Check this config file anyways, it might do the trick without the copy as well. It might be set up to point to a different location than your mount.


Hehe, I downloaded the game and have no CD for it. would it be looking for that CD? Would burning the files I installed on the HDD, to a CD, stop the seek for files?
« Last Edit: December 24, 2009, 04:29:00 am by NighTTripper » Logged
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #21 on: December 24, 2009, 10:15:34 am »

Hehe, I downloaded the game and have no CD for it. would it be looking for that CD? Would burning the files I installed on the HDD, to a CD, stop the seek for files?
Any decent supplier of downloads would provide installation instructions; check for documentation in the package. If no CD or CD image has been provided, burning a CD probably won't help, especially if the game has been modified to run without the CD. There should be a file called LEGEND.INI that indicates where SC3 should find its files. For me it looks as follows:

Code:
PLAYER1=KEYBOARD1 LEFT_ARROW RIGHT_ARROW UP_ARROW ENTER RIGHT_SHIFT
PLAYER2=AWESOME
PICDATA=G:\
VOCDATA=G:\
QDATA=G:\Q\
SAVEDATA=.\
SECTOR=0 0 1 0 0 0
CONFIG=1 1 1 1 127 127 127
PICDATA should point to a directory with about 56 MB of .pic files, VOCDATA to a directory with a 264 MB .voc file and QDATA to a directory containing 306 MB of .q files. SAVEDATA should normally be the current directory, as in this example. The backslash after the directory name is apparently mandatory. Make sure all these directories are correctly set and contain the relevant files; if not, your download was incomplete and I suggest you ask for your money back.
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NighTTripper
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #22 on: December 24, 2009, 12:55:38 pm »

Hehe, I downloaded the game and have no CD for it. would it be looking for that CD? Would burning the files I installed on the HDD, to a CD, stop the seek for files?
Any decent supplier of downloads would provide installation instructions; check for documentation in the package. If no CD or CD image has been provided, burning a CD probably won't help, especially if the game has been modified to run without the CD. There should be a file called LEGEND.INI that indicates where SC3 should find its files. For me it looks as follows:

Code:
PLAYER1=KEYBOARD1 LEFT_ARROW RIGHT_ARROW UP_ARROW ENTER RIGHT_SHIFT
PLAYER2=AWESOME
PICDATA=G:\
VOCDATA=G:\
QDATA=G:\Q\
SAVEDATA=.\
SECTOR=0 0 1 0 0 0
CONFIG=1 1 1 1 127 127 127
PICDATA should point to a directory with about 56 MB of .pic files, VOCDATA to a directory with a 264 MB .voc file and QDATA to a directory containing 306 MB of .q files. SAVEDATA should normally be the current directory, as in this example. The backslash after the directory name is apparently mandatory. Make sure all these directories are correctly set and contain the relevant files; if not, your download was incomplete and I suggest you ask for your money back.

Money back from a free download? lol Smiley I will try what u suggested though

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RTyp06
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #23 on: December 31, 2009, 07:50:16 pm »

 I'm pretty sure most DLs of SC3 are cracked to not need a CD/ Diskette. It's been so long since I tired playing SC3 that I can't recall the secuirty implementation.
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CelticMinstrel
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Re: Star Control 3?
« Reply #24 on: January 04, 2010, 03:46:37 pm »

Hehe, I downloaded the game and have no CD for it. would it be looking for that CD? Would burning the files I installed on the HDD, to a CD, stop the seek for files?
Any decent supplier of downloads would provide installation instructions; check for documentation in the package. If no CD or CD image has been provided, burning a CD probably won't help, especially if the game has been modified to run without the CD. There should be a file called LEGEND.INI that indicates where SC3 should find its files. For me it looks as follows:

Code:
PLAYER1=KEYBOARD1 LEFT_ARROW RIGHT_ARROW UP_ARROW ENTER RIGHT_SHIFT
PLAYER2=AWESOME
PICDATA=G:\
VOCDATA=G:\
QDATA=G:\Q\
SAVEDATA=.\
SECTOR=0 0 1 0 0 0
CONFIG=1 1 1 1 127 127 127
PICDATA should point to a directory with about 56 MB of .pic files, VOCDATA to a directory with a 264 MB .voc file and QDATA to a directory containing 306 MB of .q files. SAVEDATA should normally be the current directory, as in this example. The backslash after the directory name is apparently mandatory. Make sure all these directories are correctly set and contain the relevant files; if not, your download was incomplete and I suggest you ask for your money back.

Money back from a free download? lol Smiley I will try what u suggested though

Fixed your post.
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