My dosbox wasteland woes

[PageofCups]

Though a big fan of the Fallout series, I couldn't ever quite find the motivation to give Wasteland a serious shot. Now that I'm waiting for W2, I'd like to play the original in order to experience it for myself.

I'm attempting to play it using dosbox, and mostly things have been coming along quite well. I've even found myself slowly drawn into the game, despite being spoiled by advanced graphics over the years. There's just one problem: I seem to be experiencing random freezes of the game during combat. Sometimes I'll play for 45 min, and experience no problems, others the game freezes during the course of the first combat. I've tried following various tips I could find on the internet and in dosbox's readme, altering dosbox configuration, using loadfix, and so on. Sadly, it keeps happening.

None of the other old games I've played on dosbox were so problematic. Does Wasteland require some specific dosbox configuration to run well?

[Cutter]

http://www.abandonia.com/en/forum?url=s ... php?t=3462

Poke around the Wasteland forum on Abandonia. You can probably find a resolution in there, or ask for one. Good luck, ranger!

[Drool]

My game will freeze on me from time to time too. I'm not sure what the issue is. It frequently happens when I'm repeating an action a couple hundred times, but I've had it lock just walking across the map.

I don't know if it's a specific issue or not, so I just try to save a little more frequently. Since it autosaves every time you switch maps, you never lose too much progress, thankfully.

[CaptainPatch]

I've been getting the same thing. I'm averaging 5-10 minutes between freezes. I learned to "Save frequently; save your a**."

I just Alt-Ctrl-Del to bring up Task Manager. Oddly, TM doesn't say "stopped responding". But I still have to close the program and start it up again. It seems like it's more just the _mouse_ that freezes.

[Drool]

The mouse certainly freezes, but the keyboard controls lock up, too. I'm wondering if it's an issue of the game itself. My (current) copy is from Abandonia, so maybe there's a slight corruption. I think I still have my copy from Computer Gaming World back in '97 somewhere and could see if that locks up. Maybe that version won't reverse the freaking colors when you go full screen, too.

Generally, I just alt-tab away from DOSBox and then close the window.

[ad1066]

The mouse certainly freezes, but the keyboard controls lock up, too. I'm wondering if it's an issue of the game itself. My (current) copy is from Abandonia, so maybe there's a slight corruption. I think I still have my copy from Computer Gaming World back in '97 somewhere and could see if that locks up. Maybe that version won't reverse the freaking colors when you go full screen, too.

Generally, I just alt-tab away from DOSBox and then close the window.

Palette issues can be alleviated by editing the DOSBox config file and setting the Output option to "surface" instead of "overlay". I never had that problem with Wasteland, but I did with several VGA games (Turrican II and Star Control II).

-- Ben

[Lucius]

Generally, I just alt-tab away from DOSBox and then close the window.

Same problem here, and this has generally always worked for me. Also it's important to know the game saves whenever you radio in for a promotions also.

[PageofCups]

Dang, seems I'll just have to save obsessively.

[ad1066]

One thing to keep in mind: the game auto-saves when you exit a shop as well. This is all well and fine, until you get yourself TPK'd, and you reload your game, and it starts you on the square where the shop was. That's right: "was". Now the trigger for the shop is gone. Congratulations, you just killed the shop. Found that out the hard way with Leroy's the first time I played the game. That was rough going until I got to Darwin (I think that was also when I found out that shops o not have infinite ammo, and I'd cleaned Quartz out of 7.62mm clips).

Moral of the story: Always manually save after you've exited a shop and are at least 1 square away.

-- Ben

[CaptainPatch]

I just noticed something when I started the game this afternoon. In the opening Menu, there is a command for "Capture/release the mouse. Ctrl + F10." [And of course, for a change I didn't have _any_ freezes to test it out.) Might be a way to un-freeze a game.

[Gizmo]

DosBox isn't perfect.I have games that play just fine under real DOS, but crash or eventually crash under DosBox.

[Hell Razor]

I have found that I can completely avaoid this problem as long as I do NOT use ctrl-F11 or ctrl-F12 to adjust cycles after DOSBox starts, and do not click inside the box to activate the mouse. Set the cycles to 20000 in the config, leave the mouse alone, and I can macro all night without a crash.

[Mathsorcerer]

I can get Wasteland to play perfectly fine in DosBox, even though I can't seem to use macros. I still have a laptop that runs XP, though, and Wasteland will run in DOS mode without needing any extra assistance--just browse to the directory, type "wl", and it runs.

[CaptainPatch]

I can get Wasteland to play perfectly fine in DosBox, even though I can't seem to use macros.

I found that I could only set up macros for F2 and F3.

[Drool]

I have found that I can completely avaoid this problem as long as I do NOT use ctrl-F11 or ctrl-F12 to adjust cycles after DOSBox starts

I have no idea why you'd need to adjust cycles for Wasteland. I've never touched the cycle settings and it's fine.


As for the macros, I think you can fiddle around with the settings to make more macros work, but I can usually get by with just two: one for combat and one for miscellaneous uses (usually resting).

[ad1066]

There was another thread recently where someone mentioned that you can map the Ctrl key to Shift in DOSBox, and use Shift-Fkey to start and stop macro recording.

-- Ben