Ultima VII Part I - Gaming Made Me @ RPS

Well, I gave in an installed it last night as actually have an hour to myself for once!

I started with the config file you posted before Thrasher, but had some problems, then found this link http://bootstrike.com/Ultima/Online/u7dosbox.php. Worked very well for the most part.

I can definitely see the combat issues and such without even leaving Trinsic though! Of course combat never interested me much anyway, so no problem there. I did notice a couple things that stood in difference from my last attempt through using Exult:

1) The animations and controls when walking seem clunkier than I remember with Exult. For instance, if I am pressing the left arrow then press the down arrow and hold it, the character will turn south, but not actually walk. I have to release the down arrow and press it again.

2) The earthquake that occurs at the beginning didn't seem to animate properly. The characters all fell over, but the whole world screen didn't move.

3) The mouse doesn't seem to work for walking. I seem to remember being able to hold down the left button and move forward with it.

I think tonight or tomorrow I'm going to run Exult and really compare them. Only thing is that apparently there are some massive bugs with the newest version and they aren't even sure how far those bugs go back. Not sure what to do.

Also, I wish dosbox would actually incorporate a 4x scaler. Seems like it has been asked for for years, but never been done.
 
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Sounds issues or something else? Also, what version of DOSBox are you using?

0.74. It was doing a few strange things, like taking forever to get to the load screen, and the scaling looking pretty bad (I used the hq3x scaler instead and it looked better).
 
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Yep, that's the same version I am using. I would hope if you were using the exact same dosbox config it should be fine, but perhaps platform diffs matter? Maybe different OS? (I'm using XP) or GPU? (I'm using ATI) makes a difference?
 
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Could be. I'm using Win7 (32bit). I've got an ATI 6800 for video.
 
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It's a shame that DOSBOX seems to be platform/environment sensitive. But at least it gives you lots of options to optimize/tweak. The down side is that it's a classic example of the "20 knobs" problem. Lots of undocumented settings that need be tried out via trial and error.
 
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It's a shame that DOSBOX seems to be platform/environment sensitive. But at least it gives you lots of options to optimize/tweak. The down side is that it's a classic example of the "20 knobs" problem. Lots of undocumented settings that need be tried out via trial and error.

Yup. It's better than a lot of other things though. I can generally get a game running fairly quickly (granted most of the time I'm using a guide like the one I posted!). This is kind of what turned me off from Exult (and a lot of OpenSource software). I looked at Exult last night, and in addition to all the bugs that seem to have popped up, there were so many different settings, I just figured it would be easier with DosBox.

If you want a real example of the '20 knobs' problem, just try building an HTPC! I replaced out DVR with one last year and I have a full love/hate relationship with it. I once tried using a guide on avsforum to upscale DVD's to HD using ffdshow. I'm sure the results are great, but holy crap where there a million different variables. I finally just paid the money for SimHD in Total Media Theater and use that. It may not be quite as good, but it is easy!
 
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Yeah, there's always that trade between ease of use and optimality. For games lately, I gravitiate on the side of ease of use to get them going, at least. ;) Most people are even more biased in that direction (mainly due to lack of technical competency) - thus the success of consoles vs. PCs.
 
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Wait until you try an emulator :D First you have to spend an eternity to transfer bios and games to your PC. After that is done you have to spend an eternity finding the right plugins… and after that another eternity tweaking it :D
 
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