Documentation: How to run Turrican 2 in DOSBox-X

[darkstar]

Turrican 2 doesn't work, neither in stock DosBox nor in DosBox-X.

After launching turrican.bat (which in turn launches t2.exe), the (text-mode) setup starts but the screen is mostly blank, so you cannot see what it detects. After pressing enter on what presumably means "keyboard", the screen switches to VGA and gets garbled

If you need the game files I can provide them for testing

[joncampbell123]

Interesting...

Let me know where i can download the game files. I might find a way to make it run.

[darkstar]

I uploaded it here: https://mega.co.nz/#!9gshybSQ!zQUtN_TJ7LbY6QcmJgRHrH_k7IOw73FxFxNEPBgTiCQ

[joncampbell123]

OK. Here's what I've found so far:

If you just unzip that zipfile to a directory and run it as C:, the demo screws up the way you described. The setup screen prior to the game will complain that it can't create directory TURRICAN.CFG (what?? TURRICAN.CFG is a file!).

If you instead create a subdirectory to run it from (I used C:\GAME) and unzip it there, then make drive C: one level up, then use SETUP.EXE to initialize C:\TURRICAN.CFG, then the setup program can't offer any sound cards, but if you select "-none-" for a sound card the game runs just fine, silently.

Then, it turned out that for some reason the configuration program needs to be able to write the various *.MSD files that correspond to sound cards, in order to use them. So if I (using Linux) chmod +w all the files (your ZIP archive had them all read only), then the configuration program is able to list sound cards and I can configure it to use Sound Blaster. Then the game runs fine.

Finally, I found out the demo is able to support Sound Blaster 16. What is not well explained in the configuration program is that you need to select the high 16-bit DMA channel, not the 8-bit low DMA channel. So when it offers 1,0,3,5,6,7, you need to select "5" not "1".

After all that, the game is quite playable and works fine.

Here's what I did under Linux:

cd (whatever root directory you want to use as drive C)

mkdir game

mkdir turrican.cfg

cd game && unzip turrican2.zip

cd game && cp -v * ../turrican.cfg/

chmod -Rfv +w game turrican.cfg

That's:

Go to a directory you will make drive C: in DOSBox. Create directory "game" and "turrican.cfg". Unzip turrican2.zip into game directory. copy game contents into turrican.cfg. Make files writeable, since files extracted from ZIP are read-only.

Then before you run the game, you need to run SETUP.EXE, and use the "3) Create minimal startup files on harddisk". It will fail for some reason, but it will put out the right files in c:\turrican.cfg to make the game work. Abort installation, skip through the text, to get back to the DOS prompt. Run TURRICAN.BAT and the game should work.

I used for dosbox.conf:

[dosbox] machine=svga_s3 memsize=32

[log] logfile=log.txt

[cpu] cputype=pentium cycles=30000 core=normal

[dos] ems=false

[sblaster] sbtype=sb16

[gus] gus=true

[autoexec] mount c: . c:

Then I ran DOSBox-X, CD'd into the "game" directory and ran TURRICAN.BAT. It will ask you for sound and video configuration. I set sound to "Creative Sound Blaster 16", base 220, IRQ 7, DMA 5. Then ran the game.

[darkstar]

Hm. this is not how it works for me. I have the game in C:\T2. I run setup.exe, it tells me that I need to make changes to my config.sys, I tell it to ignore it and it asks where to install (C:\TURRICAN), and nothing related to sound pops up. After installation, the C:\TURRICAN directory is empty, but I have a C:\TURRICAN.CFG directory with a couple of files in it. Trying to run T2.exe or TURRICAN.BAT in C:\T2 results in the same error.

I didn't notice the readonly bit (it's probably because it was copied from CD) so I removed it but that still doesn't change a thing, I still have the same "no sound" screen where I can select the empty line above the word "joystick" followed by VGA garbage.

I'll try a few things and see if I can get it to work...

[darkstar]

Ah okay now it runs. Copying everything to c:\turrican.cfg seems to have worked. However, if you try the "video setup" and screw with the frequency, it seems to break the text-mode VGA afterwards (but that's probably a minor issue)...

[heydojo]

@joncampbell123 you can probably close this report.