Ascendancy - Cannot Find CD
 

Reposted out of the General Ascendancy thread, to here where it's more appropriate:



I'd love to be able to play Ascendancy again, it was one of the highlights of my long-ago gaming past, but it doesn't seem to be working. I downloaded and installed the game, downloaded DOSBOX, and followed the excellent how-to guide for setting it up. It worked perfectly, attempting to run Ascendancy exactly how my XP computer does - including the CD check, where it aborted and told me to insert my Ascendancy CD. I'm pretty sure this means I need to follow the alternate DOSBOX setup where it reads off a CD-image, but does anyone know where to find one?

The games on Abandonia are usually already preinstalled. There is no need to install them or to use strange subterfuge.

If memory serve well, you simply need to either hit enter or ignore the error message. However, I also clearly remember that you should not have this kind of problem with our version of Ascendancy since it works fine in Windows XP, without the use of DOSBox. And I also regularly used DOSBox to play Ascendancy to get over the slow mouse problem, so I know that it works flawlessly without problems. Which lead me to think that you either try to run another version of this game, downloaded elsewhere, or you are trying to run Ascendancy thru an original disk.

If you still have problems then please post back describing in details how you tryied to run the game. This will help us to find out if you did something wrong with DOSBox.

-EoF

weird, just mounted the ascendancy directory as c, ran ascend.exe and it just worked

It's ready to run in dosbox.

Sorry, I should have used more accurate wording - I downloaded and extracted the game as-is. When I referred to my XP machine, I meant that the game functions fine there, including the CD check, but since I actually have said CD in the drive when using that machine (currently several states away from me), it works. Specifically, I followed these steps:

1) Downloaded Ascendancy from this website, Abandonia.com....I've never found it available for download anywhere else.
2) Extracted it into a new folder, C:\OLDGAMES
3) Downloaded and installed DOSBOX 0.73.
4) Ran DOSBOX, and obeyed the excellent wiki-help guide to mount C:\OLDGAMES as my local C: Drive. I followed the guide verbatim, except for substituting ASCEND wherever the example guide uses TESTDRIV, and substituting ASCEND.EXE in place of TDGCA.EXE.
5) Followed the wiki's instructions through C: to C:\ASCEND, the directory storing ASCEND.EXE.

5) Tried to run Ascend.exe, and it functioned perfectly, right up until the part where it checks for the CD, and since it did not find said CD, it dumped me right back to my C:\> prompt without any opportunity to ignore or skip it.

And what about this?
Once again I repeat: the game runs fine in dosbox as is downable from AB.
The only thing I changed was the folder name, from ascedancy to ascend.
No problem whatsoever.
To conclude:
Delete your old folder and start over from scratch, you screwed up the cfg file.

[Edit]
Also tested: you even can dragdrop ascend.exe on the dosbox shortcut.

The only thing I could say more to what already been said is that you should make sure that your unarchiver also create and unarchive subdirectories which could be included in the archive.

I did it countless times with a lot of different DOSBox versions in the past, including the newest version. It works with DOSBox as is.

Really?

Hey, it worked. Problem solved then, thanks!

Sigh, forgot to log in, so I can't edit my above post or delete it.

Game is now working very smoothly, but I'd like to crank up the difficulty with the Antagonizer AI patch. After I copy Antag.exe into the ASCEND folder as instructed, is there anything special I'll have to do to make it work with the drag-and-drop method that dosraider pointed out? Do I keep drag-and-dropping ASCEND onto Dosbox, or do I have to drag-and-drop the Antag application instead?

ANTAG.