Philos73

Hi guys,

I'm just about to start this great TBS. Did read the manual and the spellbook.
Got a lot of extra info (strategy guide etc.). Looks just great but having trouble with the setup. I usually tend to play all my old DOS-games on my old Pentium II - so the machine is too slow for DOSbox - but I don't want to screw up my other system with too many games. I have a separate DOS7-Partition on that Pentium II (derived from Win98SE - but with no Windows left in it. Added some stuff from DOS 6.22 to get a complete DOS7 running - works just fine). Win98 FE is running in another partition.

Finally managed to configure the memory to get the game started (that was quite a pain - I actually lack 1878 Bytes of conventional memory - and have done everything I know of to free up conventional memory - but even with just 579 KB of conventional free I can now start the game.

The problem with not getting more conventional memory may actually be due to me using DOS7. I also have another DOS partition with DOS 6.0 on that same machine - but haven't tried with that one yet because I put the game itself on a FAT32 partition where I have more space. That FAT32 partition is actually drive F when booting DOS7.

Only real problem left is the sound. I have a Soundblaster 128 PCI (16 Bit sound system). On the Soundcard it says that it's a CT4810 - but Everest Home Edition tells me it's actually an Ensoniq 5880 with a Creative Soundblaster chip. I've heard that Ensoniq cards - even though they run under the name of Soundblaster and come with Creative drivers - are not 100 % Soundblaster-compatible.

I have the Soundblaster DOS-Driver installed. In the Autoexec.bat ist says
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H7 P330 T6.

So I think the IRQ should be 7 and the DRM should be 1, base being 220.

But if I enter those settings in the game install screens and then start the game in native DOS then I get "Reconfigure hardware options" error. I do not
get that error when setting all options to "no sound". So it's definitely a sound problem.

If anyone has managed to get the sound in MoM to work under native DOS with this type of soundcard then I would like to hear from you.

Some more info on the system: Mainboard is a Gigabyte 2000 BX (the one with dual BIOS chip). The BIOS is actually somewhat buggy on that mainboard
but it has no onboard sound (which otherwise might interfere with the soundcard). The CPU is a 400 MHZ Pentium II (Slot CPU) - not overclocked.
The machine has 512 MB RAM. Installing so much RAM on that mainboard is a bit tricky but I managed to fool the BIOS into accepting the RAM (officially it would go up to 1GB of RAM but that would be even harder to do on that board and Win98 would not like that too much....). Apart from that the machine is running very well - even plays some H264 movies - which I did not expect when building this system from used parts. Graphiccard is an Ati 7000 - entry level AGP card with only 32 MB graphic RAM. Not too bad for old DOS games though.

I might end up playing the game without sound (as I do with most DOS-games) but remembering the good forum here on Abandonia I decided to post here before giving up on the sound installation.