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[Scatty]

The computer opponents receive periodically every now and then moderate boosts of mana which they probably spend in exchange for gold and to upkeep and summon their units. If you ever saw the weakest of the opponents who's laughable at best positioning 5-6 sky drakes or 5 death knights in their capital city you know where the wind is blowing.
It is cheating indeed, cheap replacement for the lack of good AI, but that's the way the game continues to stay challenging (a bit at least) and interesting anyway. Noticed the same thing already long ago in Transport Tycoon, seems to have been a usual tactic to program the computer opponents back then when making a good AI would otherwise make a huge game.

[krokots]

Hi, i have problem with sound - it does not work. And when i launch install.exe there is no configuration button. What to do now?

[The Fifth Horseman]

Are you running the game in DOSBox?

[krokots]

Yes

What system do you run? I have a Windows 2000 with the "patched" version from here. My system can only run the basic 640x400 resolution option, although fullscreen=true makes the point moot. Do you know of any more options I might be able to tweak to get it working properly?

On the list of glitches, I'm very sure now that what causes the "ability overflow" is when I stack any group with numerous abilities (my main 3-hero, 2-magician, 2-cavalry team) with a boat or other transportation device (including when they are just passing through). Many of the abilities listed shouldn't exist, like Lionheart +{insert ridiculously large number}, and going into battle with them or examining them crashes the game. This makes my main group of troops totally useless.
The "spastic lines and shapes" seems to happen in places where something should refresh, but doesn't correctly for some reason. It first happened when I used "Change Terrain", the terrain in question began randomly flickering between all possible terrain types and causing everything to slow to a crawl when it was viewed, while simultaneously causing vertical lines of near-random color to appear. Because of this, it's not worth it to ever use that spell (transmute works fine though, but Gaia's Blessing is dangerous), and my main priority is to find and wipe out any nature opponents before they can use it.
There is a second, although less common, time when the "spastic graphics" appear; when I am about to select a new spell for research. All but the mouse freezes up and and the color-lines start dancing along the screen left or right, while the letters for each spell get randomly scrambled. Luckily, it only happens about 2-4 times per game, so I can ignore it.

[Scatty]

As for those bugs listed, I think raising the CPU cycles of DosBox should help with most of them. Though I have a different version of Master of Magic than this downloadable on Abandonia I also was encountering some of these problems earlier until I decided to raise the cycles to 27000, since then it happens only rarely that these bugs (especially the bug with Raise Volcano when the game stops responding) appear.

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.

[Scatty]

Just a site notice - if you're mostly using that Pentium II for Dos games, 512MB RAM is far too much and can cause troubles with some games, 128M is usually a normal maximum with 64MB RAM being the optimum.
Also by using EMM386=RAM HIGHSCAN in config.sys you should be able to free up a bit more conventional memory, though the HIGHSCAN setting often causes troubles with later versions of that program and Pentium class machines (those being hang-ups at loading after starting the PC). There're few other tricks also to shuffle loadable things around and optimize memory to be freed up at maximum possible size, one of them being loading MSCDEX.EXE with the /E switch for it to place most of loadable program code into extended memory, for example.

About the Soundblaster 128, try setting SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6 and if you have a plug & play setting program from the drivers CD with that soundcard, try running it and configure the plug & play settings to load at these values above during each start. However you would have much less troubles altogether if you get either Soundblaster Live! which does offer 99% compatibility with early Soundblaster standard (99% because of slight sound disagreements with very few games only) and Dos drivers for that, or a Soundblaster 16 PCI which is the standard.

However those two posts of you and me belong either into a separate thread in Troubleshooting than here.

[yoga]

Hi,

Well respected Scatty is absolutely correct.

If you may remove some chips of RAM -for example if it is possible to remove from 4 x 128 MB RAM configuration 3 chips x 128 MB , or from 2 x 256 MB RAM - 1 x 256 MB RAM) i think You will not have any problem..
The requirements of game are very simple..
Pls, slot 1 must be with RAM chip, not empty.

I played Master of Magic and this is very nice game.
Mind, that you must hurry to go to another word before opponent(s) seal the entrance..

Ty.

yoga

[The Fifth Horseman]

You might try running the game itself with loadhigh. It helped me with another title I had an issue like that with just yesterday.