Hardware & Technical Assistance with running FFE on Dosbox

[drew]

Hey retro Elite folks!

I'm getting towards the the tail stages of my playthrough of FE2 on my stream (twitch.tv/drewwagar) and am looking to getting FFE up and running next. I'm trying to run it from the original binaries as provided by eliteclub.co.uk back in the day.

So far...

• Downloaded FFE and unzipped. Eventually figured out slightly odd path config and game runs - WORKING
• Used setup programme to apply settings for audio and midi - WORKING
• Found an ISO with the CD version and extracted the videos... put into a DATA directory in the game folder. They work when double clicked in explorer, but the game doesn't see them - NOT WORKING
• Control method. I've been flying FE2 on keyboard. This seems to work on FFE most of the time, though occasionally the game seems to pick up some spurious control input from somewhere (ship spins around for no obvious reason) - PARTIALLY WORKING
• Frame rate. Even with dosbox boosted to a crazy 60k cycles, framerate is poor. Anything I can do to optimise? - PARTIALLY WORKING

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[Arioch]

Hey retro Elite folks!

I'm getting towards the the tail stages of my playthrough of FE2 on my stream (twitch.tv/drewwagar) and am looking to getting FFE up and running next. I'm trying to run it from the original binaries as provided by eliteclub.co.uk back in the day.

So far...

• Downloaded FFE and unzipped. Eventually figured out slightly odd path config and game runs - WORKING
• Used setup programme to apply settings for audio and midi - WORKING
• Found an ISO with the CD version and extracted the videos... put into a DATA directory in the game folder. They work when double clicked in explorer, but the game doesn't see them - NOT WORKING
• Control method. I've been flying FE2 on keyboard. This seems to work on FFE most of the time, though occasionally the game seems to pick up some spurious control input from somewhere (ship spins around for no obvious reason) - PARTIALLY WORKING
• Frame rate. Even with dosbox boosted to a crazy 60k cycles, framerate is poor. Anything I can do to optimise? - PARTIALLY WORKING

Cheers,

Drew.

Hi Drew,

• getting the Oscar-worthy videos to work with DOSbox FFE involves copying the entire CD into a folder and setting DOSbox to use it as a CD-ROM, unless someone knows another solution
• keyboard controls are a bit broken - in atmosphere, up/down will go diagonally when below a certain altitude. Joystick controls were never made to work and having one connected can lead to problems
• frame rate is fairly poor on planets or in the vicinity of them - I run at 45k cycles which is as good as my 486 DX2 66 back in the day, but it still stutters on occasion

A much easier solution I found was to use John Jordan’s modded FFE - you can have identical 320x200 graphics and everything works at a smooth frame rate.

If you’re going to try keyboard controls, good luck! I tried and tried, but I found combat to be virtually impossible with them - as the publishers said back when patch 1.06 came out (regarding broken joystick support): the game is meant to be played with a mouse.

 

[Morbad]

It may well be possible to use the videos off the disc with the version you have installed now, but since you have the disc image it may be best to mount the ISO and install the game from that.

You can disable any joystick inputs in the dosbox.conf file by setting "joysticktype=none". No idea if that will fix your spontaneous inputs, but the game certainly won't be detecting anything on the joystick interface.

Performance can be tricky. Manually setting "core=dynamic" in the [cpu] section may help, but chances are you'll need a huge number of emulated cycles to get good performance. For example, without wrappers for 3D acceleration, I need about 250k cycles to get good performance in Quake at 1024*768, and almost 600k to do the same in Mechwarrior 2.

 

[Steve]

Set up a batch file containing the following:-

D:\DOSBox\dosbox -fullscreen -c "MOUNT C 'D:\Frontier Stuff\Emulators\DOS-PC\FIRSTENC'" -c C: -c FIRSTENC.exe

obviously replacing my path with wherever you got DOSBox and FIRSTENC.exe located. As long as you've got a DATA folder in your FIRSTENC directory containing the videos it should work.

A much easier solution I found was to use John Jordan’s modded FFE - you can have identical 320x200 graphics and everything works at a smooth frame rate.

This is correct.

 

[drew]

Cheers folks - lots to try there. Will report back!

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[drew]

Downloaded JJFFE and copied the data files - video and game working - Awesome. Not quite original, but good enough for my purposes! Many thanks all.

Cheers,

Drew.

 

[gunbladelad]

I've played a lot of JJFFE over the years - and in my opinion, one of the best ways to enjoy the game on a modern system. I know you'll love it.