A shot in the dark!

[Jawz II]

right, so i was gonna play an old time favourite of mine Panzer General, its a strategy game from 1995, i think.

this version i got from underdog.com long time ago, supposedly its abbandonware, anyways ive already bought this game, twice! none of the old copies work.

this version is zipped and its already installed when unzipped. i had no problem running it on my system, on XP, but i had to get a new harddrive 1,5 year ago, and now its not working properly.

the game itself seem to work, after the intro part i hit escape and the first scenario starts.
but the graphicc is all messed, like i can see the top of the picture and right under it, is the bottom part and the rest of the screen is all black, the middle part is missing!

i tried to take a screebshot, but its a DOS based game so it didnt work. please help me if you can, i think i have to adjust some kind of graphic card setting or something.

 

[taper]

Have you tried Compatability mode? If you browse to the program's folder, right click on the launch icon, then properties/compatibility you have a few options to play with. I've gotten several old programs to run well using this.

 

[Jawz II]

ill try that, thanks.

any ideas on what i should change?

i tried right clicking on the game while it was running in the activity field (bar? not sure what its called, its the long thing in windows at the bottom of the screen, with the start button in it, at left hand side) and then chose "properties" and then graphics and got awhole lot of things i could tweak, but i didnt touch anything.

im no computer whiz, im affraid my computer will explode in my face if i change anything

 

[bhsup]

Personally, I use DOSBox to run Panzer General if I run it on my XP box. You might give it a try.

 

[Jawz II]

Personally, I use DOSBox to run Panzer General if I run it on my XP box. You might give it a try.

hey a fellow PG fan!! i thought i was the last person on the planet to play that game!

ill try DOSbox, thanks a whole bunch!

 

[Padma]

DOSBox is excellent, and it's cross-platform! I use it to run DOS games on my Linux box.

 

[Jawz II]

halleluja! it worked, great!

only 1 smal problem, i cant maximize the window that DOSbox is running PG in, the "maximize" button is faded and dosent work, which is annoying, heres a picture:

oh and more thing, the mouse movement is kinda choppy and laggy, but i dont think that can be fixewd, i had the same problem earlier when i ran PG on XP, but if anyone knows a remedy, it would be much appreciated.

thanks everyone.

EDIT: also, is there anyway i wont have to type in the whole "MOUNT c c:\games" etc thing everytime i want to run panzer general? its not alot of work, but if theres a way to get around it, id like to know.

 

[bhsup]

Jawz, sorry about the late reply. I must have missed your post in here.

Not having to mount C every time:
I personally load all old apps/games that I'll be wanting to use DOSBOx with in D:\Bin\OldApps, within their own subdirectories under there of course. For example, PG is in D:\Bin\OldApps\Games\PG. To automatically mount "C", you edit the dosbox.conf file, which is in the directory you installed DOSBox in. Add the following to the bottom of the file under the [autoexec] section (any line preceded by a # is a comment, use at your discretion). Change the directory to point to the directory you want mounted, of course.
mount C D:\Bin\OldApps
C:
#The following line will automount a CD drive...hopefully. Replace 'x' with actual CD drive.
#mount D x:\ -t cdrom

Problem maximizing your window:
I'm honestly not sure why you're running into that as I don't have that issue. You might try changing the first uncommented line in dosbox.conf to true instead of false, but given your issue, you might then be stuck in fullscreen mode until you exit.
fullscreen=true

Choppy or Laggy Mouse Movement:
Not sure again, but a couple of suggestions. Try lowering the mouse sensitivity in the dosbox.conf file. Also, maybe you're actually running it too fast. You might try lowering the cpu cycles and see if it runs smoother.

The readme file has most of this (not a criticism, I hate reading docs too, so why not ask), and given the nature of this app, it's probably not a bad idea to break the rule and read the docs here. It also mentions a couple of links that you might find useful:
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewforum.php?f=39
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/wiki/

Good luck!

 

[Jawz II]

thanks alot, ill get right on it.

i did actually read half the readme and looked through the rest real quick, but i was looking for something else..

belive it or not, it took me about half an hour to remember complicated DOS commands such as "dir" and "cd"

i learned all this stuff in school long time ago (too long ago), but a hacker, i am not!

EDIT: fixed all of it, cheers!

 

[bhsup]

EDIT: fixed all of it, cheers!

Cool! Was it slowing down the cycles that fixed the mouse problem?

 

[Jawz II]

actually for some reason after i got the fullscreen the game runs much smoother than before, so i didnt have to change mouse sensitivity in the config file. it wasnt just the mouse, the whole game ran kinda slow. its works now.

i tried to set mouse sensitivity at 50 but then i changed it back to 100, it was too slow.

i just played the game for 2 hours straight.

thanks again!

 

[Dida]

Panzer General is a great game. What shame that they stopped making it.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Battle Isle 2 also rocks
I recommend it. as the pioneering hex based war game

 

[bhsup]

Nit picky, but you should have used the phrase "pioneering hex based computer war game."

Avalon Hill was making awesome board games with hex maps many, many moons before PCs were around.