Talk:GAMES:Star Wars: Dark Forces

Optimum configuration

Use DOSBOX to run the setup program. You can use every music card except for AWE32 MIDI, Soundscape Synth, and Gravis Ultrasound. Using these for music card either produce no music, or crash the game.

For Digital Sound, you can use all excepr Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro, AWE32, Pro AudioSpectrum, and SoundScape Audio.

The rest of the options work fine, however using Gravis gives tne sound a considerable delay before playing. SB2.0 can lag if a few sounds are playing at once, so use Sound Blaster 16 for the best performance.

Now, go to your DOSBOX config, and change prebuffer to 0 under the sound area. This will remove some delay before sounds. Also, it may help to change rate to 11025, this will decrease lag and cause no problems in sound quality.

You shouldn't use fulldouble, this causes lots of render errors and other things that you don't want. It runs graphically fine at any resolution, but the sound may become delayed at higher ones.

If you want to remove the letterboxing without making it look terrible, change output to ddraw, and set aspect to true.

If you want to use the mouse for horizontal aiming, you may want to crank up the resolution. Nope, you should keep Dark Forces' sensitivity the same, for some reason it only affects turning left.

Now, set sensitivity in the DOSBOX configuration to 250. Note that this will also increase the mouse speed in the menus, so be warned.

• Note from another user: You can change the mouse sensitivity in the game. When setting it to the max, you will see no difference at first. However, if you close and re-run the game it should handle properly, without changing the DOSBOX configuration sensitivity.

That's it! Dark Forces should now look and play it's best.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.33.18.92 (talk • contribs) 02:51, 7 August 2008

(Note: The below was tested and confirmed to work using DOSBox v0.74)

Once you have the game installed, you may find that it runs at a very low (mostly unplayable) framerate even on a modern system. To get the game running it’s best, edit the following entries in the dosbox.conf file (note: change the “fullresolution” setting below to match your monitor’s native resolution):

[sdl]

fullscreen=true
fullresolution=1280x800
output=openglnb
sensitivity=250



[render]

aspect=true
scaler=none



[cpu]

cycles=max



[dos]

xms=false
ems=false
umb=false

The most important of the above entries is “output=openglnb”. This tells DOSBox to use the OpenGL renderer. (note: the “nb” in “openglnb” means “no bi-linear” filtering. This keeps the pixels looking “pixelated” and more true to the original game). This setting utilizes the power of your hardware accelerated graphics card to render the display and increases the frame rate from “slideshow” speed, to a silky-smooth hundreds of frames per second. For more information on output settings, see Configuration:SDL.

Also, make sure to use the “xms=false, ems=false, umb=false” settings as shown above, since this game runs in “DOS/4GW Protected Mode” and therefore has it’s own memory management system. Activating Extended (XMS) or Expanded (EMS) memory managers will interfere with the game’s memory manager and possibly cause memory corruption and undesirable gameplay effects. For more information on DOS/4GW DOS memory extenders and helpful hints on using them with Protected Mode games, see these external sites:

—Preceding unsigned comment added by PoultryInMotion (talk • contribs) 00:05, 23 July 2012