GAMES:Blood

Blood
Box Art Shot
Developer	Monolith
Publisher	GT Interactive
Released	June 20, 1997
Status	Perfect
Tested on	0.73
Tested game version	1.21 One Unit: Whole Blood
Links	Compatibility List
Commands
Executable	BLOOD.EXE
Installer	INSTALL.EXE
Setup	SETUP.EXE
DOS Extender
DOS4GW.EXE	Unknown
Works with DOS32A	N/A

Overview

Blood is a PC first person shooter computer game developed by Monolith Productions and distributed by GT Interactive. It was released on the June 20, 1997, and became well-known for its copious amounts of gore and numerous stylistic and cultural references to literary and cinematic horror works. It was also the first Build engine game to feature voxels. The game falls in the first-person shooter category and has an arsenal of curious weapons, numerous enemies and liberal amounts of gore.

Expansions Packs

Two different expansions, Cryptic Passage and the Plasma Pak, were released shortly after the game was produced, although only the Plasma Pak added new weapon modes and enemies. Later, a special edition collection titled One Unit: Whole Blood was released, which included the fully-patched full version of Blood, the Cryptic Passage expansion pack, the Plasma Pak expansion pack, and the Game Wizards interactive walkthrough/strategy guide. Blood II: The Chosen, the sequel to Blood, was released in 1998 and a year later had its own expansion pack.

Sequels

A sequel to Blood, titled Blood II: The Chosen, was released on October 31, 1998. In terms of copyrights and ownership, Monolith sold the rights for Blood to GT Interactive who published the games; the company was later purchased by Infogrames which has since been renamed to Atari.

Sound

Your soundcard works perfectly! (tm: Warcraft sound setup)

If the game ever complains about missing CD Audio tracks (or crashes unexpectedly, displaying garbled text bleeding over the graphics), try running it with the command line parameter

-nocd

Using emulated Gravis Ultrasound for both music and sound can cause sound effects to have a strange reverb applied to them.

Video

Works flawlessly, even in high resolutions thanks to the DOSbox VESA support. Set

machine=svga_s3

to enable VBE support.

However, if you own the widescreen display (not very uncommon nowadays) you may find fullscreen mode to be clipped somehow (mostly at the bottom of the screen) or corrupted otherwise. You may try switching the resolution by pressing F8 in-game, or follow the steps below.

In your dosbox.conf file, set:

aspect=true
fullresolution=0x0
output=overlay

Network

Follow the DOSbox networking guide to enable IPX network connections and let the BloodBath (tm) begin!

Note that the game was not designed to run in the server/client mode. Every player has to synchronize his game before it could be started eventually.

If the networking session ever runs out of sync, try running the setup (used to start BloodBath matches) with one of the following command line parameters

-broadcast
-masterslave

or try to reconfigure your graphic options to decrease the CPU load (e.g., choose lower resolution, minimize the use of details and gore).

General

If the game pauses during startup, displaying error message stating that there is too little memory, that's because with its default settings DOSbox allocates only 16 MB of RAM. To avoid seeing the message informing you of such condition, open your dosbox.conf configuration file, find section [dosbox] and alter the value of the memsize parameter to be at least 38.

Furthermore, here is what seems to be optimal setting for Blood:

memsize=64 (example value, see above) 
core=dynamic (anything else makes the game crawl, even on powerful machines)
cycles=max (being pretty much advanced game, Blood requires quite a horsepower to run smoothly)
scaler=none (since you would want to set the high resolution in-game)
output=overlay (or surface, using opengl makes the game unreasonably fuzzy and hard-to-read)

To further tweak and measure game performance, use the RATE in-game cheat code, that will force displaying the framerate on-screen.

--Cachibache 19:03, 1 March 2010 (UTC)