Jane's Longbow 1 on Win98

[Aldeb]

Hello. big trouble with ah64d longbow on win98 virtual machine. Whenever I start a mission, the controls are erratic - the chopper pans to the right up, spins wildly, the collective goes way up and I can't control anything. Keyboard doesn't respond, and when I hook up a joystick the game crashes. Any ideas?

[Quadko]

Try the dos version and use dosbox? MobyGames appears to say it had versions for Dos and Windows. (Might be in same package.)

Problem could be using the dos version on windows. Problem could be Win98 not liking the VM that much (for games). Problem could be Win98 never ran the game stably and you need Win95.

Searching for game name plus dosbox says the game works, and has some config tweaks, depending on the exact game in that family that you're talking about...

[Aldeb]

It's win version i'm using. ok, i'll try the dos version. longbow gold has both win and dos. But you know, windows version gets more performance over dosbox with these 3d games

[Quadko]

...when it works. But joysticks+windows were still weird in the Win95/98 timeframe. Wasn't really until XP came out that it settled down all the way into today's stability, IIRC.

[Rwolf]

Do you have any extra devices hooked up that may take the controls?
I have some older games that will start spinning if I have my TrackIR device active.

[Aldeb]

Nope. Win 98 virtual machine, with or without joystick attached = chopper seizures

In XP the game doesn't start at all unfortunately

[Aldeb]

Well in the end it ran on DosBox... shame it doesn't work directly in win98 -fps in dosbox are really low

[Quadko]

Glad it's at least working!

If you haven't already tried them, there might be some dosbox config file setting that would increase the framerate, from setting [cpu] cycles=max to changing between the emulated vga cards using [dosbox] machine = * to see if any are better for this game.

And of course, the better the computer dosbox is run on, the faster "max" is.

If you want to play with the config file, here's the documentation:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf

Or you could use a front end, but I don't have any experience with those to make recommendations.

And here's someone using an old version of dosbox (so the exact advice might not be 100% relevant any more) and fiddling with the dosbox.conf file to get the best gameplay for his setup:
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=8502

[Aldeb]

Small update.

apparently the problem was that the joystick wasn't correctly calibrated in win98, which is why the game got incorrect signals

Although this still doesn't explain the game constantly crashing to the desktop (most likely Longbow doesn't recognize the joystick model, being such an old dos game... and modern controller)

thx for the help

[Quadko]

Good tip, forgot all about that being necessary back then. If you get more, please keep sharing!

Hope you're having fun with it!

[tienkhoanguyen]

Jesus Christ!hehe

Speaking of gamepads and such, MS-DOS actually reads the gamepads differently so it makes porting it over to DOSBox 0.74 harder but maybe not impossible. I am doing mainly programs that work specifically for MS-DOS. So my goal is to try to program for MS-DOS however making it compatible with DOSBox 0.74 if necessary. During my work, I found DOSBox 0.74 to be slightly off from MS-DOS 6.22 through my gamepad attempts.

<snip>

Crapity Crap crap
Consider this a warning to you Tien ~ Wally
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