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Screen artifacts while playing gobman

Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2015 12:17 pm
by gavros777
I love that game but every 5 to 10 minutes it will get covered in graphical artifacts making me unable to play it.
Can someone inform me what i need to do?

Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2015 12:38 pm
by MrFlibble
Well, the first question to you would obviously be, what do you use to run the game? DOSBox? DOS on original hardware? In a virtual machine?

Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2015 12:47 pm
by gavros777
Hello, i'm using dosbox 0.74
Another problem i noticed sometimes the police ghosts disappear from their box and only the red ghost is out and running. It's another glitch that gets only solved by restarting the whole game.

Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2015 4:20 pm
by Quadko
Sounds like a game bug, but maybe affected by DosBox setup. Are you comfortable editing the dosbox.config? Docs: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf

Generic options to try:
  • Turn sound off in the game, if you can. That's a common cause of game bugs in DosBox. (Other tweaks may let you turn sound back on even if this fixes things. Good to know if this helps.)
  • Turn off sound emulation in dosbox
  • Switch cputype - try options like 386_slow
  • Slow DosBox cycles down (try 7800) - maybe it's just running too quickly and causing trouble? Games often count during idle time, and if it wraps the counter variable bad things can happen.
  • Switch core to normal or try other options.
  • Switch machine type (video card) from default to svga_paradise, etc. Try some different ones
I don't know if these will help with GobMan, but that's where I'd start.

And MobyGames says it's a 1992 VGA game, so that's late 286, mid 386, early 486 territory; CPUs running around 33mhz as I recall, which internet says should be around cyles=fixed 7800 speed, if you need a place to start. Faster than that is more than the game was designed for or tested with, probably!