DOS Games Discussion

I have been trying without luck to get the game Ripper (Take 2 Interactive) to install and play on Windows XP. The message that I have received is that I need to load a VESA driver onto my computer. The problem is that I have an Intel 82865G Graphics Controller which is not supported by UNIVBE. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what VESA drivers will work on this video card? I have already tried DosBox which is how I got the VESA message in the first place.

If not, what would be a good video card to get?

I recently ran into the same problem. I spent a while figuring out how to get Ripper to run in XP so I'll share with you what I did so you can get it going...

First, you need the v1.03 patch http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/ri ... id=2566421 which fixes the VESA issue. Your graphic controller should not be a problem at all, since it is light years better than what this game was designed for back in the day Extract this patch in 'C:\RIPPER' or wherever you plan to install the game.

With this patch, you should be able to install/run Ripper in any of 3 ways: From the Windows XP "DOS" shell, using DOSBox, or using VDMSound. Running from the command prompt under Windows XP actually worked surprisingly well but the sound runs to fast so it is hard to understand. I worked with DOSBox for an eternity to get the optimal settings but even then, the sound was too slow and so the speech would break occasionally. So I finally tried it with VDMSound, which will run it in a DOS shell (like the first method) but will actually slow down the sound so that it plays perfectly. I would highly recommend using VDMSound but if you prefer DOSBox you can give it a try and it will hopefully work better for you. If you choose to use VDMSound then make sure to use it for the install files as well as the game file. You might also have good luck with dropping the performace to low in order to make sure the sound doesn't skip.

To install the game, run INSTALLV.BAT (this will turn off that VESA requirement, you'll notice there is also a RIPPERV.BAT that will be used to run the game). This *should* work for you. Install the game to the same place as the v1.03 files. Next, you'll want setup the sound and video settings with SETUPV.BAT. The sound settings will be whatever VDMSound sets them to (SBPRO IRQ 7 (or 5) and DMA 1) and you'll probably want to set the CDROM speed to the highest value and the video to FULL.

You can now apply the v1.05 patch before loading the game, not sure what it fixes but you might as well have the latest updates: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/ri ... id=2565944 Now you can run the game... I think I tried loading RIPPERV.BAT with VDMSound and it didn't work so I ended up loading the game with RIPPER.EXE and then in the VDMSound settings I added the parameters '/v /v3' (from RIPPERV.BAT) and it seemed to work fine. Hopefully that works for you too.

Let me know if you run into any problems. I've probably been there too so I should be able to help. Good luck!

Aaron

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, I tried what you asked and the dos window that opens goes blank. What sort of computer do you have and what sort of setting do you have for your config.sys and autoexec.bat files?

I have a P4 ~3 Ghz running Windows XP.

Are you referring to the config.sys and autoexec.bat that one of the emulators lets you configure? In that case, I didn't make any changes to them.

Did you not have any success with VDMSound? Maybe we can compare settings in our VDMSound shortcuts, since I know mine works.

I really hope you can get this going because my wife and I are still playing it and it is really fun.

Aaron

Hey, I'm dying to play RIPPER again as I never completed it. When I first got it, I was actually a little kid ha ha ha!

Anyway, I've installed the game and did the sound test, my sound worked fine straight away so was chuffed about that.

When I click the ripper.exe or ripperv.exe the dos window comes up, then a quick flash as tho the game is loading then right back to the folder and nowt's happening.

I think you'll be able to help me out, would really appreciate! I'm not too jazzy with DOS so if I have to start it up in DOS I would love some help...

Thanks a lot.

the installv.bat and ripperv.bat must be edited so that the paths specified in them match your current games installed location or else the batch files will fail as they wont find what there looking for.

Yup done that. Also followed this guide which was all working right to the end where it asked me for the damn disc...

http://home.earthlink.net/~infernofilec ... n%20Levels

I thought I'd post this message I sent to Falconer in case it can help glyco0 out:

So did you use VDMSound? Once you setup your Ripperv.exe with VDMSound then the shortcut it creates should be what you use to load the game. You probably already did that, so if you did then the only other thing I can think of without knowing anything else about your configuration is that you need one of the cds in your cd drive. That's happened to me a couple times, where it just quits back right away to Windows, and sure enough I hadn't put one of the discs in my drive. If you do have the cd in your drive, perhaps you didn't setup which drives would be used for which disc, that was done in the Installv.exe program. Make sure that is correct.

If all that doesn't help, then uncheck the VDMSound option to close the window on exit so that when the game crashes, the window will stick around so can see what error it gave. I did that to find out that it didn't recognize the 2nd cd drive I had told it to use. After I fixed it, the game loaded just fine. BTW, if you have 2 cd drives, I would highly recommend configuring both of them for the game so there is only minimal disc swapping during the game. A quick way to do that is to open up the config file in the RIPPER folder (I don't remember the name of it, and I'm at work so I can't look it up right now ). It has all the discs 1-6 listed and the drive letter that you will use for each. Just update it to how you want your drives configured,

Let me know how everything goes...

Aaron

Well, Aaron's final piece of advise helped me out and it's now working! The process I followed to get it working is below and I am a complete DOS n00b! I've never used it but this simple step by step guide worked to the T.

You've already got the links to download the Patches from Gamespot.com so get Patch 1.03 and 1.05 downloaded and ready.

When people started mentioning VDMSound I had no idea what the hell that was so after some searching I found this page:

http://buildxp.deathmask.net/

All I did from there was find out where to get it, download it and how to install it. I didn't follow the rest as I wasn't setting up those games, I just needed to get VDMSound on my system.

After you've done that, you can honestly follow this step-by-step process below every letter and it will get your game working.

http://home.earthlink.net/~infernofilec ... n%20Levels

Actually, I better mentioned that I started at Act 2 "Setting The Scene" as that's what applied to me.

After all this tweaking, editing, overwiting etc everything seemed to go according to plan and then it said can now run the game. Alas, I tried and it asked for the CD. I got a message from Aaron and he said to check Ripper was assigned to the drive that my disc was in and behold, it wasn't set. Set the drive using the Installv.exe or Setupv.exe (I don't remember which one but whichever gives you the option) and it's a case of clicking on CD1 and changing the drive letter.

Last night I played Ripper again! Woo hoo! Hope that helps

My first ripper cd has a small crack in it. Its just big enough though because the cd wont run. Is there anyway that I can get around this?

a) Ditch pirating software and live a goody2shoes life.

b) Get better CDs.

c) Use a DVD.

d) Use Overburning if you're feeling lucky.

e) ignore LarryL.

no one has ripper over the internet

Hi there. My first entry by the way.

1. to sanchenuss: I wouldn't say so... Ever heard of torrent?

2. I was having trouble getting ripper to run properly. I simply started it from the desktop. First everything seemed to work fine, but when the first dialogues came up, I could not understand one single word becaus the skipped the whole time. I tried about 1billion+ search phrases over google and on that way also passed this side.

I'm feeling like having to help after I today succeeded in running ripper properly from Windows XPHomeSP2.

What you have to do to get it run:

1. download and install the free DosBox program here:
http://www.msu.edu/~yootaewo/20071128.rar

2. you will be needing the Vesa-Driver, too:
http://ykhwong.x-y.net/cvs/frame.html
click on "DATA" and then go to the second page and scroll down.

Another good clue: get the images of Ripper in the above mentioned way or create images from your ripper-cds by yourselve. Install free virtual CloneDrive Software and set up 6 virtual drives and load the images into them. Run Ripper-Setup in the DosBox and assign the drive letters of the virtual drives (you will have to mount these in DosBox, but I'm sure you'll manage to set that program up - easy to understand)

Finally: Run the VesaDriver in the Dosbox, mount the images by typing the driveletter of each once (e.g. G:<Enter> and then confirm you want to mount it). Get into the ripper directory, e.g. cd c:\ripper (huuu... some frightening messages come up) und run ripper.exe

Thats it.

I followed the steps posted by inferno to get ripper to work on xp. I did everything he said. I got to the installation and that worked. Riper even works. When I tried to run the game though I got the error message

"Error reading header records from library interfac.pl."

Can anyone help out