DF-21 Forums

[Patrick Haslow]

OK. This is really pissing me off.

I am trying, trying, trying to finish The Dark Tide III. I was cruising along, doing fine, when suddenly I added some sectors and INF and started up my .GOB. I approach an Imperial Officer in the game, only to hear, "SSSTAAAWWWWPPPP WWWWHHHAAAIIRR YYYOOOUUU AAAWWWRRR!"

What the hell?

Now I notice all the sounds in the game are playing at a slow speed. I never had this problem under bona fide OS 9. I go back and load up my previous .GOB backup of DTIDE3. Its playing with slow sounds now too! I try playing parts of DARK.GOB- and the same thing! I clean out every excess file from my Dark Forces Data folder and try playing DARK.GOB again- its still slow!

Guys, I really want to finish The Dark Tide III, but this crap is getting ridiculous. The GOB plays fine on my PC, but I don't want to abandon the Mac version. I am assuming its just my Mac doing this, so I guess other Macs should play it. Anyone have a suggestion as how to fix this?

[The MAZZTer]

Bah, at first I thought it was a Windows XP thing, and I was gonna suggest VDMSound. :p Guess I need to pay more attention to thread titles.

But if it hasn't done it before, I say go ahead and keep making it, and ignore the error.

To be sure, make a new one sector level to test to see if the sounds are screwed up there too.

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[Patrick Haslow]

No you don't understand. The sounds are screwed up in EVERY POSSIBLE GOB FILE.

Just found something else weird. Normally I leave my .INF file outside the GOB in the DF DATA folder, so I can edit it in a text editor while I work on the sectors in Dark Forge. I only add it to the GOB before it is released. This way the DF application is ableto run the GOB as long as the INF file is there in the folder too. But now the DF app isn't finding my .INF file.

The annoyance continues. Its like the whole thing is breaking down.

Yeah I will keep making it. I suspect my Mac is the only one not playing DF properly.

[DF4GL4ever]

Well I'll be ready to test it out if you need help. I just upgraded to Tiger 10.4.2 and DF still works great under Classic (although it's nice to be able to boot into OS 9 still).

Did you zap the DF prefs and maybe reinstall the raw files?

[Patrick Haslow]

Yeah, I tried reinstalling everything. Deleted the prefs too. Nothing helps. Even the cutscenes voices are in slo-mo. It's not a problem with The Dark Tide, its a problem with DF in classic mode, so sending somebody a GOB file isn't going to fix anything.

[Burning Gundam]

Hmm... makes me glad I kept my G3

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[Tom Resnick]

Hey Patrick, you can always send it to me, and I'll try it on my Mac - we'll find out if it's just yours.

(Oh man PLEASE let him fall for it so I can see it early)

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[Patrick Haslow]

Wait, let me think...NO.

The strange thing is that now I have absolutely nothing to reliably playback sounds in Dark Forces. The Mac is too slow, and the PC under XP is obviously too fast. I have been testing DTIII in XP using VDM sound, its pretty good, but long VOCs with dialogue and cutscene dialogue skip ahead of themselves, so sometimes a sentence that should be heard, "we'll bomb that place flat!" will sound like "we'll bomb flat!" This is disconcerting because it means a lot of hard work put in for voice acting will be wasted, forcing players to instead just read the subtitles.

[The MAZZTer]

http://junk.mzzt.net/darkvdms.zip

Try this for Dark Forces / VDMS. It's a custom VDMS.INI file that might fix your sound problem, at least partially. Unzip it into your DARK directory and run the batch, it should launch VDMS and then Dark Forces.

The general idea is to use Wave for sound instead of DirectSound. It seems to work better for DF.

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[Patrick Haslow]

Thanks I will give that a try. In other news, the sound problem in MacOS X Classic mode has mysteriously repaired itself!

[Burning Gundam]

If you restarted the computer, some problems I've had seem to automatically correct themselves by doing so. I'm sure there was just a read error of some sort.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[Patrick Haslow]

Maybe, but this problem went away after dozens of restarts.

[Burning Gundam]

Interesting....

I'm sure it was just a bug that corrected itself then.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[TheIntellectual]

I'm moving to college soon and switching to OSX (Yay, Powerbook!), and I was curious what I have to do to get Dark Forces working on my mac. I have the PC version... I heard that if I get files from the PC version and combine them with the mac demo I can make some magic. Is there a mac equivalent for vdmsound?

[Patrick Haslow]

No, the sound should work fine on its own. I think Darth Oosha was the one who managed to run DF using the PC files and the Mac demo, but I don't remember how he managed it. You should do a search here of the forums.

[Darth Oosha]

I don't remember how I managed it either. I guess if I had to repeat it, I'd try something like this:

- Download the MacDF demo.
- Download the MacDF 1.2 patch, to replace the demo app.
- Dump the PC LFDs on top of the Mac ones.
- Merge the Mac GOBs into the PC ones, so the hi-res HUD overwrites the lo-res version.
- Use trial and error from there, figuring out what doesn't work and correcting it.
- Was there a problem with CR/LFs in CUTSCENE.LST? Try doing stuff with that file if you continue to experience no mission select screen.

Alternatively, buy the Mac version for like $1 on eBay or Amazon. You'll get more out of it, like the game demo(s) on the CD, and possibly a box and manual. Personally, I think that sounds more fun.

[TheIntellectual]

Will the mac version work with Tiger? For some reason, Classic mode is really messed up.... I've still got to find a way to get it or something. I tried running something in classic mode and it said it couldn't find it.

Yeah, about the only real reason why I want to get DF on my mac is so I can play DTIII whenever it's released...

[Burning Gundam]

Unfortunately no

If it did, I would probably not bother with the G3 I use anymore. I'll probably be hanging on to that machine for a while.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[DF4GL4ever]

I run Dark Forces under Classic with Tiger all the time on my G4. Luckily my G4 boots into OS9 so that helps too. I backed up my os9 System Folder before doing an erase and install of Tiger, then put the old classic System Folder on and everything was all set.

[TheIntellectual]

Aha! I'm officially an idiot....

I bought a G4 Powerbook, so no OS 9 for me.

But then I realized... my dorm has a computer lab.... which means when I want to play DF I can just hijack one of those.

Obviously their graphics cards are non-existant, but that's actually a plus with games like Dark Forces.

Now all we need is Dark Tide III.... heh.

[Burning Gundam]

Well, I'd say DT3 is a shot in the dark from here on

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[Patrick Haslow]

Why would you say that? Didn't you read my project update?

[Burning Gundam]

Oh snap! Does this mean in a couple of weeks? That would be friggin awesome, especially since I'm taking the Fall of from school to make some money (Oh boy is Christmas going to be fun -_-). Hopefully I can get a majority of my projects done before the end of November because after that I will be too busy to do work of any hobby.

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.

[Patrick Haslow]

Well no, not that soon. I made that update before Map-Review's editing contest was announced. I will be working on that until September 3rd, but after that I am going to finish off DTIII once and for all (at least to the point where I await Matt's cutscenes).

[Burning Gundam]

I knew there qould be a catch...

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I don't think outside the box... I customize it.