Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!mirror!ssi3b1!ssibbs!jlockhar From: jlockhar@ssibbs.UUCP (John Lockhart) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Bard's Tale II on speed (kinda LONG) Summary: Bard's Tale II - Problems with 1.3 Message-ID: <46@ssibbs.UUCP> Date: 30 Nov 88 03:48:54 GMT References: <2357@cbnews.ATT.COM> Distribution: na Organization: Sangho's Public Access Unix, Cambridge, MA Lines: 51 In article <2357@cbnews.ATT.COM>, wbt@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) writes: >[stuff deleted] > Soooo,... tonight I'll start experimenting with ways to speed it up. > I'd also appreciate any help anyone out there may care to offer. > > My system is an Amiga 2000 with 2 megs of expansion RAM. I'm operating > under 1.2 (out here in the sticks (! ? ) most of us are *still* waiting [more deletions] > Naturally, the character disk must be left as is, so you can save your > game. Has anyone tried this ? > Bill Thacker att!cbnews!wbt I use a combination of hard drive, RAM:, and messy bug workaround to get it to work reasonably well. I believe I had to alter the binary to get rid of some hard-coded paths and replace 'em with logical names, preserving the original string length. I did this only after I had problems doing it the obvious way (copying it to a directory on the hard drive, doing ASSIGNs, and trying to run it unsuccessfully, as below). Not nice, but it works - kind of. First, my system is an A2000 with Micron/ASDG 2M RAM, A2090, ST251 hard drive, flickerFixer, internal floppy, and external floppy, running under 1.3 AmigaDOS. Usual things I run are: FF, WShell, MachII, WorkBench, ARexx, ConMan, RAD:, and various ARP commands (basically rm, cp, mv-type stuff; some ARP stuff breaks with 1.3). Bard's Tale II does not work properly. After booting normally, I do the necessary ASSIGNs ("bardsdk:" to ff1:games/bt and "Destiny Knight Character Disk:" to ff1:games/bt/chars, where ff1: is the FFS partition on the hard drive). I then CD to ff1:games/bt and type "bard". Guru!! *However,* Bard's Tale works perfectly well if you do *nothing* else before starting it up [I found this out before altering the binary]. So I've created a special "Bard's Boot" disk for which the startup-sequence copies necessary executables to RAM: and starts the program with a RUN command, and then goes about the business of setting up the hard drive, etc. I still keep much of the picture data and all of the character data safely on the hard drive -- it does the ASSIGNs before BT2 gives up looking. I called EA and they said, "We're looking into it." Sounds like a line to me, especially after the demise of Archon for lack of support. But who knows, at least it isn't copy-protected (hooray). Does anyone have a better solution than this workaround? -- --- John Lockhart ___________________________________________________________________ ...{mit-eddie,pyramid,datacube}!mirror!ssi3b1!ssibbs!jlockhar jlockhar@ssibbs.UUCP or jwl@feanor.stanford.edu