UfoMan

I do believe that the: x3svga.zip is important for the VGA thing to work right. I do remember that some people had problems with the mouse, and that there were various mouse fixes around, but I was lucky and DosBox 7.0 handled the mouse just fine on my machines. I do believe that it's really possible that DosBox 7.2 would be different than 7.0. Each one of them is slightly different, and some work better for the purpose than others. I do remember how lucky I felt when I finally loaded it up and it ran without crashing, and it was actually good. It was as if I had experienced a modern day miracle, and I was crossing my fingers hoping to be able to duplicate it and explain it. I also believe that it's best to be doing this on Windows XP, because I don't think any of this will work if you try it on Vista. I also thought it was an amazing miracle that Mickal put out a Virtual Machine way of doing it on the same day. If this fails or if DosBox 7.2 is no longer able to do it right, you still can try the Virtual Machine route. If DosBox no longer allows you to mount drives and run the utilities in DOS compatibility mode, then there's nothing I can do about that, except to say that if you figure out how to get it to work, be sure to report back and tell people how you did it, so that others can benefit. Reading and understanding the DosBox instructions was also of great help! Along with using its built-in help button to get it to give me sample instructions that I could then modify and use. I just know how I was able to do it, but if you are trying to put things onto another drive besides C drive, or trying to use one of those new mobos that don't any longer support DOS, or trying to use graphics drivers that no longer support the legacy stuff, or some such -- I'm guessing here -- then I can imagine that I would be impossible to get this to work right, even if you follow all the instructions exactly. And, then it's going to require effort and experimentation on your part to see if you too can get lucky and actually get it to work. That was the frustrating part about DOS and some of this stuff -- what works for me is pretty much guaranteed not to work for you, and its corollary, murphys law says that you are most likely to mess it all up and get it wrong no matter how good and detailed the instructions are. You'll have to keep trying it until you get it to work or until you give up. And, you might want to start over from scratch and try it again? The next time in the process, you might do or understand something that you overlooked before. And, you will also have to hope that someone with more skills and knowledge might come along with some real suggestions. Because, I wasn't able to see from what you wrote a quick and easy solution to your problem.

I can't believe it has been over two months already. I used to be a DOS and Netware Programmer 20 years ago, and knowing how to get around in DOS kind of stuck with me, which made it possible for me to imagine and document this workaround. But, if you go switching paths or switching stuff around or installing into different folders or directories or go installing onto other hard drives, you kind of have to know the DOS or the theory behind it all in order to tweak it all. That's the weakness of doing it this way, the DosBox way, as you kind of have to know DOS and how it works if you want to venture from the path. Many thanks to the others who stepped in and provided the extras and the nitty gritty details and the additional workarounds -- kudos to Gimli and Bomb Bloke.

-- That sounds like some of the greatest news or the greatest plan I have heard yet! I want a PM or a link when that's ready so that I can get a copy and study it, that's for sure!

I have been lurking around the Supreme Commander forums, and somebody there was suggesting that I underclock my video card in order to get Supreme Commander to stop crashing. So, I did. I haven't played Supreme Commander all that much, as I'm playing UFO Aftershock right now with my spare time, so I don't know if it made a big difference for Supreme Commander, but the Supreme Commander games I have played so far haven't crashed on me, which is a good sign. But guess what! I haven't had a single UFO Aftershock crash after underclocking my video card! And, I have played many many hours of UFO Aftershock after underclocking my video card. I was getting UFO Aftershock crashes every twenty minutes or so, and now I haven't had a one. I can finally understand and relate when you guys say that UFO Aftershock has never crashed on you. Now, it has never crashed on me either after I underclocked my video card below factory settings. I'm starting to guess that UFO Aftershock and Supreme Commander are part of that group of borderline software that just doesn't run right with SuperClocked video cards or any sort of overclocking whatsoever. Hundreds of other programs have run without any problem whatsoever for the past year or so since I bought my video card, but UFO Aftershock, and I suppose Supreme Commander as well, they just don't like the default factory settings of my video card. Underclocking seems to be working miracles with the buggiest or crashiest games I have ever owned. I really really like UFO Aftershock, so I'm extra pleased that it isn't crashing any more. I believe I'm now actually going to be able to finish Aftershock all the way to the end, and then try some of ShadowWarrior's goodies. So, thank you to the people over at Supreme Commander forums for finally helping me to find a way to get rid of all the UFO Aftershock crashing! I figured it was probably right to come in and spread the gospel, or the good news, here as well, even if it has only been a day since I last reported in. What a difference a day can make!

It comes patched to version 1.2 from Gamer's Gate, but still crashes a lot. I know that getting rid of the StarForce is one of the tips for improving performance and decreasing crashes. I guess I'm in the need of links for ways to reduce Aftershock crashes. -- I have dozens of games that have never crashed at all. But, there are three so far that are indeed my Nemesis. -- 1) UFO Aftermath would crash about once a month on Windows XP. That I can live with. 2) Supreme Commander crashes on average about once an hour -- it was BETA material upon release. It gets better and better with each patch, and the recent 3251 patch is the best of all. 3) UFO Aftershock 1.2 can crash as often as every 20 minutes, and it can crash anywhere. I haven't seen any working solution to that problem, except you have to move slow and not rush things, especially on the screen where you equip the squads. Also, there are more 'non-crashing' bugs that have surfaced in UFO Aftershock than any game I have played in years -- rescuees located inside of mountains or in the air or on a ledge where you can't get to them, a Laputa that shows up on the other side of the world after doing a mission, and the periodic report that it cannot uncompress a file and then quits.

I have never done alcohol before, on computers or in real life. I would probably need a bit of a tutorial or a link to one someplace, when it comes to Alcohol 120. Is Alcohol a freeware program or something you guys have bought? Studying that side of the thing could probably take me as long as my long convoluted DOSBox list took me, knowing me and how slow I sometimes am to getting things going. -- Hopefully, when Aralez gets it working, Aralez will come back in here with a more detailed tutorial, including links for the Alcohol ISO image side of things, along with tips as to what he did to get around it or what he did to implement it. -- X-Com Apocalypse just wasn't like the others. For the other DOS games, I just created separate DOSBox shortcut for each game, changed cycles=max in the master dosbox.conf file, and they all ran just fine after getting them properly installed. It was just so much more simple with the other DOS games -- fire and forget. With X-Com Apocalypse, you have to do so much more, either Alcohol ISO image for Virtual PC 2007, or the long convoluted bug fixing route that I went through to get it to run under DOSBox, if you want it to run and run completely from the hard drive.

If you get it working, Aralez, take notes and do a follow up report. Whatever you get hung up or got hung up on will most likely be the things to hang me up as well. -- My DoSBox thing worked wonderfully for me and X-Com Apocalypse, but it is indeed infinitely more complex than what this Virtual PC 2007 route seems to be. It's just that, if it's no longer broken, then there's no real pressing need for me to fix it, now. http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/index...?showtopic=6357 My longer more convoluted method has one advantage in that you aren't burning out one CD drive after another playing X-Com Apocalypse, as my method put it all onto hard drive and ran it from there, which is nice. In the past 10 years, I must have burned through a couple of CD-Rom drives, just burned them out, by playing X-Com Apocalypse, as that game has the CD-Rom spinning all the time getting hot, if you play the music as I do. Instead, now, with my DOSBox method, the Hard Drive is spinning all the time, which a hard drive was designed to do. Having it all on the hard drive in the end is really the only benefit or beneficial side effect to my DOSBox 0.70 method that I got to work. BUT, the Virtual PC 2007 seems like a much easier method from what I have read so far.

I, too, was one of those who refused to buy UFO Aftershock unless I could get it without the StarForce. Gamer's Gate was the answer. It all goes on the hard disk and is played from the hard disk. I also had the usual grief getting it downloaded and installed, having to redownload the thing multiple times until I got one that stuck. -- I must say that UFO Aftershock is my favorite one of the bunch. That thing was addictive as heck! Nice graphics, nice music, nice looking tactical missions, nice detailed base management, a huge research tree, and a nice package all around. Of course, to get any real work done, I have to force myself to limit myself to a mission or two a day. I must also say that UFO Aftershock crashes to desktop more than any other XP game I have ever played. It crashes every 20 minutes of gameplay on average. And, UFO Aftershock crashes anywhere in the game, on the manufacture screen and the Squad Screen and the Geoscape and in the Tactical Missions. It is as if Altar knew that it was going to crash a lot on different machines, and for a game that crashes so much, it's been very playable, as the game autosaves before every tactical mission so that you always have a safe stable place to go back to, and it seems to have been designed to be very good at recovering from a save. A saved game is your anchor or safety line in this game. There's also a nice selection of bugs like rescuee's trapped in mountains or floating in the air where you can't get at them, and the periodic 'uncompress' error where their huge zip file has a file that can't be uncompressed and leads to an error message and a crash to desktop. Rebooting and reloading and refusing a mission and going a different route seems to get you past most of these, again, the saved game saves your butt and keeps the UFO Aftershock game going so that the addiction really takes hold. And, thank goodness, it doesn't seem to mess up too much or too often on the Geoscape Strategic Screen while you are fast forwarding to the next mission. It messes up more while tabbing to other screens. -- Before UFO Aftershock, the only game on my machine that was in a 'permanent' state of being BETA material and occasionally crashing on Windows XP was UFO Aftermath. UFO Aftermath 1.4 would crash once a month on my XP machine. UFO Aftershock crashes a hundred times more, about three crashes an hour, although occasionally, I would get lucky and have it go for an hour without crashing, if I got stuck in a particularly long tactical mission for example. UFO Aftershock has been really nice about NOT crashing during tactical missions, with it only crashing a couple of times during tactical missions so far. Most of the UFO Aftermath crashes comes while loading files or uncompressing files or loading up missions. Just save a lot and reboot and reload -- that's the way I seem to play these games anyway. There are only a few bugs that the saved games seem to bring back, like files that can't be uncompressed or a Laputa that disappears and suddenly shows up on the other side of the Earth. Only Altar was in the habit of releasing buggy software for Windows XP and never really ever getting around to actually fixing all the bugs and CTD's in the subsequent patches. And, UFO Aftershock is actually a hundred times worse for CTD's than UFO Aftermath was. Altar did break the promise there, when they said that Aftershock was going to crash less than Aftermath did, and to wait and see how much better and how much crash-less UFO Aftershock was going to be. We waited, and their promises to us were not fulfilled in that regard, as UFO Aftershock crashes infinitely more than Aftermath ever did. -- BUT, UFO Aftershock is very addictive, and I really liked it despite the continuous crashing. I figure that I must be about midway through the game. Gonna be taking it slow. My biggest hope with UFO Aftershock is that I will be able to play it all the way through before running into a bug or a crash or a file it can't uncompress that I can't get past with a saved game. I hope there isn't a permanent obstacle there to finishing the game to the end, as I have actually learned to live with the UFO Aftershock crashes. I know, that's probably hard for some of you who know me to believe, that I have actually learned to live with the UFO Aftershock crashes. But, UFO Aftershock is indeed my favorite of the bunch so far. It's as if the game were made just for me. I was one of those who always played X-Com Apocalypse in Real-Time mode all the time. And, I tended to like UFO Apocalypse gameplay the best of the bunch, and UFO Aftershock is the most like UFO Apocalypse, in my opinion, so I also really like UFO Aftershock. It's just too bad that Altar never finished UFO Aftershock and that Aftershock remains in a permanent BETA state in need of further bug fixes, as I think Aftershock is the one that comes closest to what I personally have been looking for and waiting for since UFO Apocalypse. I just liked and like UFO Aftershock a lot, despite all the constant crashing. -- If Altar stays true to form, I suppose Afterlight will crash more often than UFO Aftermath did, too -- true to Altar's legacy. But, I have recently been curious as to whether Afterlight will be anything that I like, for obvious reasons, because I liked UFO Aftershock so much. But, after the bankruptcy, maybe we got a new Altar? I would be nice to have an Altar that actually patches away the CTD's and gets them all killed before it stops patching the game. It really does seem to me that UFO Aftershock was made especially for UFOMan. Out of all the UFO Clones out there UFO Aftershock so far has come the closest to being what I was looking for and waiting for, ten years after UFO Apocalypse. Late, I know, but I had to wait for a version of UFO Aftershock without the StarForce, as I'm one of those boycotting StarForce games, and I also had to wait until I got a price for Aftershock that I was willing to pay, as they never really finished the game with the proper post-release support, another area where Alter broke it's promise to us, when they told us that they would be doing much better post-release support for Aftershock than what they did with Aftermath. Despite Altar's failings in regards to properly finishing and supporting Aftershock, I still really really like and liked Aftershock a lot!

http://illegalyouth.blogspot.com/2007/05/u...als-review.html -- Yes, nice balanced review there. Chaos Concepts has gotten permission from the modders over there to incorporate the mods directly into the next patch thus saving the coding time, and making the patch come sooner, and thus making the game more like what we wanted it to be. That's what they really need most now, is mods fixing all the things we don't like about the game, and there are already lots of mods. They also need more complete lists of where UFO ET falls short of expectations, so that CC and the modders can go in and make it even more like X-Com. UFO ET is the thing that comes the closest to being like X-Com, and what they need is lists and input where it falls short, so that they can work on making it more like what we want it to be. http://www.ufo-extraterrestrials.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

-- Yes, I hear ya too. I spent days trying to get DOSBox 0.70 to run X-Com Apocalypse after getting DoSBox to easily run the other DOS games that I had purchased 15 or 20 years ago. I'm just more eager to go in and play it now and re-experience it again. But, there are clients I have who are still using some of the old DOS and NETWARE software that I wrote 15 years ago, and that Virtual PC 2007 might be handy for them to run some of those old programs and do so cheaply -- if it will actually run on Windows XP Home Edition. Up to now, they have been dual booting or triple booting into Win98SE or DOS on their XP machines using System Commander. But, System Commander is expensive, and hasn't always been perfectly reliable either. In fact, Windows XP is extremely predatory and often seems to reach right through the System Commander barriers and hidden files and picks off your other operating systems that are out there. So, if using System Commander, it's best to install DOS first in the first 512 MB of hard drive as that's the only place DOS will run, and then XP, and then the other operating systems. I had XP reach out and wipe out all of my Win98 partitions and claim it as its own, yet it left the DOS, while under System Commander. I don't know if any of that is interesting to anybody or not. But, I do know that Microsoft designed XP to actually be predatory and kill some of its older OS's whenever XP gets the chance to do so, so it's kind of amazing that they are finally making and releasing a free Virtual PC program. If I can get some of the legacy DOS stuff running in Virtual PC 2007 on my client's XP machines, then that would answer a need and save some money in the long run, instead of dual booting. So, this Virtual PC program is welcome news, not just for the X-Com Apocalypse, but for other things as well! Anyway, it's definitely something that I must look into, now that I know that it exists. I do remember hearing about the Virtual PC long ago, but they were charging for it if memory serves, and it was more expensive than System Commander, and not as polished or refined, so we went with the System Commander at the time, and did the dual boot thing. But, if this Virtual PC 2007 runs on Vista, and if I and others can get it to run on XP Home Edition, then it is definitely the find of the year, that's for sure! If any of you get Virtual PC 2007 running under Windows XP Home Edition, be sure to report back here and let us know. And, I'll try to remember to do the same, although it might be awhile before I get to it, as I find myself rather far behind in my work recently, for some reason or another.

After reading the fine print, there's no indication that Windows Virtual PC 2007 actually supports Windows XP Home 32-bit, which is what all of my XP machines here and at the office currently are. So, if Virtual PC 2007 won't work with Windows XP Home 32-bit, then this solution won't work for me or my clients or my friends or my family. I'll have to stick with the other solution that I found. -- At least it allows me to download Virtual PC 2007, but I don't know if it will allow me to run it. -- Hopefully, Mackal, Pete, and the others who try this method will report back if any of them get Virtual PC 2007 running on Windows Home Edition. Microsoft made special effort to eliminate Windows Home Edition from their list of compatible OS's, when listing the compatabile OS's for Virtual PC 2007. -- It is clear Windows XP Home is the OS that Microsoft intends to kill off next. Microsoft announced that they intend to stop selling Windows XP a year from now. You won't even be able to buy XP a year from now. They are going to try to force us all over to Vista. So, I have been upgrading everyone's machine to Windows XP Home recently, to get it in before it is too late. At least this Virtual PC 2007 lists Vista as one of the OS that will support it, so you should be able to run Virtual PC 2007 on Vista. Has anyone gotten X-Com Apocalypse running on Vista yet, using Virtual PC 2007? I personally don't want to have anything to do with Vista until Vista Service Pack I has been released a year or two from now. I'm staying away from Vista, and telling my clients and family and friends to stay away from it too, until Service Pack I for Vista comes out. Hopefully, SP1 for Vista will be out before Microsoft stops making and selling Windows XP, a year from now. -- I don't have time to try Virtual PC 2007 today. I have wife hovering and people wanting attention right now and got to go eat. But, this has all been pretty cool the past couple of days -- getting Apoc onto XP! I never thought that I would ever be back here on these Strategy Core forums either, certainly not with X-Com Apocalypse as my focus. Good stuff all around, though. See ya!

Cool. It looks like my post actually inspired somebody else to post another solution. http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/index...?showtopic=6357 -- It has always bugged me that there was never an X3 solution that actually worked, when it came time to run X-Com Apoc on XP SP2 or Windows XP in general. Hints, but never any written solution. Now, two in the same day. -- I haven't tried this Virtual Machine solution, as I finally got a DoSBox 0.70 solution that worked for me and that I can live with, as I have all of my other purchased DOS games running under DoSBox 0.70 and can live with it. -- But, this Virtual Solution looks like a better solution if you can actually run some of these things without all the stutter or annoying sound glitches. -- I just never thought that Microsoft would ever put out their own 'DosBox' for XP, as they seemed pretty much determined to kill DOS and Win95 as quickly as they could kill them. -- Yes, you need to be running DOS or Win 95 or Win 98 in order for the original X-Com Apoc CD to recognize the operating system and not die or quit to desktop. The original CD won't recognize XP at all. Iirc, you could also get WinME to recognize the XCom Apocalypse CD, but WinME was never any good. It was Win98SE that was the jewel. Dual booting into Win98SE worked in the past for me, to run X-Com Apocalypse, but you always had the thing running too fast and the music was always off. And, I no longer have Win98SE on any of my dual booting machines any more. XP install or converting to NTFS killed them. Anyway, it's just nice to be able to actually run X-Com Apocalypse on XP. That's where I need it to be running nowadays. -- Unlike a lot of other people, if you remember me, you know that I actually liked X-Com Apocalypse a lot. It was probably my most favorite of the bunch. Apoc had like 7 different levels, flying armor, teleporters, and poppers. I and my friend put in a big plug for teleporters long ago. I still have that free rubber Popper toy on my shelf here right now looking at it. Microprose sent that Popper toy out to all of us who pre-orded X-Com Apocalypse if I remember correctly. Anyway, I'm one of those who has the collector's rubber Popper toy. I just always liked X3 Apoc, and I have wanted for years to be able to run the game on XP. Now it looks like we finally can! -- Hopefully, these recent posts will inspire other solutions as well. Downloading Virtual PC 2007 now.

In the subsequent time, I found that the default "cycles=auto" in DoSBox 0.70 dosbox.conf file might actually work a bit better on some of the machines than "cycles=max", when it comes to X-Com Apocalypse 1.0. This was the only game though, where the default 'cycles=auto' appeared to work better than 'cycles=max'. All the other games required 'cycles=max' to run their best. It's a simple exercise to create a custom dosbox.conf file in the C:\XCOMA folder and adjust the shortcut to point to it. Just be sure that you make a copy of the real dosbox.conf file and not the shortcut that is on the start menu. If you do the one on the start menu, that's the shortcut, and it will have you modifying the real thing. I actually have two separate X-Com Apocalypse shortcuts now, one for the default cycles=auto and one for my updated master cycles=max that I use for MOO, MOM, Empires Deluxe, X-Com, and TFTD. I have also taken the results of this whole and put it on two other XP SP2 machines in the house here, and XCom Apoc runs just fine. I don't need to play X3 right now, but my son is done with college and in between tasks, and he has been playing my copy of X-Com on his XP machine with DOSBox 0.70, and I wanted him to be able to have a go at my copy of Xcom Apoc. Anyway, the gist of this is that XCom Apoc is now working on my son's WinXP SP2 machine just fine now. And, I also backed it up onto my secondary WinXP work machine that I have in the office, and again, it ran just fine. So, the process seems to work on more than just my main XP machine. Good news. It seemed like Pete, Slaughter, and a whole bunch of the guys here had the original XCom Apoc and could never get it running on XP. Hopefully, they will now be able to take their CD and get it going, if they so desire. The key to it all is that you have to get it all onto the hard drive and running from the hard drive. If you don't, if it the startup or Autoplay accesses the original CD even for one second while starting the game, it will crash every time on XP. Only Win 95 and Win 98 and Win ME could seem to access the original CD without it crashing. It's as if the XCOM APOC CD startup checks the operating system, and when it runs into XP, something that it has never seen before, then it just automatically quits to the prompt and you are done before you start. I was pleased at how nicely it ran under DoSBox 0.70 on XP, when I got it all on the hard drive. The music is still a bit choppy at times, but then XCom Apoc music was always a bit choppy and weird, even running from the CD. You can turn it off if you want. Or you can make cycles=auto in dosbox.conf. You will have to experiment around to see what works best. Also, so far, none of the other XP machines that I have tried this on worked for SB16/AWE32 emulation. None of them. The other machines had onboard sound. My main machine is the only one with a Soundblaster card. I had to set them all to SOUNDBLASTER PRO. I tried to see if any of them would work as SB16. No go. There's something broken there too. Other DOS games will run SB16 mode under DoSBox 0.70, just not X3 Apoc. But, they also all work with the SOUNDBLASTER mono setting too. XCom Apocalypse is the hardest one to get going on XP. It had a dozen different bugs and glitches that all interfere or intervene to prevent it all. It's like you need to line up all the dominoes just right in order to have it run. Maybe now you can imagine how shocked I was the first time that it ran and ran right. I was stunned. I sincerely believed that I would never be able to crack the thing or figure the thing out. But, I did. It's working really well, and the process has now been tested on other machines too. I also played around with the xcom3fix.zip thing to see if I could somehow get it to run from the CD. I never could get it to run from the CD. I don't think xcom3fix.zip changes anything. It isn't really a CD crack but a CD substitute, but it didn't work for me. That's another part of the process that I never mentioned, as I don't think it did anything, but I mention it now, just in case one of you goes through the whole process and discovers that it still isn't working for you. Tried to be thorough.

Mine was the original v1.00 X-Com Apocalypse that I purchased 10 years ago. That CD has something on it that breaks XP so that XP cannot run it with the CD. Even if you crack the CD and try to run from the CD, it still doesn't work. You have to run from the hard drive! And, to run from the hard drive, again, you have to crack the CD. I found no other way. The original CD that came in the box with the game just won't AUTOPLAY or startup in PLAY or work at all on XP. It has something there that is broken when XP tries to run it. Crashes every time. The only way is to run off the hard drive. Then DOSBox works wonderfully! -- I'm not trying to promote the cracks. They have been around for years and never worked. When it comes to the original X-Com Apocalypse, the key to it all is to get it all onto the hard drive, as there is something on the original 1.0 CD that prevents XCom from running at all on Windows XP. Even if you crack it and try to run from the original CD that you purchased, it still won't run. The CD breaks it or prevents it from running on XP. The Play button isn't offered as part of Autoplay, even after you have installed from the CD. The Autoplay is broken for XP or doesn't run with XP or isn't compatible with XP. So, running from the original CD is impossible! You have to be running it all from the HARD drive. That's why the Windows Collector's version worked for some people, as it apparently all ran from the hard drive. Then you didn't encounter the Autoplay thing on the CD that broke it. For those of us with the original version, the only hope is to get the whole thing onto the hard drive and running from the hard drive. And, to do that, you have to crack it. I found no other way. If you find a way to do it without cracking it, let us know. But, every place that I went to made it clear that the only people who got it to run were running with Window's Collector Edition and running it all on the hard drive. There is a way for those of us with the original XCom Apoc v1.00 to run on the hard drive too, but it requires the crack to break the dependence upon the CD and to get it to run without encountering the thing on the CD that breaks XP compatability. You have got to get past the CD, as the original Apoc CD is not compatible with XP, no matter what you do with it. Hopefully, they will let this stay up here, as it would have saved me days and years of grief if I would have known from the start that I was never going to be able to get it to run on XP from the original CD.

The DoSBox Forum and Mark's forum refers you to the various cracks as well. You are going to have to crack it in order to get XP and DoSBox to recognize it. I found no other way. I tried everything I could think of to install without the crack, and nothing worked. Once I cracked, then up it came, in both DoSBox and Windows Explorer. The CD itself breaks Windows XP and prevents XP from running. I don't have the Windows Collector Edition, I have the original 1.00 CD that came with the original game 10 years ago, along with the nice manual. That original CD just won't startup or autoplay or run right on XP. But, a crack can fix it so that you can skip the CD and just run from the hard drive, which seems to be essential to getting your original copy of XCom Apoc to run under DOSBox and Windows XP. It only took me five years to find something that finally worked. Now, I can actually play XCom Apoc on my Windows XP machine. It's been a long time in coming!

XCOM3 - XCOM APOCALYPSE v1.00 WORKING UNDER DOSBOX 0.70 ON WINDOWS XP SP2 Okay, this required like about a million steps to get it right and hours of experimentation. This may not work for you, and you may have to spend hours or days trying your own experiments to find what works for you. But, this is what worked for me!! 1) I started by finding the XCom Apoc CD that I bought long ago. Mine is the original DOS and Win95 stand-alone version. I got it 10 years ago. 2) I used windows explorer to create a folder called c:\xcom3i 3) I copied the contents of my Xcom Apoc CD to this c:\xcom3i folder, and I then went into that folder from Windows XP Explorer and right clicked "INSTALL" and told it to run in Windows 95 Compatability mode. 4) Then I installed the game from Windows Explorer. It complained about a few things but allowed me to install. I installed to the default C:\XCOMA subdirectory. I'm installing from the hard drive to the hard drive. It goes rather fast, and you don't have to worry about CD speeds or any of that. 5) I then while inside the install program, I used Setup to set the sound - SOUNDBLASTER 16/AWE, BASE 220, IRQ 7, DMA 1 -- what DOSBox defaults to. Ended up going with SOUNDBLASTER PRO, as SB16 didn't provide any sound at all. 6) Lots of problems here, actually. You have to guess right to get the sound right the first time, as it took me days to figure out how to run SETUP.EXE from XP. First of all, if you choose incorrectly, I was able to actually run C:\XCOMA\SETUP.EXE from Windows Explorer after I had created a PIF that set the program to run in Windows 95 Compatibility mode. I soon found myself right clicking each XCOM3 program that I wanted to run and setting it to run in Win95 Comapability mode, using the compatability tab. 7) After I finally got XCOM3 running way down below on step 15, I actually had to go back in and set it to SOUNDBLASTER PRO, BASE 220, IRQ 7, DMA 1 -- the SB16 mode gave no sound, but I did get sound out of SOUNDBLASTER and SOUNDBLASTER PRO. SOUNDBLASTER is mono sound, though, no stereo, so I eventually ended up going with SOUNDBLASTER PRO as my final setting. I mention that here just in case you want to select SOUNDBLASTER PRO from the start and save yourself the trouble. 8) Now, you have the core installed in C:\XCOMA, but that is only the beginning. 9) Notice that your XCOM3.CFG file has this in it "<space>C:\XCOM3I\". It is extremely important that the <space> be there before the path name or you won't get music. It looks like this " C:\XCOM3I\", whenever you edit XCOM3.CFG. 10) Now you got to download goodies to fix the video and crack the CD copy protection, or you can't get it to go. I was never able to run the APOC game on XP from the XCOM3 CD that I purchased 10 years ago! It just won't work for me. 11) http://www.xcomufo.com/x3dl.html This one here was an important link. FORGET about the xcom3fix.zip. It never worked for me no matter what I tried, although it has a good batch file that might come in handy later. What you need on this forum is the x3svga.zip file. Download that one! It fixes the VGA problems so that you won't get black screen of death. Unzip it. Follow the instructions. Copy the two patches to the appropriate folders TACEXE and UFOEXE in C:\XCOMA. These patches won't run from DOSBox. You have to set them to Windows 95 Compatability, and run each one of them from Windows Explorer in Windows XP. There, now your video should work, when you finally get all the rest of the stuff done. 12) You have to download DOSBox 0.70 from here: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/download.php?main=1 Install DOSBox 0.70 to the default directory. I found that to get ALL of my purchased DOS games to run right under DOSBOX 0.70, I had to go into START, ALL PROGRAMS, DOSBOX 0.70, DoSBoX.conf, and edit that file so that cycles=max. Iirc, it set cycles=auto, and that just plain makes everything stutter and lag and music choppy. BAD! Go into dosbox.conf and make cycles=max, and save. Then all seems to be well. This was a tip that my son taught me. And, it made all the difference between DOSBoX 0.70 being total crap to sheer perfection! Then you want to copy the DOSBox shortcut from Windows Explorer, rename it do DoSBox X-Com Apocalypse, right click on it, Select properties, and then copy this into Target: -- "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.70\dosbox.exe" "C:\XCOMA\DARXCOM3.BAT" -fullscreen -conf "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.70\dosbox.conf" -exit -- The quotes have to be there. It won't work, yet, but now you are ready with a shortcut to run the thing in DOSBox! Make sure you have a space before every

There was a thread there over on Altar's forum in which they talked about how much better Aftershock ran without the StarForce, but the thread was deleted or censored away. But in that thread, there were real world examples of how the game loaded 3 times faster without the StarForce and had ten times fewer CTD's without the StarForce. The important thing to me was the fact that the hard drive light wasn't continuously on without the StarForce. That's important from a stability and quality control point of view, a programmer's point of view. I posted my response elsewhere, because I think those wayward souls had stumbled onto something important. http://forum.ufo-aftermath.com/index.php?s...indpost&p=30660 -- I'll quote my message here: Any time you access the hard drive continuously or any time you use the hard drive as memory, you increase the number of random CTD's. Cenega probaby doesn't know how to properly incorporate the StarForce so that it isn't constantly thrashing the hard drive. By this point in time, Altar and Cenega have garnered within the user community a huge reputation for crashes to desktop and unfixed bugs. The scuttlebutt in the background is buyer beware whenever you see anything from Altar. Yet another sad thing about StarForce is that the Altar people and the Aftershock users are blaming some of the problems on StarForce when the fault is with Altar and the Aftershock program. And likewise, the StarForce makers are blaming many of their problems on their customers, the game publishers who are unwise enough to use StarForce. Cenega still has a chance to get it right by giving us a US Release without the StarForce, but all indications are that Cenega and TriSynergy aren't listening and don't care. It looks like they aren't going to have the wisdom to try something different in terms of copy protection. If there is something I have missed, please tell us, and then we can all celebrate about a future version of Aftershock that is freed from the chains of StarForce. Meanwhile, Altar never got all the bugs out of Aftermath, so many of us no longer have faith that Altar will ever get all the bugs out of Aftershock, and the whole subject is rather moot as long as Aftershock is being polluted by StarForce. MindJuicer wrote: "Can I suggest Altar find a better publisher, or at least get a contract saying you get paid long enough to actually finish the game... " Wiser words were never spoken. Meanwhile, I would put in a suggestion that Altar get into writing that StarForce won't be used to pollute or destroy the upcoming UFO:Afterlight -- since according to so many of the StarForce messages floating around nobody knows how to incorporate StarForce properly anyway, aka StarForce people blaming publishers. All StarForce does is increase the frequency of crashes, and sometimes the crashes are fatal or permanent. -- -- -- In that forbidden censored thread over on Altar's forum, the thread that was deleted, those were real documented StarForce problems, problems that were present when StarForce was present and problems that went away when StarForce was not present. You couldn't ask for a better example, a scientific proof if you will. Pete was looking for scientific proof and real world Aftershock examples. They were there in that thread for awhile. They were real people talking about their own experiences with Aftershock, and that was something that Altar and Cenega should be made aware of. Their implementation of StarForce in Aftershock is buggy and/or or not done right. If Altar or Cenega got the message, that would help them in the long run, whether they get rid of the StarForce or not. For awhile there, while the forbidden thread lasted, there were documented StarForce breakdowns being reported there.

Okay, I needed more time to think about this. I know that it might sound silly or immature to some, but I found that with Aftermath almost anything is possible when it comes to bugs. For example, months ago I was under the firm superstitious belief that you would eventually get crashes or glitches in Aftermath if you tried playing a Europe Medium saved game inside a profile that was created American Hard, or some such odd combination. I can see from up above that Lurker was probably using an American Hard Profile to run your Europe Hard configured 115.zip and Upload.zip saved games. If my former superstition has any validity, and if it's possible for one configuration to pollute another, then Lurker should have been looking at problems at some point or another, after playing your saved games. Maybe I would too, eventually, if my Duron machine didn't already freeze during complex rebalance tactical missions, as it is doing. My past experience has taught me that once the Aftermath system is corrupted and you are getting frozen aliens, then it's time to uninstall the mods and the game, and time to start over fresh and new. Furthermore, I noticed long ago that the use of Alpine with previously unmodded saved games always resulted in frozen aliens. So, following supersititious lines of reasoning, I believe that the more types of mods that you introduce to the system, the greater the chance of something going wrong. I had to dream about it a bit, but I remembered more details this morning, as to what I think went wrong on my system. See my message up above for the introduction or the backstory. I distinctly remember thinking that I was going to run a test in order to see how much my new system could take. Most likely my mistake was to include Aftermath in such a test. GetRight allows you to download multiple files or segments at the same time. During normal usage of GetRight on dialup, two segments work just fine, and the third and fourth segments seem to start to gum things up. While GetRight was downloading three or four segments, I was playing Aftermath. During a tactical mission, I did Alt-Tab and went back to the desktop to see how the various downloads were going. I'm watching GetRight download while the Aftermath music is playing in the background, and then I get called away for 10 or 15 minutes. When I come back, Aftermath is still playing music in the background, it probably has cycled through all its music files by then and is getting pretty gummed up. I select Aftermath on the taskbar to bring back up the tactical mission, and I get a black screen and nothing will come up. I couldn't get back to the desktop either. I didn't know what was going on for a minute there, until something finally came back. Eventually, both Aftermath and the desktop came back. Now, I believe that most of Aftemath was probably archived into the swapfile by the time I got back to my desk, and it took forever to bring it back up. When Aftermath came back up, I saved at the end of the debacle while GetRight is still saving and trying to run, and then I quit Aftermath in an attempt to bring back some stability to the system. Aftermath wasn't running right anymore. I didn't remember the details until this morning, because it's been awhile since the weirdness. I only play one Aftermath tactical mission per day on average, so it could take awhile for problems to start showing up at that pace. I hadn't had any real trouble with Aftermath for a month or so, until now. With all the crashes that I used to have with Aftermath, I got into the habit of saving any chance that I get, I realize now that I should have quit without trying to save when Aftermath was running wonky and when GetRight was downloading. Actually, I should only download one file with GetRight while playing Aftermath, and I should never leave Aftermath as the background task if I walk away from the desk. I can see that now. Speaking of game saves and strange beliefs, I was always under the superstition where Aftermath was concerned (especially during the time that I was getting hourly crashes from Aftermath) that one should save and quit the game after the completion of each mission in order to keep Aftermath from crashing or keep it from having problems. I only play one tactical mission per day on average, so for the most part, my Aftermath system has been very stable the last month or two, only logical if my save-after-every-mission superstition has any validity. But, now that I have seen frozen aliens on this system, I know the cure. Uninstall Aftermath, delete all previously saved games, reinstall Aftermath, and start a new non-default profile once you get your mods in place. And for best stability and security, DON'T play Aftermath games that were saved on other profiles with other starting settings or saved on other machines. In summary, I do believe that Aftermath has no self-correcting features in its save-game routine to clean up polluted files as it goes along. So, if something goes wrong during the creation of a vfs file, the disease will spread like a virus into every subsequent file. And, as you have suggested Aralez and from what I have seen, it may even be possible that some of the corruption could spread backwards into previous vfs files due to a currently corrupted or confused config file. Sometimes superstitions and paranoia have a way of coming true, especially where computers are concerned. For example, I imagine that once you get spit and boom in the inventory, then it's there forever in subsequent saves, so why not frozen aliens in every subsequent load and save once the frozen aliens are there and the configuration files are confused? BTW, what's the story about %d's? Sounds interesting and mysterious! And what does IIRC stand for? I don't know the meaning of that short-hand. Time for me to go away too, I guess.

Okay, let me summarize what I am seeing: 1. RB6.7 can't load any previous saved games that were created by previous Rebalances or any unmodded saved games either, without running the risk of eventual VFS corruption. 2. Or, RB6.7 can't always properly load and run version 6.7 saved games that were created on a different language version or on a different machine. 3. Or, the Upload.zip Saved Game with the Cudgel introduces additional flaws and glitches into Aftermath that somehow spreads throughout the system, and thus the Cudgel saved game is not the best one to start with or to use. (There seems to be logic contradictions between these three and what's written in this thread, but there they are.) 4. If you use the later Rebalances, then it's best to have an Athlon XP processor to handle the extra load. (That's my addition to the Rebalance 6.7 recommendations.) 5. If you have an nForce motherboard and you have updated the nForce Drivers and the Nvidia graphics drivers since the last time that you installed Aftermath (as I too have done), then you had better uninstall Aftermath, delete the Aftermath subdirectory, and reinstall Aftermath before continuing forward with Rebalance 6.7. Then let RB6.7 create its own profile after you have successfully reinstalled Aftermath and after you have no previous saved games anywhere on your system. 6. It looks to me as if the creator of RB6.7 wants you to delete all previous Aftermath saved games and create a new game profile with RB6.7 before continuing forward. But, if Aftermath is setup to use older drivers and RB6.7 somehow is sensative to that change, then an un-install of Aftermath and the re-install of Aftermath seems like a very sensible course of action to me as well. If you decide to go that re-install route in order to update Aftermath to the new Nvidia drivers and if you have a CD Burner, then you can write your old saved games to CD before you delete the CENEGA or Aftermath subdirectory during the reinstall of Aftermath. 7. It will take some time for us with the problem to get off work and to find the time to backup, uninstall, reinstall, and then test for a few missions to see if it really worked. Yes, keep our fingers crossed. 8. If it's spit and boom causing the problem all along, then we might someday need a Rebalance 6.7 from Aralez that doesn't have spitters and poppers anywhere in the mix. -- -- EDIT: I was actually thinking today that the last week or two I have done a lot of downloading from the internet while simultaneously playing Aftermath on my computer. I enjoyed having a computer that could really do both tasks at once without either task seeming to suffer in the process. But, I have started to wonder if my frozen aliens were the result of a corrupted Aftermath saved game that somehow got created while I was simultaneously downloading from the internet and saving an Aftermath game all at the same moment of time. Maybe writing to two separate files at the same time is enough to mess one of them up, especially an Aftermath vfs file. While downloading, it seemed like one of my saved games took forever to save, and then suddenly was fine, or so it seemed. I have no way of knowing for sure if there is something to it, and this latest hypothesis is but one of an infinite number of things that can go wrong when a person starts playing with computers and pushing the envelope. There, now I have said it, and now I can stop thinking about it. <grin> -- Okay, I guess I couldn't stop thinking about it. I could just hear the experts saying that a modern XP computer should be able to multitask the simultaneous saving of two separate programs without any problem. Actually, at the time that I experienced the weirdness with the Aftermath and Rebalance save, I was using GetRight to download three or four separate files with two more files waiting in the queue plus any files that Getright needs plus any requests that Aftermath might be making. It's very possible that I was asking XP to keep track of seven to eleven different files all at the same time, or even more. When you save Aftermath, it writes either two files or four files. Anyway, I now believe that it is possible that I could have overloaded my XP machine a bit, and maybe a corrupted VFS file and frozen aliens were the result.

I decided to try another game with the RB6.7 and my Duron machine that runs it right. Figured it would be funner not to get frozen aliens tonight for Easter. <grin> I went to a downed UFO. No frozen aliens, as expected, but it takes that Duron machine about two minutes to create a mission. The ABIT KT7A-RAID Duron machine always had problems with freezing if it gets overloaded, what I call interrupt overload. It's the thing you get when you try to run C&C Generals on a non-Athlon machine. Anyway, while scrolling and pressing a key, the game froze and the keyboard became unresponsive. Had to hard reboot. That computer just can't keep up. It has nothing to do with Aftermath or the Rebalances, that computer hangs during the starting musical flourish of Encarta, and will hang with other modern programs if they are processor intensive. And when I put a Thunderbird Athlon in there, the mobo overheated and hung randomly as well. So, I usually only use that machine for a Word Processing project that I'm doing for work. 1200 Mhz Duron machine is not up to Aftermath and such. I went back hoping that I could treat it more carefully and not get the freeze. The Duron machine will usually run Aftermath just fine. But, it was a mission with mountains and a million of those twisted dead trees, and apparently the Rebalance late game puts a bigger strain on the system than Aftermath by itself does. It hung on me again when two BFG9000 fired at the same time. Anyway, no frozen aliens on the Duron machine for a fourth and fifth load. But, that's it for tonight, all the time I have for game playing and testing. I'll try something different tomorrow if my schedule allows. Let me know what is priority.

I put in a plug on the ALTAR site hoping to get more people with more machines over here. I linked to this RBMOD 6.7 Release thread and to the SavedGames thread. It looks like the saved games are now gone. I found saved games to be both helpful and enjoyable. But, I guess I can see how saved games might add an extra element of peril or give something more to go wrong. However, someone needs to update my thread for me over there at ALTAR, and it's now dead-link to saved games. <grin> The Upload.zip saved game with the Cudgel was fun to watch and use on my working 6.7RBMod Duron Machine. But, I ran into some glitches with the Cudgel. He didn't have a body on the inventory screen when you took off his armor. And, I loaded up the Cudgel with the AutoCannon in addition to what you (Aralez) had given him, and when I got inside a mission, I couldn't get the Cudgel to put his GattlingLaser on the ground when it was empty. And though I could put the AutoCannon on the ground, the Cudgel couldn't put the GattlingLaser in the backpack. Finally got him to throw the empty LaserGattling, and then I was able to put the AutoCannon in his arms in its place. The Upload.zip saved game worked right on my Duron machine, as you can tell! With my Athlon XP machine, I don't know whether to uninstall and reinstall, try the TestVersion, or do the checksum on my XP machine that does frozen aliens. Unfortunately, it is my busy season at work, and there are deadlines and stuff, so I will be slow to help, whatever I do. Hopefully each person will give what they can a try, when they can, and maybe over time a true picture will evolve. I wouldn't stress over it, though, Aralez. It will take time, and I would hate to see you give up too soon. I do see the sense of keeping a version 6.61 of the Rebalance on the boards for awhile, though, if you don't mind my saying so, just in case. I also came away from this thread with a disctinct feeling that it would be nice to have a Warp Targeting Device version of the Rebalance that does not have Spit and Boom. If there are no poppers or spitters in a modern version of the rebalance, then there will be none of their stuff to build up in inventory, as it's apparently doing on some machines. If there's no possibility for Spit and Boom to go into inventory, then there's no possibility for it to be corrupting saves. And, honestly, the Warp Targeting Device was a much greater selling point for me than Spit and Boom. I definitely want the final Rebalance to have a WTD, unless I can't get it to work right on all my machines. Anyway, you might considering having a 6.7a, the original, a 6.7b the TestVersion, and a 6.7c Non-Spit and Non-Boom on the boards for awhile. If people can see the three versions along with a version 6.61 on the boards, along with some sort of explanation as to what each contains, then they can pick and choose silently in the background, testing as they have time. If they are the shy type, they won't even have to post. They can just PM you with their results or with their complaints, as time goes by. An elusive or etherial bug will by its nature take a bit of time to isolate or nail down, especially since it appears only on a minor fraction of machines. There used to be a 4.1 and a 4.1b of the Rebalance for a good reason. Tracking down an elusive bug would be just as good a reason for a 6.61, 6.7a, 6.7b, and 6.7c to be on the board, in my humble opinion. Plus, last I saw, Slaughter liked having multiple Rebalances on the board in case someone couldn't get an older one or a newer one to work right. Sorry that I can't be of more use right now, but over time, we'll see. UfoMan P.S. What does iirc stand for? I never figured that one out.

I know that Slaughter doesn't want me around, and the UfoMan has laid low regarding Aftermath bugs for a month or more now - just suffering in silence whenever Aftermath crashes or yucks up. But I have specific input to offer regarding this thread and the 6.7 Rebalance, so here goes. I know some people don't like to hear it, but the truth is that Aftermath has the most variable performance of any game that I have ever played. With other game titles, you get rather consistent game performance from one motherboard chipset to the next, but Aftermath performs very differently from one machine to the next. That's been my real world experience. A Aftermath bug that will show up on one machine, will be completely absent on the next machine, will be majorly annoying on another machine, and will be there but inconsequential on another machine. You can also experience competely different bugs and crashes from one machine to the next. It's the same CD and the same installation, but completely unpredictable performance from one machine to the next. I started a new Profile with Rebalance 6.7 on my ABIT KT7A-RAID motherboard, and then I transferred the Upload.zip contents into the new Saves in the new Profile. I played three games and didn't get frozen aliens and the spit didn't transfer back to base into inventory that I could see even though spit was in the capture list. Three missions is hardly conclusive, and the ABIT KT7A is a slow and painful 1200 Duron machine which makes playing Aftermath tedious. But Rebalance 6.7 works just fine so far on that machine. Using English version CD. I usually only play one Aftermath game per day if work allows, so I don't make fast progress, and can't be counted on to provide timely conclusive results. But, three missions completed successfully with Rebalance 6.7 sounds like more than Lurker got. I have a new ABIT NF7-S v2 motherboard with 2800 Barton, and I created a new Game Profile with Rebalance 6.7 and put the same Upload.Zip in there and went to a mission. I immediately ran into frozen aliens with Aralez's save. I then tried playing Rebalance 6.7 from the start, eventually got spit and empty icons in the inventory, and eventually got frozen aliens in subsequent missions. I did a lot of Aftermath playing. Not good results with the new machine and Rebalance 6.7. My conclusion is that the Rebalance 6.7 works fine on my VIA chipset, and it seems to result in frozen aliens on my nForce chipset. Extrapolating, I would conclude that each person who plays the Rebalance 6.7 on a different machine will end up experiencing different results. My other conclusion is that since I haven't had any noticeable problems with the Rebalance mods on my nForce machine until Rebalance 6.7, I would guess that the new Rebalance 6.7 has introduced some kind of incompatibility with the nForce chipset that wasn't there before. Again, just a guess, and not enough of a sampling in my humble opinion to be conclusive. I probably won't report back in here again, because Slaughter doesn't want me to report crashes or bugs when I experience them. He is the moderator, and I broke his rule just now. But let me end by saying, that I'm tempted to uninstall and reinstall Aftermath on my fast new nForce machine and see if Rebalance 6.7 will then run right. Other than that, I don't know what more I can do. And in summary, it looks to me that if you get spit or invisible icons in your inventory, then you are going to be experiencing problems soon with the Rebalances. From what I have seen in the past, the same Aftermath mod (whether ALPine or Rebalance) can and does peform differently on different machines. Lurker gets frozen aliens, Kret gets crashes from Rebalance 6.7, and my ancient Duron machine runs Rebalance 6.7 as it was meant to run. Hope that helps and is topical enough to get past Slaughter. UfoMan

Maybe it's just me, but the new LurkerGun burst mode seems strange or off. The new aimed mode is basically the way it always was, with 98 or 99 percent accuracy with good soldiers. But with the same soldiers, the new LurkerGun burst mode has accuracy in the 20 to 40 percent range, yet empties the gun four times as fast, while missing everything I shoot at, using the same good soldiers. You can shoot at something nearby in the next room with the LurkerGun in burst mode, and you'll miss almost every time. But, in aimed mode, you'll hit almost every time, as it should be for a late-game gun and 'mature' soldiers. I think the accuracy of the new LurkerGun burst mode should be higher. In fact, if I understood some of the posts up above, I believe that the original intention was that the whole gun (both modes) should have 'high accuracy.' It's in Aralez's original specifications. So the burst mode should have a 95 percent accuracy or some such, just a tad lower than the aimed mode, cause I think that the game requires that an aimed mode have at least a bit higher accuracy than a burst mode. I hope you don't mind my speaking up. But, I think it was just an oversight that the accuracy on the new LurkerGun burst mode ended up being so low. If I could make a request, I would ask that Aralez take a look at it for the next minor update. Still waiting to encounter that new Reticulan General, or whatever it is being called. Eager anticipation. I thank you, Aralez.

Aralez: Just a quick note to say 'Thank You' for the rebalances.

Aralez, I like what you have done in Rebalance 6.2. Thank you.