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Despite the game itself works pretty well, the fmv videos have audio pauses due to the timing being set wrong in the DOSBox settings.

´The solution can be found in the GOG Forums posted by user Flash-Nine:

I post this for future reference of people who have this problem, because I had the same problem. After searching the internet, I found that it is a known issue that that the WC 3 video sound stutters with cycles=max setting, can be found on the dosbox compatibility page. Unfortunately, that is the setting in the GOG version.
Setting cycles to 70000 fixed the problem for me.

In November, 2024, Gog updated the game, hence the CPU settings differ a bit now:

cycles=fixed
core=dynamic
cputype=auto
cycles=50000
cycleup=10000
cycledown=10000

I run it on:
Windows 11 24H2
on a Nvidia GeForce 1070 Katana
on a AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core Processor@4.00 GHz

I also highly suggest using an analog joystick instead of a gamepad, as the thumbsticks have a different movement pattern (round instead of a rectangle), which means the deadzones are not correctly and correct calibration will fail!

To run the Steam version of the game, you need the following 3 patches:

• The SilentPatch to fix the memory leaks and crashes of the game
• The Autosave v2 mod to allow saving anywhere in the game (most reasons of failure in this game is failing to save when needed).
• The Widescreen Fix (Albeit it is suggested by community members to only apply it on ultra widescreen monitors as the game supports 16:9 natively, in Win 11 it will overlap if you minimize the game once or start the game the next time. With the widescreen fix, you can simply re-select a 4:3 resolution temporarily in the main menu and then switch back to your desired 16:9 resolution, without the widescreen fix, this will fail to fix the aspect ratio!).

How to fix the game:

1. Download and install the game on Steam
2. Download all mods
3. Install the SilentPatch (there is a .txt file with installation instructions if needed)
4. Install the Autosave 2 mod (do not forget to also download and install the mod loader from the same site, beforehand)
5. Install the widescreen fix.
6. Start the game for the first time
7. Afterwards you will receive two popups, one by the modloader and one by the DirectShow filter and Video for Windows codec:

answer the prompts in the following order:

A) modupdater: select “INI files: replace all and keep settings.
Then click on “Download and Install updates now”
B) ffdshow compatibility manager
untick: Report this exe file name via internet anonymously.
untick: Don’t ask me again.
Select: use ffdshow. (always)
Click: OK
C) modupdater: Restart Now

After that you can select the resolution as you please and all the other graphic options via the main menu. take notice about my comments regarding widescreen aspect ratios above.
Furthermore, enabling the compatibility setting in the properties of Bully.exe “Disable fullscreen optimisations” might help further improving the situation.

They are several traps when trying to run Running Arctic Baron / Transarctica on DOSBox:

(as hinted by the DOSBox Compatibility List comments)

• When you copy over the files from the CD to HDD (because the Batch installer won’t work), do not forget to remove the read-only attribute to the files!
• The game will freeze randomly in the default setting of the DOSBox config. I do suggest to use a separated config file for the game. There adjust the CPU cycles from “auto” to “max” as suggested here.
• If you use the European version that asks you to pick a language, use the NUM block number field for this input!
• If you want to use a joystick, use a real analog joystick, analog gamepad sticks may not work.

If you need help to win the game, Scenario: how to win in Arctic Baron might help.

There is also an open source remake called “Transarctica Remake”.

Hint: As you cannot setup your details of where the soundblaster is located, it will fall back to PC Speaker if it isn’t where the game expects it to be.

To fix this, set the following values in your DOSBox config file for the game:

sbtype=sb1
sbbase=220
irq=5
dma=1
hdma=5
sbmixer=true
oplmode=opl12
oplemu=default
oplrate=44100

This will give you ingame music and sfx at the same time! \o/

These instructions of me are based on the Steam user’s Jeff Paine guide named “Fix MPEG/MIDI not working in Windows 11“.

I am just adding additional steps necessary for Win11 24H2 not mentioned in his guide.

The general difference between his guide and the additional steps I have added is, that 24H2 appears to behave quite different than earlier builds.

Preconditions:

• Make sure, any audio/video codecs or DVD players you have installed previously to redeem the issue as from other guides or comments from the Steam Community, have been completely uninstalled.
• Make sure the game files and registry entries are also in its original state. To ensure this, uninstall the game and reinstall it. (caution! Make sure, the Steam folder used has no spaces in its folder name, if it does, create a new one with the Steam Settings! (refer to the coder who fixed the game to work on modern systems in his pinned Steam community post)

The reason for the above preconditions are, because all necessary video and sound codecs are already shipped with the game installation and are inside the game folder but are ignored as Steam sets it to Windows 95 compatibility mode which means the game cannot access them, despite they are there!

1. To work around that Steam sets the compatibility mode for the game, we download Jeff Paine’s launcher from his guide
2. Open the game’s files folder and rename “OVERSEER.EXE” to “OVERSEER2.EXE”.
3.  then open its preferences and set compatibility mode to another OS like Windows 8 or so, confirm, and then send it back to “None”. Then confirm again.
4. Extract the files from the fix’s archive to the game folder.
5. Try to launch the game, you will most likely come across this error message

After that, the program will crash before you could confirm you would like to download it. Here, you can find the manual download.

6. run the game from steam, first thing you will see is the following prompt:

Be quick so the dialog won’t disappear, select “Use ffdshow. (always)” and make sure the checkbox “Report the exe file name via internet anonymously” is unset.

That’s it! Enjoy playing the game! 🙂

Now, once inside the game, we are hit with more issues.

After the intro and the cut scenes finished playing, we are hit with the following error:

Which simply means the Midi sound cannot be played, so the background music and speech is missing.

We fix this by going to the sound preferences of the game and select the fitting MIDI Mapper to use. Since I am using a dedicated Creative Labs X-Fi Xtreme Gamer dedicated PCI soundcard, I am choosing “Creative Synth B” (As “Creative Synth A” sometimes makes the game freeze)

Last but not least we want to fix the transparent textures issues, hence we set up within the game the following:

And for the Advanced Preferences, we set these:

Then we download the latest version from dgVoodoo2 and copy the following files as instructed by Steam user Below Zero:

extracted the following files into the root of the Overseer folder from the MS folder. I did NOT create an MS folder in the Overseer folder.

D3D8.dll
D3Dlmm.dll
DDraw.dll

and from the root of the zip:
dgVoodooCpl.exe

Putting the 3dfx (glide.dll) files in there as well seemed to break things, so I didn’t.

Then we set it up as written by user Datargnan:

opened dgvoodoosetup and unchecked all options about vsync and aliasing

Your setup should look as follows in the DirectX tab:

Important:
Note!: If you are stuck at the “brain puzzle”, i.e. the cut scene wont play after implant removal, you need to temporarily disable dgVoodoo as described by user dlrdgm:

If you use dgVoodoo disable it for that implant removal cutscene/puzzle. In dgVoodoo-Setup DirectX tab check “Disable and passthru to real DirectX”.

It still occationally causes freezes while being in fullscreen, I decided to leave a feedback to Microsoft about it in the Windows Feedback Hub, if you wanna read or participate, find it here.

So, Resolution announced yesterday, that Broken Sword 1 Director’s Cut going to be delisted on November 4th, 2024, as can be seen in this Steam post.

So this also means the OST of the game and the original release of 1996 will be removed, as both where part of the Director’s Cut as a DLC.

While the Reforged Edition does have the original graphics you can switch to using the Tab key, it does not contain the original cut-scenes and neither the additional scenes of gameplay with Nico of the DC and the re-recorded audio bits.

However, on the bright side, I can report we finally did an interview with the dear Charles Cecil, for our podcast:

which can be listened to / watched at https://scene.world/brokensword

As Forza Horizon 4 is going to be delisted on December, 15th and runs a promo now with -80% off, until October, 28th, time to look how to get this classic run on latest installment of Windows.

I have noticed, there are some do and don’ts for this game.

Don’ts:
– don’t move the installation files using the move function of Steam. Instead uninstall it from the old location and reinstall it at the new location.

Do’s:
– You have a higher probability of getting the game to run, if you disable displaying the Steam overlay in the Steam properties of the game.

– If the game’s process in task manager is staring, stopping, restarting without using resources and stopping again, delete the file “TargetHardwareProfiler.dll” in the Steam installation folder of the game.

– if you still have issues, deleting the App data of the game (%AppData%\Local\ForzaHorizon4)

Mind you, Nvidia has better support of old DirectX than AMD GPUs, so your experience might differ.

on reddit and steam you can read a lot how the game doesn’t work right on anything Windows 8.x and newer.

However, when getting the settings right, this was not the case for me!

Note: I do have an optical DVD drive in my computer, so the DRM check for inserting in my Steam release, do not appear for me.

So you have to change 3 Settings in the Advanced Graphic options inside the game:

• Default is “Primary Graphic Device” –> Select your actual GPU
• disable “Incremental Rendering”
• disable “Animation Interpolation”
  
  

Bonus: You can apply a hi-res pack, currently, you just have to dig through the thread to find the right page, here the permalink to all the still valid downloads: http://forums.sierrahelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=97737#p97737

Just to clarify: There are in fact 4 “Hot Pursuit” Need For Speed games:

-The first: “Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit”
-The successor: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit II”
-2010 release: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit”
-2020 release: Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered”

While the 2010 release works fine on my system with Windows 11 24H2, AMD FX-8370 and a Nvidia GeForce 1070 Katana with latest Game Ready Driver (565.90, released October 1st, 2024), the 2020 release: Need For Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered” stutters and audio hangs and loops all the time.

I found at the EA Forums a lot of possible solutions, but not of them worked, except the easiest one by user “edalfb” which I will quote here:

I solved the problem. It is done with a very simple method.
1. Set the display mode to be borderless when you enter the game.
2. Turn on vsync and make max framerate fps 60.
3. Set your other graphics settings as well.
4. Exit the game completely.
5. Re-enter the game and just make the screen mode to full screen.

Now the game becomes very comfortable to play in full screen and it’s getting 60 fps.

Note: When exiting the game, set the display mode to be borderless and exit and make it full screen again the next time you log in.
You have to repeat this every time.

Íf you have a 2nd screen and you have no sound in the borderless setting, you might have to click into the 2nd monitor first and then click into the primary monitor again until the sound finally returned.

Conclusion:
As the Autolog servers are down, mulitplayer is not possible, but if you are fine by playing just the single player missions, stick with the 2010 release. The graphics are really not that different and resolutions up to 4K still work! (playing it on a 2K monitor myself).

Update:
It appears, changes in the system at EA made so the product key given by Steam when starting the Game for the first time is not automatically connected to your EA account, so Autolog cannot find your license for the game.

The Solution can be found in the Steam forums by user [BR] Hamm Mann:

Your CD key for the game isn’t automatically applied to the game, and the box to enter it into in-game is non functional, so treat it as a red herring.
Instead, go to the EA App website, log into your account (if you don’t have one, i suggest making a burner account with a throwaway email) and then redeem the key in the settings for the site.
Then after logging in for the first time, reboot the game a few times and you’re in.
(This also removes the advertisement for NFS World, so use that as an indicator for if you’re on the autolog or not.)

Side-effect: In the EA App, You might get a notification message saying “Your EA Play Membership Expired, but you can renew it”.

This can be ignored, as the game solely runs within Steam, no additional installation in the EA App (former Origin) is necessary! 🙂

After backing for Tronimal’s new Virtual Boy album, I suddenly received an error message, that delivery to my email address was broken and I am supposed to update my email address.

I ignored that, of course I’d rather have the issue fixed that is causing the error.

Next stop: Emailing my email provider: Namecheap:

As their 2 test emails both arrived to me, the problem must have been at Kickstarter’s end.

So, I did send in the screenshot and a description of the issue via the bug report section of their support contact form.

They came back asking which email didn’t get delivered, and 6 days later, I received this:

The warning message disappeared, and email delivery to me from Kickstarter is restored!

Glad to see, that sometimes tech support is helpful and making them check their backends for errors might be fruitful! 🙂

Just to make sure, this article is just my opinion and based on my experience of the city of Mannheim where I live. This doesn’t necessarily mean it is the same way in smaller of larger cities in Germany.

As a little background, I was raised with zero emphasis on foreigners, to consider them different or deal with them different than my own people wasn’t even a consideration or topic in our household, so I grew up with zero pre-judgement or stereotypes against other cultures, religions, whatsoever.

I was also a witness of one of the refugee trains arriving in Frankfurt On The Main Central Railway Station back in 2015, I was standing a few tracks away and witnessed the whole arrival procedure of the refugees and how they have been welcomed by individuals and refugee help organizations, given care packages, etc.
It was – for a person raised as open-minded as I am – a moment that gave back faith into humanity and that one can do good to others and just being human.

That being said, I also witnessed a few moments of frustration of my fellow Germans when e.g. in a refugee camp, somebody got into a fight and got his shoulder broken, however in the hospital’s emergency section, the nurses couldn’t speak any English, so it was a bit of a troublesome process to get things sorted out.

A few years further, I also witnessed a situation where I was in the queue of the DB Travel Center, and the person behind the counter’s mood degrees by the minute as the person before me couldn’t understand neither German, nor English.

In my daily life, I more and more came across people who would try to deliver a Hermes parcel to the neighbor, groceries or food, just to be approached by the question: “Do you speak English?”.

Who knows me well, knows that 99% of everything I am doing on the internet is in English, I also communicate with friends abroad on a daily basis.

Yet, at first I came across moments where both of us would be standing in front of my door trying to sort things out in German as I am used to do that in my life outside of the internet, just to have the realization afterwards “Perhaps I should have asked if the person speaks English, could have been so much easier”.

Nowadays, I come across more and more people who do not understand a single word of German, and now here comes the shocking realization: It does not really matter!

Why it doesn’t, you ask? Because of both parties are fluent enough in English, it’s just working as well, and even better than beating around the bush by using German which the other person doesn’t fully grasp.

I’d rather deal with somebody in English, than sitting in a Flixbus arriving from Luxemburg where the destination is written on in a language I don’t speak and the driver doesn’t speak any common language with the people he transports and is responsible for.
How do I know? Because it has happened to me at a long distance bus station for myt trip from Mannheim to Frankfurt On The Main Airport, and I didn’t feel safe knowing if anything is happening to the bus, his French is wasted on me.

The flood of immigrants forced us to be more flexible, and realize, while it might be not something for me to be only living in a bubble, because I do not speak the language of the society I am living in, learning German is not for everybody.

Be kind and considerably to each other.