The David W. Bradley's Wizards & Warriors Thread

[Lonely Vazdru]

A bit late, but since my thread sort of initiated this mess, I might as well show-up. :wink:

I could see the movies fine with the default graphic options, but in-game graphics were shitty and I experienced various crashes. So I turned on D3D to play the whole game and only switched back to default for the final fight, so I would get the outro movie.

Watching them with Rad is OK though, the intro movie gets old really fast anyway, and you only get to see the other movie at the end of the game. No great loss to watch them "outside" the game.

Hope you have fun playing this, it's a nice dungeon crawler.

 

[Durendal]

Dusted off my old W&W disks that haven't been played in 9 years to try and get some fun RPG action in. Installed everything, hit the play button, screen goes black, I see an hourglass icon, and it crashes, can't even get to the first menu. After doing some google searches I came across the codex and you guys seem pretty knowledgeable so thought I'd seek some advice here.

Here's the exact error

"the instruction at 00423dba referenced memory at 02740000
the memory could not be written"


So far I've come across this thread at the codex
http://rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php ... 1e0481da1f

And this one at Ironworks Gaming
http://www.ironworksforum.com/forum/sho ... hp?t=98119

Both have a lot of ideas to get this game working and there seems to be quite a lot of problems with it and XP. Here's what I've tried so far.

Set compatibility mode to windows 95
Installed patch 1.0
Installed graphics patch
Installed Indeo codec 5.11
Unzipped townavi.zip to the townavi folder

What I haven't yet tried is altering the gameopt.dat file with a hex editor as was suggested in the ironworks thread, problem is I can't find a gameopt.dat file anywhere.

Any help you guys can give me would be great, I know people have gotten this game to work with XP and it's really frustrating that I can't. As you can see by my post count I'm a complete noob here so if this is the wrong section just let me know and I'll move it. One last thing, I've mostly been a console gamer so have patience if some things need to be explained slowly

 

[Rorschach]

Try DosBox.

 

[Phelot]

I'm posting because your name appears to be in reference to the sword used by Count Roland as opposed to the video game series: Marathon.

 

[Jaesun]

Or the ship in Xenosaga. r00fles

You might also try WIndows Virtual PC.. you can find it on the M$ website.. and it is free. Though you need a Windows 95 CD.

 

[Durendal]

Indeed my name is in reference to Roland's sword. Never played Marathon but every few years I'll read through the Song of Roland. Durendal also makes a fitting name for paladin characters when I play Might & Magic games.

As for DosBox I'm not sure how that will help as W&W came out in 2000 and most of the games on the DosBox compatibility list are from the early 90s. Will give it a go though, should be interesting trying to remember dos commands from when I was 10.

Edit: The thought of a virtual machine had crossed my mind, though I'm not at all experienced with how to set one up. Is it possible without a windows 95 disk?

 

[Jaesun]

Edit: The thought of a virtual machine had crossed my mind, though I'm not at all experienced with how to set one up. Is it possible without a windows 95 disk?

It's VERY easy to set up... it basically makes a Windows 95 computer... on your computer. But you have to have a Windows 95/98/98SE disk. Which I am sure, you could possibly not remove from inventory somewhere...

It however does NOT have any 3D support.. at all. I don't remember if W&W is 3D or not.

I just know it was a shit game and never got it. :D

 

[Durendal]

Tried messing about with DosBox for awhile and wasn't getting anywhere so I switched to the virtual machine idea. By now getting W&W to run is a game in itself I've managed to get a virtual pc set up running windows 95. Tried installing the game and watched Office Space for awhile while the machine was doing it's thing. When I came back there were two blue screen errors.

Wizards and Warriors is a 3d game so that may have something to do with it. Like you said setting up the virtual machine was really easy once I tracked down the discs, so I might try setting up a windows 98 one.

 

[ecliptic]

I doubt the performance will be very good if it runs at all in a virtual machine...

 

[Jaesun]

DO you have an Intell CPU?

 

[Durendal]

Yes, it's an intel core 2.

Update: Haven't set up a windows 98 machine yet to try that, probably will do that tomorrow. Decided to mess around some with the windows 95 virtual machine and now have Might and Magic 1-5 up and running on it.

Was fun to load up Isles of Terra and see good old Crag Hack in my party as a dwarf barbarian

 

[Jaesun]

Yes, it's an intel core 2.

hmmm technically, with Windows XP AND an Intell processer you *typically* have less problems running older games (I.E. Deus Ex, System Shock 2 etc...)

 

[Durendal]

Just my luck to be the outlier here. I have gotten a some older games to work fine with XP, Heroes of Might and Magic 1-3 and Civ 3. Although when I tried to run Sacrifice awhile ago that wouldn't work either. Kinda seems like just rolling the dice sometimes with my comp and games.

Anyway I'm getting to sleep, tomorrow I'll keep trying to get W&W to work.

 

[Rufus_T_Firefly]

I had that exact same problem and it took me like a week to get it running. I think what I did was download some kind of no cd crack and that of all things finally got it to work on windows xp. Search around the ironworks forums, I think thats where I found the link to it.

 

[Rufus_T_Firefly]

Oh wait! I just remembered what solved it, you need to change the renderer from hardware to software (or vice versa) the only problem is that you need to be in the game to actually change the option, so what you need to do is download someones save/options config and then youll get it to work. Search on forums for a file like that (I think it was Ironworks where I found it but I could be wrong, it was a couple of years ago that I last wrestled with W&W).

 

[coldcrow]

With newer video cards it runs only in software render mode and still the cursor is kind of choppy.

If you have an older PC lying around, use that one.

PS: Indeed, it seems the new Nvidia Drivers are way less compatible with older games than the ATI.

 

[Jasede]

Enjoy this underrated, not-that-good but strangely charming and fun dungeon crawler!

 

[jorgamesh]

With newer video cards it runs only in software render mode and still the cursor is kind of choppy.

If you have an older PC lying around, use that one.

It runs without tweaking (just patches) on ATI cards and win vista32bit
I had no luck on nvidia though

 

[ecliptic]

It was very addictive even though it had it's foibles, and far more functional as a game than Dungeon Lords.

 

[Durendal]

Update: I've gotten Wizards & Warriors up and running on a windows 98 virtual machine, hip hip huzzah!

Only problem now is getting it to the right size, here's what it looks like now.

Bit too small for my liking. I can set the virtual pc to full screen mode but that crops off bits of the sides in game and the only graphics options I see in game for resolution is low or high. Think I'll mess about with my XP resolution settings to try and get the full screen W&W to not get cropped.

Thanks to everyone for all your help.

Edit: This is how it looks with XP resolution set to 800 x 600

Not ideal but playable

 

[bgillisp]

I actually got this game working on Vista, I had to set the game to Win98 compatabilty, that may be the problem. However, I had to stop due to an unusual bug. When I went to the 2nd town I could never leave, none of the exits showed up from town for selecting so the party was just stuck there forever. Anyone else run into this? If so how did you get around it?

 

[Jasede]

Did you convert your .avi files with Virtual Dub?

 

[Durendal]

Converted the .avi files when I was trying to run it on XP, didn't convert them on the virtual machine.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Hello,

I'm having considerable trouble getting Wizards & Warriors (the 2000 DW Bradley RPG) to run properly on Windows 7 (I'm running Home Premium 64-bit, specifically). It's a nice game and I would like to replay it, so maybe someone here can help.

I've set it to compatibility mode (tried windows 98 and 95 with no appreciable difference).

There are two main issues. First, and perhaps most importantly, the mouse sensitivity feels way off - it's as if there's a huge deadzone and the cursor only moves after a certain threshold, it can be very distracting. I've read on another forum that lowering the mouse polling rate helps, but my driver software only goes down to 125hz, which probably isn't low enough. Setting the polling rate to lowest and increasing the DPI resolution seems to help, but only barely.

Second, running the game in Software mode seems to cause weird sound popping/skipping as if frames are being dropped; also, the in-town interface (I understand this is some sort of weird .avi interface) seems strangely sped-up in this mode. When I run it with the DirectX renderer, these speed issues are solved, but the rendering itself is somewhat faulty - models have no face polygons, for instance.

I'm running the latest unofficial patch, to the best of my knowledge (1.0b), have converted the .avi files to proper format, etc.

I understand that there's an option to run it through a Virtual PC setting, but that's a considerable hassle and I'd like to exhaust other options first. I'd really appreciate some help if anyone has gotten it running decently on a setup similar to mine.

Thanks!

 

[Norfleet]

I think the mouse thing has always been that way, that's just how the game normally is. I remember the mouse being sluggish even back then, with no apparent way to change it.

And it doesn't respond well to VirtualPC/VMware, either, because those don't give proper 3D rendering capability, and the game is still a 3D game. Without 3D rendering capability, the game will just look and run awfully.

I suspect it is just not one of those games which stands the test of time, having the unfortunate combination of being too new at the same time it is too old.