ComancheGame

Playing Comanche 3 with DOS

Yesterday night I got the sudden urge to play *Comanche 3* by Novalogic again... It wants either Windows or DOS, and all I have is an old DOS disk here. A quick look at the output of *mount* revealed:

/dev/hda1 on /mnt/boot2 type vfat (rw)
/dev/hda3 on /mnt/gar type ext3 (rw)
and other stuff.

Thus, hda1 was a partition of about 10MB, hda2 was swap, and hda3 was about 3GB. All unused.

Turn of swap:

swapoff /dev/hda2

Start fdisk for _dev_hda and reorganize:

1. delete the first three partitions.

2. create a new DOS partition with 300MB

3. recreate the Linux swap partition of 128MB

4. recreate the Linux partition with 2.7GB

Make filesystems:

mkfs -t msdos /dev/hda1
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda3

Fix _etc_fstab:

/dev/hda1  /mnt/dos   vfat  defaults  0 2
/dev/hda2  none       swap  sw        0 0
/dev/hda3  /mnt/free  ext3  defaults  0 2

Fix mountpoints:

cd /mnt
mv boot2 dos
mv gar free

Fix _boot_grub/menu.lst by adding:

title DOS
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Look for the appropriate CDROM driver. First, determine the brand I am using. Luckily I use the ide-scsi module and access my IDE drive as a SCSI drive. Therefore, I just used *cdrecord -scanbus* to identify it, instead of searching for a manual. And there it is:

0,0,0     0) 'HITACHI ' 'DVD-ROM GD-2500 ' '0101' Removable CD-ROM

Now search for Hitachi GD-2500 DOS, and choose *hitdvd.exe*. As root, you can mount `/mnt/dos`, save the selfextracting archive there and just use *unzip* on it (since the self-extrator requires Windows to run, Dohh!).

Fix AUTOEXEC.BAT, assuming the MSCDEX.EXE from the DOS disk is in the DOS subdirectory:

C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001  /M:8

Fix CONFIG.SYS, assuming appropriate directories:

LASTDRIVE=Z
BUFFERS=40
FILES=30
STACKS=9,256
DEVICE=C:\CD\HIT-DVD.SYS /D:MSCD001 /N:1 /T:2

Now we have to go looking for a driver for the Soundblaster PCI128 card – for DOS! Using Google and following a few links and regoogling, I found SBPCI.zip here:

http://easymamecab.mameworld.net/html/snddosdr.htm

Add the following to AUTOEXEC.BAT, assuming appropriate directories:

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
SET SBPCI=C:\DOSDRV
C:\SOUND\SBPCI\DOSDRV\SBLOAD
C:\SOUND\SBPCI\DOSDRV\SBINIT.COM
C:\WINDOWS\SMARTDRV.EXE

Add the following to the beginning of CONFIG.SYS, assuming appropriate directories:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS NOVCPI
DOS=HIGH, UMB

I also had to get HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE from the web... Put them in the appropriate directory.

Now the only thing that remains to be done is configuring C3. Run SETUP and when prompted for the audio device, don’t rely on autodetection. It detected the wrong card for me. At first, I thought that the info in the BLASTER variable was wrong. But it is not. Just switch to a different card type until the audio tests succeed.

And now lemme play *Commanche 3*!!