Black Dahlia XP yet another fuss
 

Hello

Im new to this board but not to the use of old games. I recently bought black dahlia again after years of forgetting about it. It was one of my favs. Long story short. I followed the XP install instructions and got the game to at least turn on but the sound skips and lags in most parts and during the 360 view turning(if you know the interactive video 360 turning like tex murphy, etc.) the 360 turning goes SUBSONIC speeds making me dizzy in game and I cant even leave the first room. Also if I say.. open a drawer, you hear it open 40 times then finally the video catches up and the drawer opens. Also I get the same mouse lag another in the forum stated, during the opening menu and randomly in game the mouse will just hiccup. I know all about VPC and 98 but atm I dont have 98 or 95 to install to it. I have tried messing a bit with video and audio acceleration but no go there. Any ideas, its simply driving me nuts.
BTW.. when I finally did get out of the office the speech in the videos matches fine, with the occasional hicup due to reading from cds.

My machine

Xp pro
ati x800
onboard sound (sounblaster never again after squeal of death)
AMD64 x2 4400+(yes i tried removing the 2nd core in my INI file no help.

Please let me know its one of those things thats driving me mad.. like when you cant remember a movie title :P

Well, I run it with Win95 compatibility on. In fact, I ran the setup.exe from a win95 comp shortcut. THe only problems I have with the game now is the superfast 360 spin you are talking about and I have finally gotten to where I can play it, by just moving the mouse really slow. It takes some time to get used to but it is playable. The other problems you have might be solved with win95 compatibility.

I sure wish this one had been made for DOS. THen I could use DOSBOX!!!

Grr
 

You dont get the mouse slow down where it chugs then goes normal?
also the 360 thing isnt playable on mine, dont know what your cpu is but no matter how slow I go it wont turn less than about 20 times around.
This game WAS made for dos,, or so it says. win 95/98 ran on dos, and the manual that came with the game states "TO INSTALL IN DOS INSERT CD AND TYPE INSTALL" there is no such file so weeee. If this WAS in dos I would have no problem running it. Ive even tried VPC which made the game WORSE. VERY slow cant even get past the menu.
Common adventure gamers! Some help here?

Yes, the game was originally to be released for DOS but read the notes carefully and it says that they pulled the DOS version at the last minute and put out only a Windows version! So even though it seems to imply that the DOS version is on the CD, it isn't!

On the functionality issue, this is one of those games that no one has ever been able to get running smoothly. Did you try WIN95 compatiblity? I know it won't fix the 360 thing, but if everything else works then we are down to that issue alone.

Mine is a 2.2 ghz computer. It is just a case of barely touching the mouse. Takes a lot of practice to get used to it, but at least it is playable for me.

Would a CPU killer help with the 360 panning? I ask because it helps immensely on Zork Nemesis. :)

...
 

Ok well 1st off, there is no way the game even works without compat mode for me.. if it was that simple I wouldnt post here. As for cpukiller tis a bad thing, I dont like to see a program that just lags my machine like im encoding avi to dvd video :P Seems a bad way to run a game.

Ive gone as far as to lower video and audio acceleration
Take off write combining
tried every slow down
installed VPC and win98 game runs 100 times slower

Only thing I havent tried is building another old machine(my mobo fried on my other oldie)

Grrr x10

Anyother clues ?
seems someone in this community should know

has anyone here simply tried installing/running the game on virtualpc?

lol
 

Well apparently this should work but....

If you read one of the things I tried

Ive gone as far as to lower video and audio acceleration
Take off write combining
tried every slow down
installed VPC and win98 game runs 100 times slower

any more ideas why it would either be running slower or any other help

hmm
 

Any more advice on this game or is it a dead cause ?

You installed Win98 and it ran TOO SLOW? That is really odd. I first played this on Win98 with a 2.2 ghz computer. Obviously it has something to do with clock speed, but I don't know how to adjust that normally.

Have you seen
http://home.earthlink.net/~infernofi...hlia_Setup.htm

hmm
 

No I didnt say I installed 98se.. I said VPC and 98se... vpc is like an emulator in windows. I installed my 98se on it .. same as dual booting only a bit slower due to emulation and still no go.
Ive talked to the inferno guy in emails, his faq is to vague and doesnt work for most as you can see if you google black dahlia XP problems and find most in other forums state infernos work around caused the same symptoms I have.. slow mouse... then fast... and fast spinning around

strange how other 95 games work fine ... only other one like this was the win ver of phanstasmagoria 2 :P and even that worked eventually.. sigh with this was dos like it said.. or wish NILO who worked on tex murphy stuff... would do his mojo on this game too... SIGH

Any more advice please let me know!

I just recently installed Virtual PC myself so I know a little more about it. Perhaps, if you haven't already, you could assign the maximum memory to your Virtual Windows 98? That might speed up the game a bit as it is a memory hog.

sigh
 

yea, ive tried. Dont know why but everything runs slow in vpc for me. I wish someone could help :P

Well, here is thought. Does this game require a video card? If so, this could be the problem. If you are running virtual PC you will have to install your video drivers in the virtual PC, just as on the real operating system. Of course, I don't remember this one using a video card. Perhaps if you move all the video options in the game to minimum it would help, but since VPC is running Win98 over XP (or whatever system you are using) it is necessarily going to run slower.

grr
 

Yeaaa... not this slow, and ive talked to a few people who have gotten the game to work both in vpc and in xp sooo would someone please speak up or is adventure forums dead? Mabye just the thread... lol

I played this game on my XP laptop last year and used the slowdown program Turbo at about 75%.
I found that the only problem was with the movie scenes where parts of the sound was a little out of sinc, but besides from that the game played fine.

Cheers
StewieG23

I'm now having the same problems. It worked fine the first time I ran it, although the mouse 360 turning was extremely fast. What I did was install the patch and then CPU Killer to slow things down. That's when the trouble started.

Now, I'm seeing a mouse trail in the main menu. There's also mouse lag and sometimes I have to wait seconds before I regain control.

I uninstalled CPU Killer and Black Dahlia and rebooted the computer. Then I reinstalled Black Dahlia, without the patch. The problem persists. This is nuts.

I am going to fight this. I will prevail and let you know how I fixed it.

Okay, what I just found out (that was fast!) that my compatibility setting of Windows 95/98 was causing this. Disabling compatibility mode fixed it. I'm going to try the patch again.

I read that you couldn't even run the game without compatibility mode, right? I would still urge you to try to get it working without, because it does fluently on my Windows XP machine.

Lastly, for those that still concern it, you can alleviate the overly sensitive mouse problem by editing the BD.INI file in the Black Dahlia installation directory. Play around with the settings for:

- spin edges (allows you to spin the camera around by moving the mouse to the screen edges)
- spin edge height/width (seems to be the size of the area that the mouse can be on to initiate spinning)
- spin vres/hres (seems to be the sensitivity value, 1 means no movement, 2 seems fine for me)

Looks like you need to make height/width a multitude of vres/hres.

Also, the mouse dragging spinning:

- vjoy res
- vjoy slide res

I put them both to 1 for much improvement. I just guessed these values, they may not be perfect.

My BD.INI file under the [options] section:

I hope this helps if people are still even reading this. I created an account to post this. :D I'm loving this game so far! Excellent, I can't believe no one knows it. It reminds me a bit of 11th Hour, also an old-time favourite (that everyone seems to hate).

OMG!

Gonna try it out tonight, if it works you made my day, week, year! ;)

I've been trying to find a solution for this problem for years...