How i run Blood 1

[RedFanatic]

Getting Blood 1 to work on XP-Pro for me was a real struggle
i went through many many options and varying stages of
quality but with thanks to the BuildXP site i have a perfectly
working version that runs at correct speed with perfect sound quality
and in fact no problems of any sort,

but while reading things
in forums and on the BuildXP site i noticed that some people
had it going in a quite different way to me with the most glaring
difference being the VDMsound shortcuts that have never worked on
my system this made me think what if other people are running
a less perfect set-up and losing quality (as i was for the whole
first episode when i got the whole game) so just to put my mind at
rest i thought i'd describe the process i went through to get PureBlood

Well first off install Blood oneWholeunit (i have an original cd but OWU
is just easier) patch up to the maximum then copy in Cli2nop and nolfb
and install VDMSounds making sure to install every feature, patch VDMS
to 2.0.4 and install the Launchpad addon, cli2nop the exe file
and then all i do to run it is

open cmd prompt and type

cd\blood

nolfb

dosdrv

blood

and it runs great.
well there you go i most likely just patronized everybody but
if anyone is having sound break-up or slow down or even crashes
this works really good i even once got it running over a lan
with commit but my bro's machine got upgraded and now it complains
about netbios but hey he doesn’t like Blood anyway

[da_weezle]

Make sure you have IPX/SPX installed on both machines for a LAN game.

[boss429]

What does "dosdrv" do?

[Doomer64]

I think it is VDM sound

[Thrakath]

Yes i did the same and it runs too. but you can´t play in LAN without big lags. thats why cruaich and i decided to make a dos boot disc. U just have to find dos drivers for sound (tricky) and network card (easy).

[RedFanatic]

aahh ok ty to da weezle i did try that but as i said my bro is not bloodite so i diden't try hard,
and yes dosdrv runs VDMSounds on standard settings
diden't know about the lag although it was working before the upgrade never actually tryed it.

as i said not really sure if all that will help anyone just thought i'd
put it up in case

[Slink]

Yes i did the same and it runs too. but you can´t play in LAN without big lags. thats why cruaich and i decided to make a dos boot disc. U just have to find dos drivers for sound (tricky) and network card (easy).

Doods, do you still have that boot disk? May I cop a copy of it? Could Willis maybe post the disk on buildxp?

[Willis]

Doods, do you still have that boot disk? May I cop a copy of it? Could Willis maybe post the disk on buildxp?

Unfortunatly, adding a bootdisk without versitle sound support to buildxp would only cause me massive support email headaches.

[RedFanatic]

I Love VDMsound

i just re-installed my system and immediatly ran blood of course but
disaster my sounds where crackling so i first off fell into
a depression but the after two hours of work discoverd that i must
have followed these instructions during my last installation


; - DIGITAL SOUND LATENCY: latency can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you are looking
; for. Low latency means good synchronization between sound and animation, but may result in breaking
; sound. High latency means smooth sound which may, however, lag significantly behind animation. Modify
; latency by changing 'buffer' under the [SB Wave Player.config] and [AdLib Wave Player.config]
; sections. If you have a sturdy system, you can also improve sound quality without increasing latency
; by lowering 'minDMAPeriod' under the [DMA Transfer Manager.config] section. Keep 'minDMAPeriod' above
; 0 if possible, or else your system responsiveness will decrease blow acceptable limits.
(change it to 1)

and now it runs perfectly a little thing to forget but makes a huge differance just thought i'd share and hopefully let others avoid my pain.

[cosmo]

Hi, sorry to bump this but I figured this would be the best place to post in.

I'm running Windows 2000 and need some help getting Blood to work. Tried DOSBox, but with unsatisfying results (awful framerate). So then I stumbled across the the BuildXP guide and followed it step by step. Ran the game, worked great... until it crashed after about 5 seconds. I've tried everything I could come up with, screwed with some settings, tried what RedFanatic said in the original post. No success.

The game works perfectly when I set the Sound FX Card option to "None", so I figure that's where the error must be. I have a Realtek AC'97 onboard audio card.

Soo, it would be nice if someone could give me some pointers to things I should try, or even come up with a solution, because I'm lost and would love to play the game with all sounds on. Thanks in advance.

[Slink]

Sound is the biggest problem in Blood. If possible, you may want to try a Soundblaster Legacy card (many current SB cards have "legacy" support, which means that they can imitate older sound cards). I believe the Soundblaster Live! card has Legacy support. Windows XP seems to have some basic SB emulation.

To me, the problem seems to be that WinXP is overriding both SB legacy and VDMsound support, thus f*cking everything up. I don't really know, it is very confusing, and some people have success with VDMsound.
-Slink

[leileilol]

of course sound is the biggest problem of running any dos game on nt-based os's. NT just does not allow such direct hardware calls.

[DustyStyx]

You'da thought some one would have fixed that by now.

[Quickening]

Getting Blood 1 to work on XP-Pro for me was a real struggle
i went through many many options and varying stages of
quality but with thanks to the BuildXP site i have a perfectly
working version that runs at correct speed with perfect sound quality
and in fact no problems of any sort,

but while reading things
in forums and on the BuildXP site i noticed that some people
had it going in a quite different way to me with the most glaring
difference being the VDMsound shortcuts that have never worked on
my system this made me think what if other people are running
a less perfect set-up and losing quality (as i was for the whole
first episode when i got the whole game) so just to put my mind at
rest i thought i'd describe the process i went through to get PureBlood

Well first off install Blood oneWholeunit (i have an original cd but OWU
is just easier) patch up to the maximum then copy in Cli2nop and nolfb
and install VDMSounds making sure to install every feature, patch VDMS
to 2.0.4 and install the Launchpad addon, cli2nop the exe file
and then all i do to run it is

open cmd prompt and type

cd\blood

nolfb

dosdrv

blood

and it runs great.
well there you go i most likely just patronized everybody but
if anyone is having sound break-up or slow down or even crashes
this works really good i even once got it running over a lan
with commit but my bro's machine got upgraded and now it complains
about netbios but hey he doesn’t like Blood anyway

Okay this is great and works perfectly. Sadly, Im a lazy bastard and don't want to type nolfb and dosdrv everytime I want to play. Would there perhaps be a way to creat an Dos Prompt shortcut that would do all these things itself?

[Slink]

Yes, good sir. That is called a "batch" file, or .bat file. You could make one called "blood.bat" or "b.bat" if you are a lazy bastard. (Without quotes.) I would do it the lazy bastard way.

Let's say that you have installed Blood in "E:\games\blood\"

you can use notepad (or edit in DOS/command prompt). Create your file, be sure to give it the .bat file extension.

After each line I will add a comment , so please do not type my comments into your batch file:

Code: Select all

e: REM this goes to the E: drive
cd\ REM this clears the current path (cursor) for the current drive
cd games\blood REM changes the current path as such
nolfb
dosdrv
blood

This batch file will work from any directory that you place it in, as long as you get the install path right. If you want to make it pretty, at the very beginning of the batch file, type these (without REM and proceeding comment):

Code: Select all

@echo off

You cannot see this command on screen because of '@' and can't see others because echo is turned off now for the duration of the batch file

Code: Select all

cls REM clears screen

So, the body of your batch file would be as follows:

Code: Select all

@echo off
cls
e:
cd\
cd games\blood
nolfb
dosdrv
blood

-Slink