Privateer 2 Videos Lock Up

[Dogeron]

First, thank you SO much for the CIC page on how to get the WC gmaes working on modern systems! I've held on to my old WC games, but was just about to toss them when I found this site. Now I'm playing them all again!

Okay, my problem. I've loaded up Privateer 2, following the DosBox instructions on your page. Patched it, done the Bug Error tricks, everything. The problem is that the game seems to lock up after a video is played. Especially when one of the ones involving a choice decision comes up.

I think this may be a problem with the CD drive. It seems to go on "standby" mode if not being constantly accessed.

I'm wondering if their is a way to either fix this, or if it can be avoided by downloading everything on the CDs onto the HD. If the latter, how do I get the game to access the info on the HD only?

Appreciate the help guys.

 

[ChrisReid]

You should be able to copy the contents of a disc to a folder and then mount the folder. If you copied everything from Disc 1 to c:\p2disc1, then you'd mount it something like this:

mount d: c:\p2disc1 -t cdrom

Sometimes stuff like this can cause the data to read too fast for some games, but I don't think that should be a problem here and should help if the issue is your CD-ROM drive lagging behind what the game needs.

 

[Dogeron]

I'll try it out. Thanks.

 

[Unregistered]

Whoops. Okay, now how do I get it to access the OTHER two files taken from the CDs? I now have folders named PRIV1, PRIV2 and PRIV3. How do I get it to access PRIV2 once the story reaches what should be CD2?

 

[Dogeron]

Privateer 2 Videos Lock up Part 2

Well I tried the idea of copying the CD to file and it went bust.

It may be because there's 3 CDs. I'm not sure if copying all the CDs into one file works either, as they have different files using the same name. Such as CD.DAT (which just has the number 1, 2, or 3), MOVIES.IFF, and SETS.IFF

In any case the game CTD's on startup when I try using the "mount d: c:\[filename] -t cdrom -ioctl" command and then loading the game.

Any advice?

 

[ChrisReid]

That's a good question. Sometimes games are smart enough to understand multiple CD-ROM drives and pick the correct disc. It's worked for a few WC games for me, but I can't remember if Privateer 2 works this way. I would mount the second disc as a second drive letter (mount e: c:\p2disc2 -t cdrom) and then proceed to the disc swap. Make sure you hit spacebar/mousebutton/etc to make sure you try and trigger it.

If that doesn't work, you could try to be sneaky about it. Mount your first disc as you have so far, and when the disc change comes up, ALT+TAB out of DOSBox and open up Windows Explorer. Replace the contents of your first disc folder with everything on disc 2. If this works, then you'll probably want to have one folder just called p2disc, and then two more folders called p2disc2 or p2disc3. When the disc change comes up, you'd switch out to Windows, rename p2disc to p2disc1 and then p2disc2 to p2disc.

 

[ChrisReid]

This shouldn't be a separate thread. Your post has been merged back to the original one.

Well I tried the idea of copying the CD to file and it went bust.

I'm not sure what this means.

In any case the game CTD's on startup when I try using the "mount d: c:\[filename] -t cdrom -ioctl" command and then loading the game.

Under what conditions does this happen? I'm not sure how you've copied files around at this point.

 

[Dogeron]

I tried several methods. At first I copied each CD to a file folder; named PRIV1, PRIV2, and PRIV3 respectively. But since I couldn't figure out how to get the game to read three separate folders, I then tried putting the files (e.g. all the movies) of all three CDs into one folder named PRIV2 and wrote the line in DosBox as advised.

mount d: c:\PRIV2 -t cdrom

When I tried to load the game it crashed to desktop. Then I tried just putting ALL the files from the 3 CDs into one folder. That didn't work either.

So I figured maybe I was just screwing things up. SO I deleted the game and reinstalled it, then tried just copying CD1 into a folder as a test. It crashed again.

I'll try both tricks you suggested tomorrow. I'll let you know if they work.