I've recently installed Debian GNU / Linux 9.1 Stretch and on Ubuntu 16.10Yakkety Yak and as an old school true gameraddict decided to play some games to recall the good old memories from the past of the glorious DOS games times, when all was simple people was real and there was no terrible people dividers such as Facebook / GooglePlus, no skype fuzzy craziness and no people watching all time at their mobile smart phones like zoombies .
Well anyways, so I wanted to play my favourite DOS games Terminal Velocity, StarGunner, Raptor, Heroes of Might and Magic 2, Doom II, Duke 3d etc. etc. the list goes on and on – BTW What's your favourite old school DOS Game??
So I issues in Terminal:
$ dosbox TV.EXE
DOSBox version 0.74 Copyright 2002-2010 DOSBox Team, published under GNU GPL. — CONFIG:Loading primary settings from config file /home/zetathon/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf MIXER:Got different values from SDL: freq 44100, blocksize 512 ALSA:Can't subscribe to MIDI port (65:0) nor (17:0) MIDI:Opened device:none DOSBox switched to max cycles, because of the setting: cycles=auto. If the game runs too fast try a fixed cycles amount in DOSBox's options. Exit to error: DRC64:Unhandled memory reference
So what is the solution to Exit to error: DRC64:Unhandled memory reference error and why it happens?
Well, as the error clearly states the whole problem comes from a default dosbox dos emulator configuration, that's the setting:
cycles=auto
Perhaps the CPU beat of a Core I7 CPUs is too strong for some of the old games which are expecting a slower PC with less memory that's why the exception
Exit to Error: DRC64:Unhandled memory reference is spit out by Dosemu.
So how to solve DRC64:Unhandled memory reference dosemu error?
By default DOSBOX places its configuration at Linux / BSD / *nix-es at home folder /dosbox – e.g. ~/.dosbox/ the naming of dosbox.conf might differ according to dosbox version and the respective Linux / BSD distro, on Debian and Ubuntu Linux usually the naming includes a version number.
On Debian 9 Strecth Linux dosbox config is at ~/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf
Edit the file
$ vim ~/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf
and change inside the value for:
core=auto
to
core=normal
Then give dosbox with the erroring game another try, it worked for me for me and everything seemed to run fine.
I've only run a handful of games but so far it seems to be working well.
If it does work but performance is degraded and tooks a huch hit on Gameplay you better try to substitute
core=normal
to
core=simple
AND HOORAY IT WORKS AGAIN! THE GAME RUN SUCCESSFULLY JOY TO THE WORLD! 🙂
Probably many people which are my age (I'm aged 30 now), spent many days and sleepless nights being totally addicted playing probablyone of the most addictive (and in my view greatest strategy game of all time) – Heroes of Might and Magic II (HOMM2). In that thoughts it will be a great news for you if you're owning smartphone that you can turn-back some nice memories and play (for free) a port of Heroes 2 for Android.
Free Heroes 2 Android port is it is made to support multiple screened devices so game version could be played on both Android Tablet a tiny screen smart phone or a middle sized mobile. Also Free Heroes 2 mobile port allows you to choose 'The Magnifying glass' option on first game boot, so if you're on a tiny screened mobile you can still zoom by pointing on a game object. Free Heroes 2 Android port is there thanks toGerhard Stein who is also an author of OpenTyrian mobile phone port and the amazing old computer jump-and-run arcadeCommander Keen. Game pointer controls of FHeroes2 are pretty convenient and playing the game is almost as confortable as played with a PC mouse. Free Heroes 2 is port of Free Heroes 2 engine – Free implementation of Heroes of the Might and Magic II engine in SDL and because SDL is platform independent Free Heroes is also available for both Windows / Linux. Maybe here is time too mention that Heroes2 original DOS game works perfectly on any modern Linux distribution when started through DOSBOX DOS emulator.
By default Free Heroes2 has no game campaign support yet. In order to enable campaing support into Free Heroes 2, download FULL Heroes 2 game – put data files to mobile SD card to dir app-data/net.sourceforge.fheroes2 and campaign option will be there too.
Heroes of Might and Magic 2 – The succession Wars (or HEROES2, as it is widely known in Gamers communities) is a turn based strategy game from year 1996 developed by Jon Van Caneghem by his New World Computing company it was marketed under on the market under brand of 3DO Company. Heroes II was voted the sixth-best PC game of all time by PC Gamer in May 1997. Heroes2 has also a game expansion pack called the Price of Loyalty released in 1997 as well as Heroes of Might and Magic II – Gold – from 1998. The game graphic design looks very beautiful and combined with the soundtrack makes playing it an awesome and calming experience. The game is very notable especially for soundtrack which is all of a beautiful classical music.
(Picture taken and copyrighted by Wikipedia)
Gameplay
The titular heroes (horse) are player characters who can recruit armies, move around the map, capture resources, and engage in combat. The heroes also incorporate some role-playing game elements; they possess a set of statistics that confer bonuses to an army, artifacts that enhance their powers, and knowledge of magical spells that can be used to attack enemies or produce strategic benefits. Also, heroes gain experience levels from battle, such that veteran heroes are significantly more powerful than inexperienced ones.
On a typical map, players begin a game with one town of a chosen alignment. Each town alignment hosts a unique selection of creatures from which the player can build an army. Town alignment also determines other unique traits such as native hero classes, special bonuses or abilities, and leanings toward certain skills or kinds of magic.
Towns play a central role in the games since they are the primary source of income and new recruits. A typical objective in each game is to capture all enemy towns. Maps may also start with neutral towns, which do not send out heroes but may still be captured by any player. It is therefore possible, and common, to have more towns than players on a map. When captured, a town retains its alignment type, allowing the new owner to create a mixed army. A player or team is eliminated when no towns or heroes are left under their control. Usually the last player or team remaining is the victor.
As heroes visit special locations called obelisks, pieces are removed from a jigsaw puzzle-like map, gradually revealing 'The Ultimate Artifact location to the player. Once found, it confers immense bonuses to the player capable of breaking a stalemate: the grail can be taken back to a town and used to build a special structure, while the ultimate artifact provides the bonuses directly through possession.
Whenever a player engages in battle
The game changes from the adventure map display to a combat screen, which is based on either a hexagonal or square grid. In this mode, the game mimics the turn-based tactics genre, as the engaged armies must carry through the battle without the opportunity to reinforce or gracefully retreat. With few exceptions, combat must end with the losing army deserting, being destroyed, or paying a heavy price in gold to surrender. Surrendering allows the player to keep the remaining units intact. Battles can be led army army to army or castles / villages can be fight and (captured) occupied. Owning a town gives your hero daily an income of money later used to buy and upgrade castle buildings.
Also you your moved heroes could overtake mines producing different goods like minerals, sulfur, gold, emeralds etc. Building different buildings and building war units for army usually cost gold and some kind of resource.
Game Story
Heroes II history continues afterHeroes I. Ending of Heroes I results in Lord Morglin Ironfist's victory. In the following years, he has successfully unified the continent of Enroth and secured his rule as king. Upon the king's death, his two sons, Archibald and Roland, vie for the crown. Archibald orchestrates a series of events that lead to Roland's exile. Archibald is then declared the new king, while Roland organizes a resistance. Each alignment is represented by one of the game's two campaigns. Archibald's campaign features the three "evil" town alignments, while Roland's campaign features the three "good" town alignments.
If Archibald is victorious, Roland's rebellion is crushed, and Roland himself is imprisoned in Castle Ironfist, leaving Archibald the uncontested ruler of Enroth. The ending, however, results in Roland's victory, with Archibald being turned to stone by Roland's court wizard, Tanir.
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (known also as Dune II: Battle for Arrakis in Europe is a game that my generation will never forget. Dune 2 is the "first" computer Real Time Strategy (RTE) game of the genre of the Warcraft I and Warcraft II /III and later Command and Conquer – Red Aleart, Age of Empires I / II and Starcraft …
I've grown up with Dune2 and the little computer geek community in my school was absolutely crazy about playing it. Though not historically being the first Real Time Strategy game, this Lucas Inc. game give standards that for the whole RTE genre for years and will stay in history of Computer Games as one of best games of all times.
I've spend big part of my teenager years with my best friends playing Dune2 and the possibility nowadays to resurrect the memories of these young careless years is a blessing. Younger computer enthusiasts and gamers probably never heard of Dune 2 and this is why I decided to place a little post here about this legendary game.
Its worthy out of curiosity or for fun to play Dune 2 on modernOS be itWindows or Linux. Since Dune is DOS game, it is necessary to play it via DOS emulator i.e. – (DosBox). Here is how I run dune2 on my Debian Linux:
Last Saturday evening I and my future wife Svetlana went to get train tickets (Sofia Dobrich), cause next week me and Svetlana will be travelling to Dobrich. Afterwards we went to Russian Church in center of Sofia – St. Nicolas for the evening service and confessed. The evening service was led by Archimandrite Philip who is currently Russian Church's prior.
At the end of Church service there was an oilment, as always being on a Russian Holy Liturgy is astonishing experience. On Sunday morning 2nd February we were in Russian Church again for the Russian Liturgy and we took the holy sacraments as it is proper (according to Orthodox Church tradition the marrying couple should confess and receive the sacraments before marrying in Church). After Church service we went to Church crypt to venerate holy relics of Archimandrate Seraphim Sobolev. A big thing is happening in my life nowdays as I will have marriage this week on Friday 7-th of February:)
We prepared so far almost everything for marriage. My parents helped with finding a marriage resturant and finding musicians for post marriage restaurant celebration. We also travelled to Asenovgrad to look for Svetlana's wedding dress and we got one I bough a marriage suit 2 weeks back and we ordered a marriage rings. There is already agreement with a priest father Vasilij – who will merry us in Church St. Trinity this Friday. Father Vasilij serves in Church "Dormition of Virgin Mary" in Kavarna . We choose father Vasilij to make the Marriage vows for the reason he is nativily Russian speaking (like Svetlana) plus the father is a good example of a true Christian priest. Today the parents of Svetlana (mama Vera and papa Alexander) arrived in the airport in Varna for the marriage (thanks God they had safe flight). Sunday night I send Svetlana to Train Station here in Sofia to make latest preparations for marriage. I will be travelling to Dobrich on Wednesday night 1 day before marriage. The rest of things happening around are not so interesting. In y job in HP work is complicated as usual. On my job I'm learning HPSM (HP Service Manager) and how to open new Changes in system and that's mostly my life these days. When I have time I'm playing OpenTyrian and a couple of nice arcade games on my ZTE Android mobile phone and reading some saint livings on mobile.
I still remember the days of "Electronic Games". As a citizen of Bulgaria – a country which was almost a Soviet Republic (in alliance with the Soviet Union) and due to existence of separation between Communistic and Democratic societies, we the kids of the Eastern Block didn't have the opportunity to play the so popular in that time in democratic "free world" arcade games on consoles like Nintendo and Atari. Nomatter that in Soviet Union times there were a couple of electronic games. Games were not advanced and were copying already concepts existing in games produced by major game company producers like Konami, Data East, Atari and Nintendo. Russian console like games were a separate game device running its own hardware and software, the major company producing that games was the legendary Electronika.
Elektronika was so emblematic in Soviet Union times that there is probably no kid who used to be a citizen of the USSR who doesn't remember playing some of Elektronika's games. The most famous game produced by the company is "Ðу Погоди" / Nu Pogodi (Wolf / Vylk) and was popular under emblematic name "Eggs".
The hardware of the Eggs game was actually a clone of famous Nintendo gameconsole – Nintendo EG-26Eg. There were a couple of other games which was remake of "The Wolf / Eggs" like "The Merry (Cheerful) Cook" – "ВеÑельiй Повар" running on Nintendo FP-24 Chef, Explorers of Space (1989) (running on MG-13) and a couple of others.
There is no question whoever thought of porting the game for Android was a genious as the size of most middle class mobile smart phones almost perfectly fits the size of the original Nu Pogodi! The game surely can be a time eater as it is addictive 🙂 The sound effects of the game brings back child memories and are pure joy . Its nice that the game had a remake asour children can enjoy the same old school arcade game of youth of their fathers 🙂
Whether you're looking for a game to kill some time and enjoy the old "spaceship shoot and run games" check out Torus Trooper. Originally game was developed for MS Windows and is remake of an old Atari Arcade Game – Tempest.
Those who played Tempest know well that this game was revolution for its time and probably remember also a similar world famous Space Duel game.
Atari's Tempest Arcade game
The objective of Torus Trooper is mega simple as in most arcade games. You're speeding up through a tunnel all time with a spaceship with the only goal to kill as many enemies as you can and survive as longer as possible. Playing the game you can get some memories of demoscene tracked music, future crew Second Reality / Unreal demos. Game was created by ABA GAMES company, authors Tumiki Fighters and GunRoar another 2 nice 2D Linux arcade games.
Tumiki Fighters
GunRoar
Probably best thing of Torus Trooper is its nice graphics and superb demoscene like soundtrack. I truely love the pace of the game, raising up the player adrenaline in minutes. To install in a bundle Torus-Trooper Tumiki Fighters and Gunroar on Debian / Ubuntu Linux run the usual:
Many Non-bulgarian people, might be unware about an interesting fact about Bulgaria.
Here in Bulgaria, we used to produce an 8-bit and 16-bit computers in one little town Pravetz.
Pravetz town was a home place of the bulgarian communist party leader Todor Zhivkov (he used to be something like the democratic country president).
Pravetz Computers factory was producing about 100 000 computers per year for the use of the ex-USSR, making Bulgaria the biggest computer producer in the Soviet Union!
Pravetz used to be a personal computer (PC) but it was officially marketed as Microcomputer. As for that world it was considered way smaller than the big VAXes or MainFrames.
Pravetz design was not too revolutionary, its microchip was stolen from IBM, while some of the earlier 8 bit pravetz computers were stolen by Apple ][ microcomputer. The computer came with its own documentation. I've never owned a newly bought Pravetz at this time as buying a computer in the years of 1985 – 1995 in Bulgaria was a pretty hard and too expensive. I personally got my Pravetz 16 with the high 640 KB of Memory and even a 21 Mbytes of Hard Disk! The monitor was a monochrome black and green CGA. The computer however had a major bug as I cannot play a lot of the games which was intended for 16 bit Personal Computers because the screen was failing to produce some of the 16 bit colors it was supposed to.
A lot of schools in the 1990 and 1998 was using heavily Pravetz Computers for their Informatics educational program. Students were mostly learned in BASIC programming language. BASIC and Borland Pascal was the most used programming language on this archaic machines. Actually the first computer ever I saw in my life was an 8 bit Pravetz8M. Seeing a computer was quite an interesting experience, we used to have here in Bulgaria special calculation ceneters dedicated to high calculations, storing a lot of mainframes, along with the mainframes Pravetz was supporting the scientific works of the Bulgairan scientists.
The pravetz factory which used to be producing the Pravetz line Personal Microcomputers was disbundled about the year 1998 like a lot of other government (communist party) owned and supported factories.
Most of the Bulgarians in age between 23 and 45 should definitely still remember how euphoric it was to run an old school DOS games on Pravetz. Actually most of the the schools in bulgaria in the years 1982 – 2000 had either used only Pravetz or used mostly pravetz. Nowdays not much people remember the Pravetz years. Pravetz was runnign a computer architecture of 8086 XT
I still remember on Pravetz playing great games like Double Dragon, Karateka, Prince of Persia, Grand Prix 🙂 And many many more, I even remember a program called Stripe or something for 3d design. Pravetz was running fine a lot of stuff including the great File Manager Norton Commander.
Well what can I say it was good years 🙂 Its a pity nowdays computers are nto produced in Bulgaria anymore.
Many people are using ThePiratebay to get all kind of data and share Movies, Games, Programs etc.)
ThePirateBay has become like a standard media for file sharing and still not many people are aware of who is behind ThePirateBay. This is why I thought, by posting this article I can "rant" on the existence of the Swedish Pirate Party The Pirate Party – Is a party fighting on behalf of information sharing freedom (or in other words a party fighting for our freedom as individuals in the digital era).
Pirate Party (Sweden) party official mascot
The Pirate party are swedish political party established in 2006, its members are activists lobbying on freedom of information as well as pointing at threats to our human freedoms imposed by new legislations and anti-freedom agreements like the recent ACTA treaty.
Since there creation in 2006, they have grown from a local Swedish party to an international party, locally existing in 33 countries arount the world.The ideology behind the Swedish PirateParty as well as the rest of existing Pirate Parties international is as I prior said Freedom of Information on the internet. PP is a party phenomenon, as they are neither a left or a right oriented party (on the traditional left-right scale). PP are independent bloc pursuing their political agenda colabborating with all mainstream parties, which stand behind the ideologies the party fights for.
After last European Parliament elections, PP received 7% of all Swedish votes for a country EU representative. As of today according to Wikipedia , the party holds 2 EU deputee seats in EU parliament.
I've a friend who is taking membership in the Pirate Party and from him I know the PP party are big supporters of Free Software.
One major key figure part of Pirate Party is the swedish Peter Sunde. He is a front person who is behind ThePirateBay project as well as holds a very interesting revolutionary ideas. Many of his ideas are close to "the father of all free software" – Richard Mathew Stallman (RMS). Therefore the PP would be probably of interest to anyone who is interested in Free Software. Here is an interview with Peter Sunde's taken in Cebit 2011:
As long as I know the Pirate Party are along the only few organizations in the whole world, who are trying to fight on behalf of human freedom.I'll be glad to hear if someone know about other ornigazations apart from Pirate Party the Free Software Foundation – (FSF) lobbying on present worsening conditions of invidual human freedom.
Here is few curious facts proving how BIG and important thepiratebay.org is, the text below is again quote from Wikipedia
Currently ThePirateBay.org is ranked as the 80th most visited website in the world and 20th in Sweden by Alexa Internet, has over 5.5 million registered users and, as of February 2012, hosts more than 4 million torrent files.
According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading" and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright or pro-piracy movement"
I've faced some issues with crappy sound in some of the games I'm playing on my Debian . Also I ometimes, have issues with sound while watching movies with VLC or Totem... Sound issues with Skype are also seldomly occuring during skype calls etc. etc.
Recently I've realized many of this crappy sound issues origins from PulseAudio – the sound server GNOME desktop env uses to manage all sound just before passing it through ALSA.
I've found on the internet many suggested ways on how to workaround these issues. Many of the things suggested as workarounds, however was outdated and referred to old versions of GNOME / Pulseaudio and therefore was unusable on my Debian 6 Squeeze….
What I found most helpful is fixes and workarounds for pulseaudio list compiled by people in the Fedora community on fedorasolved.org's website – http://fedorasolved.org/Members/fenris02/pulseaudio-fixes-and-workarounds
Some of the fixes and work arounds suggeted on the above link, I have already applied, others was not applicable for Debian.
Anyways the things which I found most important and I believe many people who runs Debian need to implement from the list to solve pulseaudio crappy sound issues is concluded in the below 5 steps.
4. Enable Simultaneous Output in PulseAudio preferences
Navigate to the GNOME menus:
System -> PulseAudio Preferences
Choose the "Simultaneous Output" tab and select:
Add virtual output device for simultaneous output on all local sound cards
5. Log Off Gnome and restart PulseAudio
To load the new changed settings in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf restart of pulseaudio server is required, right after a Logoff from the current opened gnome session;
To do so LogOff with the trivial:
System -> Log Out
Login as root in console;
Press CTRL+ALT+F1, login with root and issue:
debian:~# /etc/init.d/pulseaudio restart ...
N.B.; In some cases it might be necessery to do some adjustments are made in gstreamer properties , to change settings there launch:
Tampering with gstreamer-properties used to fix for me some problems with ALSA and PulseAudio in the past, so it might be worthy to check it out and experiment a bit with it as well.
debian:~$ gstreamer-properties
Now many of the crappy sound games or applications should start working just fine. Enjoy 😉
