I've been enjoying DF very much, but something constantly nagging at the back of my mind is the fact that I am running it without using a memory extender like dos32a. I downloaded it, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to use it. I assume the dos4gw files are embedded in dagger.exe, but even then I'm not sure I follow the directions on the dosbox wiki.



Sorry to be a noob, but I wanted some clarification before I screw anything up.

First off, just how vital is using a memory extender? I have yet to encounter a corrupted save, and I make sure I have backups in another folder, but I've heard horror stories of batches of games all being corrupted at once, and I'd hate to lose all that progress. Is this a valid fear, or is having backups in a separate folder good enough? How rare is the corruption issue on a fully patched game? Is "fixsave" really as useless as UESP indicates?

If it is important enough that you folks consider it a necessity, how do I go about installing it properly? I downloaded dos32a, and the file includes many executables. Do they need to go somewhere in particular before I enter the above commands? Do I need to actually run any of them? Are those commands the only ones I need to use? What are the fill in the blank fields in those commands, i.e. I know I substitute games\mygame with the folder I put Daggerfall in (dosgames\dagger), but is there anything else that is not entered exactly as listed?

Thanks for your help in making sure my apprehensions are allayed. :brokencomputer:

I attempted to run Daggerfall with the DOS32A memory extender a while back, but couldn't figure it out either (you can find my thread http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=950234&hl= for all it's worth). I don't think it's really necessary with DOSBox, and can in fact cause corruption if you later try to run the game without the extender again. I believe a few tried, but saw no noticeable improvement in the game in doing so. Just be sure to save often, in different slots, and back up those batches of save files. I for one have never had more than one save slot at a time break, but it can't hurt. Oh - and in my experience, yes, FixSave doesn't help very much.


"I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written..."

You wouldn't happen to be a fan of the Myst series by any chance?

Finally someone who caught the reference!
Very much so, except I've never played Uru or the fifth game. I hear that I'm not missing out on much.

Just so this post has some on-topic value I just gave your thread a glance. It appears that I don't have to worry about it, though I'm hanging on to the file in case I do need to use it. I've heard dos32a can supposedly "repair" a corrupt save game by running it every time Daggerfall is launched. The only reason I'm interested is for the corruption issue, thankfully my computer can run Daggerfall just fine.

I use a front end called D.O.G. Under memory it has a page to use DOS32a and you can just click on an icon to find out if the game neds it. D.O.G. says Daggerfall doesn't need it. If you try toforce to bind it, you get a failure.

Interesting. UESP suggests otherwise, though it seems to me that particular article on corrupted saves is wrong, at least in implying that dos32a is the end-all in preventing/fixing corruption. I'll just stick with backing up saves/saving frequently for now, unless something else comes up. Thanks for the help, guys!

I've been using it and I haven't had the game crash (at all) since I've started. It's obviously not vital but I'd recommend it just as an extra measure to keep the game from crashing.

For the record, I made a batch file starting Daggerfall that simply contains the command:

dos32a fall.exe z.cfg

Daggerfall DOS extender is CauseWay, not DOS4GW, and it is embedded in fall.exe. Some users reported a better stability of the game using DOS/32A instead, you can use it as Taemos said.

I'll throw my daggerfall dosbox startup lines into the mix, too, for posterity's sake.

mount d E:\DAGGER_CD -t cdrom -ioctlmount c E:\c:cd daggerC:\DOS32A\BINW\DOS32A FALL Z.CFG

Dos32a was pretty straightforward. It runs with a parameter executable- in the case of daggerfall, this would be fall.exe. Since fall.exe ALSO has a parameter (z.cfg) you tag that on as well.

I've had little-to-no crashing since DOSBox 0.73 came out. In the previous version, the game would crash for trivial things, like minimizing the DOSBox window or loading a saved game while already in-game, or taking too long to create a custom character.

I've pretty much avoided playing Daggerfall until this latest version of DOSBox came out. It was either too slow unless running on more powerful hardware, or the speed was just really inconsistent. It's definitely way more stable now than what I'm used to.

I've actually had much more trouble with the newest version of DOSBox while playing Daggerfall. The game seems to hang in certain areas (when initially loading the game, loading and saving games, etc) much more often and I experience a huge amount of crashes, more so than I've ever experienced in the nearly 10 years I've had Daggerfall. Don't know if it's just bad luck or not... pretty weird.

I'm having trouble with dosbox myself. I'll type in the "mount c c:\daggerfall" command, than "C:' than "cd dagger~1", but it will give me some kinda error message saying that it can't goto it.

Yeah, okay, managed to figure out what I did wrong and installed daggerfall onto my comp. now when I try to run it it gives me grief for not having the cd in my cd rom, and when I try to run it from dfcd it gives me grief for trying run daggerfall off of the cd rom. can someone help me out here?

Uru was different, but I thought it was great. It remains one of my favorite adventure games, you should definitely try it. The fifth was okay, but the Bahro in it were awesome. I actually didn't really like the fourth. The puzzles were too confusing, but the visuals were great.

Oh, sorry, I really don't have anything on topic to say. Sorry.

Uru is indeed worth playing, especially if you keep an in-character journal to keep yourself firmly planted in the midst of your adventure across the D'ni empire, and particularly down in the cavern in the expansions. Back when Uru was current, posters on the Cyan forums were encouraged to stay in-character, speaking about their adventures as if they had returned from a trip and were going to fly back out to New Mexico again soon.

One message in particular is vivid in my mind: a player asked a question about his KI, saying that it was rather glitchy since he had brought it back home from Gahreesen; he asked whether human electronics might cause interference. After I read that I was convinced I had done the right thing by treating the game as a journey to be experienced rather than as a game to be completed. It's empty and it's light on actual puzzling, but if you let it sweep you along you'll come to find the emptiness haunting, and the simple treasure-hunt puzzle-style welcome once you encounter one of the game's truly fiedish actual puzzles.

As for Myst V... It's extremely pretty. It's well-acted. It's pretty easy. Story kind of svcks. Sigh, sigh.

Anyway, to keep things somewhat on topic, dos32a may be something of a talisman, but I use it, since I'd say it's better to be safe than to be sorry. I'd hate to have one of my saves corrupt, that's for sure.

Sounds like a talisman indeed. Why would you need a memory extender for a DOS emulator that's perfectly capable of adding tons of memory by itself? Sounds more like it would just complicate things. (This is assuming it doesn't also do some other magic of which I'm totally unaware.)