China DOS Union

Everyone knows The Legend of Sword and Fairy, right? It’s an RPG game classic beyond compare. But with PCs constantly being upgraded and Windows coming out, the DOS Sword and Fairy can no longer run properly (not that it can’t run at all).
1. When running Sword and Fairy’s install.exe, it gives the prompt: run time error. This is because of a bug in install (it can’t run on PCs with high clock speeds). A slowdown utility can reduce the DOS window speed under Win9x, so problem 1 is partly solved. Is there any CPU slowdown software for DOS 6.22?
2. The music and sound effects problem in Sword and Fairy. As far as I know, the best result so far is that on a high-clock-speed machine + Win9x, the DOS Sword and Fairy has music but no sound effects. No matter how it is configured in the above environment, the DOS Sword and Fairy just has no sound effects (I don’t know how to slow down the CPU under pure DOS, such as DOS 6.22, so I can’t configure it in a DOS environment; not sure whether that would be any better).
I wonder if any expert has completely, thoroughly, and cleanly solved the above problems, that is, getting the effect of a low-clock-speed machine + DOS environment on a high-clock-speed machine + Windows system.
Attached: reference environments
Environment 1: pentium100MHz+dos6.22+SoundBlaster16 sound card
Ran the DOS version of Sword and Fairy perfectly.
Environment 2: pentiumIV1400MHz+dos6.22+SoundBlaster live!5.1 sound card (don’t know how to slow down the CPU)
Everything works except sound effects; the music is slightly choppy.
Environment 3: pentiumIV1400MHz+Windows98+SoundBlaster live!5.1 sound card (CPU slowed down with Slowdown)
Same as environment 2.
Environment 4: pentiumIV1400MHz+Windows2000/XP+SoundBlaster live!5.1 sound card (can’t slow down the CPU)
No music or sound effects.

For environment 4, you need to use VDMSOUND to drive the sound card.

There is absolutely no problem. The DOS I use is pure MS-DOS 7.10, and my PC specs are AMD Athlon 1600+ (1400Mhz), 256M RAM, and a Sound Blaster PCI 128 sound card. After patching, Sword and Fairy runs completely normally, with sound effects and everything, and INSTALL also runs normally.

Could it be because the admin’s CPU is AMD? Someone said before that it runs normally on AMD CPUs, but not on Intel CPUs. That person claimed to have tested it.

It’s not because of the CPU. I also tried it on another Intel P4 1000MHz computer, and there was no problem. But the key is solving the Runtime error 200 problem. In the site’s "DOS Articles" section there is a special article I wrote introducing it and the solution.

The admin really is a good person.

How do you drive the SoundBlaster16 ISA?

It should be a sound card driver problem. At present, most sound cards do not come with DOS drivers. An obvious difference is that sound cards under DOS need to use a DMA channel, while under WIN9X sound cards do not use DMA.

When I run Sword and Fairy it always says it needs 830K memory. How do I provide that? This is depressing, can anyone help me?

When I run Sword and Fairy it always says it needs 830K memory. How do I provide that? This is depressing, can anyone help me?

Right-click play.bat in the pal directory. Set the XMS size, and try a few more times.

I’m asking how to do it under DOS

The principle is the same: just use XMSDSK to make the free XMS memory less than 32MB but greater than 830K. For example, if there is 128M of XMS memory now, then first use the command XMSDSK 100000 /Y to occupy 100MB of XMS memory, then run PAL.

It needs 830K of extended memory (XMS), right? Conventional memory under DOS is only 640K.

XMS is extended memory, while EMS is expanded memory. It needs 830K of XMS.