Daggerfall in Linux

Greetings. This is my first post on the forum, but I'm a huge fan of
Daggerfall. In fact, I still consider it one of the best RPGs ever
made.

Ever since I abondoned my dad's Celeron 333 some years back, I've been
having trouble finding a machine that could play this game. I've
finally got it working perfectly under Linux, but I'm using DosBox, so
maybe this story will help anyone using DosBox on any system.

First, I'm using Debian Sarge, on a 2.4Ghz Pentium and 1GB of RAM.

DosBox 0.63 now plays Daggerfall quite well, but needs a lot of
tweaking. The first hurdle is the install. DosBox won't install the
huge installation, so I used Wine instead. There's an XP installer for
windows users as well. Then I used the no CD cheat from the UESP.
Wine took forever to load the installer's splash screen, fade in and
out took half an hour. The install menu was also very choppy. Once I
set install in motion though, everything went very quickly.

Once installed, I used DosBox entirely. Of course, I mounted my
imaginary drive c as drive c in DosBox. Execute the sound setup from
within DosBox. Also, you can install a patch as you normally would
using DosBox.

Daggerfall worked immediately but was very slow and choppy. Of course,
you have to play with how many cycles DosBox uses. You'll want to
create a config file--the DosBox documentation has all the
instructions--so you can save your changes. I started my cycles off at
10000, and set the increase and decrease increments to 500. If the
decrease increment is less than 100, it represents a percentage which
was way too confusing for me. Also, if you're using Linux, all of the
DosBox ctrl-whatever commands must use the windows key as well.

Optimizing the cycles is pretty obvious. Turn the cycles up till your
CPU load is around 80%-90%. If you let it get to 100% while you're
just sitting in a dungeon, then a bunch of monters attacking will push
things too hard and the game will stutter. The real key to getting the
game to stop lagging is in the render options. The settings I found
immediately gave me a 200%-300% performance increase. They are:

fullfixed=true

output=overlay

scaler=none

The scaler is the biggest CPU hog. It's responsible for taking
Daggerfall's 800x600(?) output and making it look nice on your 1024x768
LCD, or whatever. The above three settings turn off the scaler, but
keep it full screen. It doesn't look as nice, but it gives you that
big performance boost.

It runs just fine with that, but I wanted a bit of fit and finish. I
copied my config file and renamed is dagger.conf . I put it in my
Daggerfall folder, though you don't have to. At the end of your conf
file, you can put commands for DosBox to run on startup. I had it
mount the c drive, move to the daggerfall folder, and execute
daggerfall with the no CD cheat. In my case:

mount c /home/joseph/.wine/drive_c/
c:
cd dagger
fall.exe z.cfg

Then I created a desktop config file (a link to a program on my
desktop). I called it Dagger and had it run:

dosbox -fullscreen -conf
/home/joseph/.wine/drive_c/dagger/daggerfall.conf

Use -fullscreen in the command line instead of setting "fullscreen =
true" in the config, at least in Linux. Finally, I used KIconEdit, a
KDE icon editor to change Daggerfall's .ico icon--which you'll find on
the disc--to a .png icon. Then I changed my desktop shortcut icon to
the Daggerfall icon. Now I just click on the Daggerfall icon on my
desk, it calls DosBox which runs the config file and automatically
boots Daggerfall.

All this effort to do the job of a Celeron 333. (;

If you have any questions, please let me know.

--Joe

I've got an alright system, but I'm not pushing it to the limits here.
By turning off the scaler, I think something lesser could do just as
well.

DosBox only shows 110meg of free space for compatibility with old DOS
installers. You have to use the -freesize "Number of MB's" switch to
increase the shown freespace

Ex: Mount c / -freesize 999 for 999mb's of freespace.

Also DosBox 0.63 is extremly old (from Nov 2004 of last year, IIRC)
there have been MANY fixes and bug fixes since then so if you can
download the CVS and compile a new binary or have someone do it for you
if you don't know how.