Running Strife in WinXP

I know this is a Doom website, etc, but I'm really desperate to get some help with this, and I have yet to see a Strife-related message board. I know Strife uses the Doom engine, so maybe someone here can help me out.

I have WinXP on a 1.6GHz Athlon, and a Soundblaster soundcard (a newer model, I guess). When I run Strife, everything works fine (incl. music), except sound/voices, which are all choppy and slow. One of the best parts of Strife is the voice acting, so I'd like to get this working decently if possible.

Thanks in advance for any help. And sorry again about not having any Doom-related stuff to say.

try vavoom, it's supposed to have strife support and I believe it's at http://vavoom.sf.net or http://sf.net/projects/vavoom

Arioch said:

try vavoom, it's supposed to have strife support...

Unfortunately, it's pretty limited. You can get a game to start, and can wander round, but very little works, you get error messages poping up on screen when scripts try to run and when some sounds try to play etc

ie, it's very, very early stuff, and I don't think any work has been done on it recently. :-(

I want a Strife Port!

Since the Strife source code was never released, ports cannot be easily done for Strife, you'd need the original programmers help probably. Since ports cannot be made and Stife will continue to run in DOS, you cannot use it in Windows XP. I suggest you use an older system with Windows 98 on it, partition your harddrive and install Windows 98 on it or basically you are SOL.

I wrote a lot of emails a while back about Strife and it's possibilities for a Windows source port. From all the information I got, I gathered that the source code of the game is lost and no further support is given for the game, if not run onder real ms-dos. :(

scorpion said:

I gathered that the source code of the game is lost and no further support is given for the game...

Yeah, that's pretty much how I understand it too. :-(

If anyone is interested, the intro video for Strife is an old AVI format that is supposed to play under DOS, and most Windows media players can't handle it. I converted it to a self executing Windows file and put it on my site.

It was a while ago. IIRC, I had to chop it up into little bits otherwise my site wouldn't accept it. If you want to run the risk of DLing a few 1.4 mb files and maybe have it not work, the links are below. From memory, you need to put all the files into one directory and then open the zip file in Winzip. That will allow you to unpack the video, from which point on it can simply be double clicked to run, and you can bin the files from my site. At least I think it was Winzip I chopped it up with...

http://members.lycos.co.uk/Enjay001/StrifeV1.z01 1.4MB

http://members.lycos.co.uk/Enjay001/StrifeV1.z02 1.4MB

http://members.lycos.co.uk/Enjay001/StrifeV1.z03 1.4MB

http://members.lycos.co.uk/Enjay001/StrifeV1.z04 1.4MB

http://members.lycos.co.uk/Enjay001/StrifeV1.zip 538KB

Thanks for the replies, all.

I have a second hard drive on my new machine. If I installed DOS (I think I have DOS 6 somewhere) on it, would that work? If so, would I have to change my BIOS to load the OS from the second HD? Would it affect anything else? Thanks again.

You could do it the old fashioned way and have a DOS booting floppy for that real authentic "my machine can only just run these games, so I need a seperate boot disk with minimum drivers set up for each one" kind of feel.

Ahhhh, the good old days. :-)

Ever heard of the compatibility mode? ;)
YOu can say to WinXP: Emulate Win** and run that programm...

But as i just use Linux i dont now exacly where to find this...

I just run DosEMU and finnis ^.^

AFAIK, the XP compatibility mode sucks ass for most games.
either your MoBo and sound card allow it, or they don't.
but not to be completely negative: that was a good suggestion if they haven't tried it.

Opulent said:

AFAIK, the XP compatibility mode sucks ass for most games.

Yes, I have found that. It has NEVER helped anything to work on my computer.

AFAIK, the XP compatibility mode sucks ass for most games.

Yeah, that's pretty much the long/short of it. ;)

In other words: Yes, I've tried compatibility mode.