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[The Niles]

I have played "Star Trek: A Final Unity" all the way through in one marathon sitting together with my brother years and years ago but that was with a borrowed game. When I saw the game lying in a shop six months back I did not hesitate for a second and bought it on the spot, knowing full well I could not run it at the time.
When I bought my new computer in December of last year one of the first things I tried, when I had that up, and running was this game. It did not work and no matter how much I tried nor what I did I could not get passed one or the other serious hang up or error.
Yesterday I suddenly felt the urge to try it once more. Several hours of searching the net and browsing forums I had finally found a work around for the most serious problems.
Here is what I did.

1] Get DOSBox 0.63 (this is at the time of the writing the most recent version)

2] Boot it up and mount the HDD and CDROM.

3] Make sure your cycles are low enough (yes that is right LOW enough) 3000 cycles seems to be a working number (if these are too high you will get an error duuring install that your CDROM is too slow).

4] Once installed you can configure the game as you like (well only the 256colours, 320x200 resolution will work)

5] exit DOSBox at this time and go here.
Download and install the application called DOS32a.

6] Once installed and rebooted open the XP (or ME or what-ever) DOS prompt (which is NOT DOSBox) write this in there. "SET DOS32A = c:\DOS32A" where c:\DOS32A is the directory you have installed DOS32A to.

7] Now move (copy) the SB.EXE from the BINW directory of DOS32A to your Star Trek A Final Unity directory. Once done write "SB /R /BNsttng.new sttng.ovl" in your DOS prompt. This will create a new file called sttng.new in your A Final Unity directory.

8] Delete the file called sttng.ovl and rename sttng.new to sttng.ovl. You can now run the game (with high cycles). I have not yet played through the game in its entirety again yet but I have had not problems with it so far.

p.s. the solutions on here are not my own work. The DOS32A solution is from swaaye at the DOSBox forums and the cycles solution is from an anonimous contributer. Thanks to them both.

[MdaG]

Thank you. I haven't played A final Unity for years. Now I know what to do when I want to boot it up again on my "new" computer. :-)