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[Eagle of Fire]

DOSBox don't have fixed cycles. It is directly linked to the power of your computer. So if you cycle too high you will start slowing down again as your computer can't keep up.

[Domomonkey]

Setting the CPU to dynamic and the cycles to max in the conf instead of using the function keys in the program itself fixed everything. Game now runs super smooth.

Thanks!

I also beat the third mission. Having things be responsive helped quite a bit.

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by Domomonkey

Setting the CPU to dynamic and the cycles to max in the conf instead of using the function keys in the program itself fixed everything. Game now runs super smooth.

Setting cycles to max should give DOSBox a value depending on the estimates of your real CPU's capabilities, and it seems to do the job quite well

From mission 4 onward, things are going to be quite a bit easier since you get tanks and, further on, even more powerful units, so mission 3 really might be a bit hard - I remember my own first time, it was Harkonnens too (in fact, this is probably the easiest of all three Houses), and I even stopped playing for a while as my "wall of units" strategy (somehow this seems a common thing for people to try) failed utterly

Hola,

Hey, what is the difference between the CD version and the floppy version of Dune II?

I cannot imagine the CD image being a mere 7 megabytes. Was there CD audio on the media, or was there anyadditional content? Does anyone know the size of the CD image (not the ISO, since that only includes data, but the raw image)?

Just asking, since I have never actually seen a CD version of the game anywhere.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Far as I know, it was exactly the same as the floppy version - no CD audio and no extra content.

[Eagle of Fire]

Well... Floppies back in the day were able to hold 1.4 megs each.

7 megabytes meant 5 floppies... Which mean that even though a CD can easily hold more than a hundred times more than this it was still convenient to go with a CD over 5 floppies.

Not to say that a CD is quite hard to damage to the point of not being able to use it. Floppies have a very limited life.

Sure, the convenience of the CD is probably a selling point.

I seem to recall something about an 'off-line music player' on the CD version, but that might have been the Sega version. I also seem to recall the CD version being the fully patched version, with the updated Setup Utility and the speech fix. Perhaps the Dune II CD that came with the 'commemorative edition' of C'n'C was the only such version.

Maybe if someone with an actual Dune II CD could perchance verify, perhaps?

[MrFlibble]

While I don't have any CD version myself, information from other sources suggests that there have been various CD releases, both of the US version (someone somewhere even mentioned he had a CD release of the US v1.0, although I can't be 100% sure about that) and the European three-language releases.

Some time ago I've catalogued known differences between the various versions of Dune II:

Comparison of v1.0 and v1.07
Comparison of the different releases of v1.07

One of the users had actually uploaded the contents of his CD version, which was released in Northern Europe somewhere in 1995. I'm not sure how official it was, but it was a jewel-case release with a three-language v1.07 that came to be called the HitSquad* version (after the apparent publisher). It included a poorly done electronic version of the game manual in Microsoft Word format, and the EXE was hacked to removed copy protection (in a very lousy way, but it worked). The CD also had a DOS installer in English and IIRC Danish and Norwegian (or maybe Swedish, I'm not sure). The hacked EXE had a date stamp from 1995, all other game files had date stamps from 1993. There was nothing else on the CD IIRC, so the whole thing was about 9 Mb in size.

Then again, it could have been some budget re-release at best, or a pirated thing at worst.

*To the best of my knowledge, this is not the same version as the one here at AB.

[zirkoni]

I have the CD version, here's a screenshot from the start menu:



The CD doesn't have any audio tracks, only one data track that includes the game files:

(+ 4 batch files in the root of the CD)

And when you install the game on your HDD, you get these files (play.bat was created by me):

[MrFlibble]

Thanks for sharing that!

Hmm, there are WAVESET.BAT and WAVESET.DAT files in the HD directory, I assume you installed them yourself with the official sound fix, right? They're not in the CD directory.

I also wonder what the CDPATCH.EXE and DUNE.RNC files on the CD are for.

It's kind of hard to tell whether this is the HitSquad or the newer EU version without the exact file sizes in bytes though. An easy way to check is to save a game and then go to the main menu. If the option to load the game goes like "Load a game", then it's the HitSquad version. If it's "Load Game" (note the capitalization), then it's the EU version.

BTW, I also know that there's yet another three-language "The Battle for Arrakis" version which is similar to the HitSquad one but not the same, apparently it was sold in Australia.