«

My friend and I were trying to get Star Control 3 to run on his computer (just because we're big fans of UQM and we want to play 3 to see how bad it really is.) As far as we can tell, the game runs adequately and is playable, except for two things:

We can't get the sound to work. We tinkered around with sound options a little, but neither of us have any idea how to get around on DOSbox so we're stuck.

The animations don't work. Basically, everything is static. The aliens' heads don't move around or anything, all we get is a still image.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Eagle of Fire]

From the review here on Abandonia:

A big difference between this game and Star Control II is that Reiche's drawings of the aliens have been replaced with photographic images, often from puppets seemingly made by special effects experts. Personally, the result reminds me of a B-series sci-fi movie, apart from the unavoidable comparisons with Reiche's 320x200 pixels art in Star Control II. Into the bargain the fans will be disappointed because each species's personality hasn't been respected: now the Ur-Quan seem old instead of fierce, the Pkunk are disgusting instead of likeable, the Syreen... well, what they did to the Syreen is especially outrageous... In Star Control II each species had a specific soundtrack we heard while talking with it, and a specific text font for the dialogues; now the fonts are gone, and the tunes will hardly get our attention. As for the new alien species, well, they haven't been created by any sci-fi top gun, and they lack the depth of the ones introduced in the previous games of the saga.

For sound: make sure you configure the game for soundblaster when using DOSBox. Look for a configuration file like setup.exe, which should allow you to set the soundcard used in game.

[Japo]

From the same review:

The digital effects, speech included, were ripped because it would multiply the download size by more than ten; therefore you may configure a drive for the MIDI music, but you must (attention) select no digital effects, otherwise the game will crash when the ripped files aren't found.

I guess the same happened with any animations.

You're welcome to find a different download of the full version of course.

Oh, thanks... I probably should have rechecked the review, but I didn't remember there being any technical advice in it.

I have the original cd, yet still dos box won't allow the use of animations or sound.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Did you install the game from the disc, or are you trying to make a copy from Abandonia use the disc (which almost certainly won't work).

I seem to have gotten it to work after first experiencing the same "no animations"
problem as the original poster (or at least I think so). First of all I think I have a rip from an original CDROM. In it's contents folder after unzipping it's already full of seemingly ready to play files. I started the first time by installing it from the "install.exe" and thought it worked. I dragged the "go.exe" onto the dosbox icon to launch it and eventually got to the game launcher screen where one could choose one of 4 options. Two of those were "install" and "run". I'd thought I'd already installed it before so just clicked "run". I could play the game this way but like you had no animations (strangely though I did have sound...).

I then tried to reinstall it from the launcher screen emulated by dosbox after drag and dropping the "go.exe" again onto the dosbox icon. This time i selected "install" of the 4 options. I chose the maximum install option again (the process seemed longer than before oddly, but that's just my subjective feeling). When that finished I had to hit "enter" through a few prompts before it brought me to the audio set up install section. By default both MIDI and digital audio are left with nothing applied. I selected one for each before finishing all of this, returning to the game launcher through dosbox and finally clicking "run" from the 4 options. This time I had animations and sound during play.

Hope this works for you too