GAMES:Blood

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Revision as of 09:32, 23 October 2009 by 82.177.55.130 (talk) (Added infobox)
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Blood
Developer Monolith
Publisher GT Interactive
Released 1997
Status Perfect
Tested on 0.73
Tested game version 1.21 One Unit: Whole Blood
Links Compatibility List
Commands
Executable BLOOD.EXE
Installer INSTALL.EXE
Setup SETUP.EXE
DOS Extender
DOS4GW.EXE Unknown
Works with DOS32A N/A

Sound

Your soundcard works perfectly! (tm: Warcraft sound setup)

If the game ever complains about missing CD Audio tracks (or crashes unexpectedly, displaying garbled text bleeding over the graphics), try running it with the command line parameter

-nocd

Using emulated Gravis Ultrasound for both music and sound can cause sound effects to have a strange reverb applied to them.

Video

Works flawlessly, even in high resolutions thanks to the DOSbox VESA support. Set

machine=svga_s3

to enable VBE support.

However, if you own the widescreen display (not very uncommon nowadays) you may find fullscreen mode to be clipped somehow (mostly at the bottom of the screen) or corrupted otherwise. You may try switching the resolution by pressing F8 in-game, or follow the steps below.

In your dosbox.conf file, set:

aspect=true
fullresolution=0x0
output=overlay

Network

Follow the DOSbox networking guide to enable IPX network connections and let the BloodBath (tm) begin!

Note that the game was not designed to run in the server/client mode. Every player has to synchronize his game before it could be started eventually.

If the networking session ever runs out of sync, try running the setup (used to start BloodBath matches) with one of the following command line parameters

-broadcast
-masterslave

or try to reconfigure your graphic options to decrease the CPU load (e.g., choose lower resolution, minimize the use of details and gore).

General

If the game pauses during startup, displaying error message stating that there is too little memory, that's because with its default settings DOSbox allocates only 16 MB of RAM. To avoid seeing the message informing you of such condition, open your dosbox.conf configuration file, find section [dosbox] and alter the value of the memsize parameter to be at least 38.

Furthermore, here is what seems to be optimal setting for Blood:

memsize=64 (example value, see above) 
core=dynamic (anything else makes the game crawl, even on powerful machines)
cycles=max (being pretty much advanced game, Blood requires quite a horsepower to run smoothly)
scaler=none (since you would want to set the high resolution in-game)
output=overlay (or surface, using opengl makes the game unreasonably fuzzy and hard-to-read)

To further tweak and measure game performance, use the RATE in-game cheat code, that will force displaying the framerate on-screen.