That would explain why all the other games play sound just fine in DOS as Jack the Ripper's sound is all supposed to be played off the cd-rom. In fact I can run the game fine without the CD-ROM in the player as all the other files are copied to the c: drive. It just doesn't have sound that way. No music or the spoken dialouge at the intro.

What I was trying to say (and don't think I quite managed) was that I just installed the basic DOS driver package and didn't use additional software.

95dosapp.exe is DOS drivers for Windows 95.

sbbasic.exe is DOS drivers for DOS 5 or 6 and Windows 3.1.

ctcmbbs.exe is for Plug 'n Play cards (which is most of them - unless you have one of the earliest models of ISA SB16 which weren't Plug 'n Play).

Can you plug your headphones/speakers into the jack on the front of the CD drive and get sound or is your drive one of those that has no jack? That's the easiest way if it's only this game that's bothering you.

Did you say you had the cable between the sound card and the CD drive? I've heard that a few motherboards don't require the audio cable to be able to play CD audio, but all of mine seem to need the cable.

I'm a bit confused. You aren't using CuteMouse for the mouse driver in 3.1? That seemed to work okay for me.

I think I'm confused with this whole concept of hearing sounds from the cd-rom in pure DOS. The way I interpreted the readme that came with the soundcard DOS drivers, I needed to add a line in the autoexec.bat pointing to an executable which was part of the driver package I downloaded in order to hear audio from the cd player which is separate from the stuff the sound card is doing. I didn't think it was just a cd player interface like the one that comes with windows, but I never did try it out.

So how is Scout supposed to hear the redbook audio that this game uses?

Jenny100,

With a hard f8 reboot out of WIN95 into DOS I can hear sound through the jack in the cd-rom, but not through my speakers. This is the only game where I've run across this problem so far.

I downloaded and installed Vibra 16 drivers for the Optiplex straight off the Dell site. Made 4 diskettes and installed the sound via the install.exe. This automatically wrote DEVICE lines into my config.sys and SET lines into my autoexec.bat. I think you said you used the drivers off the Creative site. I tried those but couldn't get them to install automatically. Also had problems with a few games that intalling the Dell drivers seemed to solve.

I'm getting confused too but the upshot is I don't have a CD player for DOS like I do for Windows? (Talking Win95/DOS 7.0.)

lakerz,

I was using the cutemouse drivers for 3.1/6.22 but thought I would try a different mouse driver to see if the game liked it any better. No change. Still can't get to the first game screen via DOS 6.22.

Oddly, in Win 95 to DOS mode as well as Win 98 to DOS mode the appropriate cutemouse drivers won't work with this game. The cursor will only work in the top 1/3 of the screen. I have to use a logitech driver to get a fully functioning mouse cursor.

I even tried installing the game without a mouse but it needs to see one before it will launch.

I don't remember if I used Cutemouse with the Optiplex. I think I did, but I'm not sure. The mouse I used was not a Logitech though. It was a basic 2-button PS/2 mouse that came with the Optiplex.

With the Optiplex, you don't plug the audio cable from the CD drive into the sound card. There's a little slot on the motherboard that you use instead, since the SB16 in the Optiplex is built into the motherboard.

Here are some other games I've played that use CD audio files for music, speech, or background sounds:

The Arrival (background sounds)

Golden Gate

Inherit the Earth (speech)

Monkey Island 1 on the Monkey Island Madness CD (but not MI2 on the same CD, which uses midi)

Noctropolis

Relentless (aka Twinsen's Adventure)

Tomb Raider 1 (background sounds in about every other level)


There may be others, but not too many. Tomb Raider was particularly strange because some levels used CD audio for background sounds and some didn't. When I replayed it from a different CD drive, I was at first confused about why some levels, like the Cistern, no longer had background sounds.

Ah, thanks for listing the other games that are set up this way! I'll have to make a note of them for future reference. I wish I had Jack the Ripper to try to install and play to see if I get this same error, but this game has proven to be elusive to find. I hope Harriet can shed some more light on a possible solution for you Scout.

I finally got Jack the Ripper running with full use of the menus. Here's what I did.

I was having no luck running the game in DOS 7.0, which WIN 95 and WIN 98 use, so I decided to try the DOS 6.22/WIN 3.1 partition on my Pentium 200mhz machine again. Again the game wouldn't install. I checked the version of DOS and lo and behold it was 6.0 instead of 6.22. Remembering the invalid /y switch error I got when I tried to install in DOS 6.0 (also go the same error in DOS 5.0...and thought hmmm...) I upgraded to 6.22 and the game installed like a charm.

Next I disabled my cutemouse and logitech mouse drivers by REMing them out in my autoexec.bat file. Then I installed Microsoft Mouse 9.01 drivers to DOS as the one thing the readme.txt file mentioned was in case of "false mouse clicking" to try Microsoft Mouse version 8.10 (which I couldn't find but could find 9.01). This time the bug was gone. I can only surmise that this game needs DOS 6.22, authentic MS mouse drivers 8.10 or 9.01 and a PS/2 mouse. (I tried to run it on an old 386 with a serial mouse but it couldn't even find the drivers.) I guess that the reference to "false mouse clicking" must have been their way of referring to the bug. So that mystery is solved and I've played bug-free through the first day, merrily collecting clues and scratching my head over the id of Jack the Ripper. I have my suspicions....

Cool, nothing like a happy ending. Knowing how persistent you are Scout, I was sure you get it running sooner or later.

erm, this game is HARD...