Boulder Dash Forum

I've got the New Dash Dimension and the accompanying kit running in windows XP, via DOSbox.
The gameplay itself is perfect!
However, I'm having a problem in the construction kit - I can't move the mouse cursor more that halfway down the screen. Not a huge problem, but I can't fully explore the kit's features without it. Any way to remedy that?

Try a different graphics driver. There are a few in the same directory which you can replace in the ini file which the kit creates on the first start.
Those drivers came with an old Pascal version, and are rather buggy, unfortunately (other software using them have the same issues).
You can also try different mouse drivers.
In many cases, the EGA driver is the only one working correctly. You still can use the editor with it, except it won't display the correct colors of the cave.

Also keep in mind that the kit itself is early beta and not bug free either. And I have no intention to work on that one anymore.

The CLCK has the priority for now. And after that, I have plans to do a new engine which shall feature the best of The New Dash Dimension and Boulder Remake, beeing compatible to every version of the C64 engine and natively using BDCFF. As it should be portable C or C++, so it can be easily ported to handhelds as well, I have to rewrite it mostly from scratch. Thus making it the perfect clone.

Anyways, nice to see that people are still playing The New Dash Dimension today.

Where should I type it; after 'driver', under 'driver', overwriting 'driver'?

RTADash wrote:Where should I type it; after 'driver', under 'driver', overwriting 'driver'?

There is a driver file name. VESA.BGI should be the default. Try replacing it with SVGA256.BGI or EGAVGA.BGI.

I just tried this. The mouse works fine with the EGAVGA driver. There is another problem, though: The game crashes whenever you quit, and this also happens when you playtest in the construction kit, which is rather annoying.
This sure is a Dosbox-bug, as I tested this with MS-DOS 4 up to 6.22 and even those Windows included ones up to 7.1, and it worked with all of them.

Thanks! The whole crashing thing isn't much of an issue for me, because I'm mostly exploring as opposed to actually designing, at least for now

For your convenience, I made a bootable floppy disk image with The New Dash Dimension and the Dashkit pre-installed and set to EGAVGA. Thus you can easily try this in emulators:
EDIT: image fixed.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/1slzxd

Bochs: The game starts, scrolling is fine, but the game runs way too fast for some reason. Maybe I just didn't found Bochs's option for proper timing. The Dashkit doesn't seem to work there, as it seems to detect a pressed joystick button all the time. Maybe it can be disabled and I just didn't found that option either.

VirtualPC 2004: The game is playable. The scrolling is too fast and the sound is a bit strange, though. Dashkit has no mouse sprite with 256 color modes, but runs fine in EGA. GUI drawing is a bit slow, but still rather usable.

I'll have to check some more of those DOS emulators out - thank you!

I encountered a new problem in running the kit DOSbox (I handn't gone to load a cave yet) - I can't get the load menu to stay up - it disappears a second after it appears.

RTADash wrote:I encountered a new problem in running the kit DOSbox (I handn't gone to load a cave yet) - I can't get the load menu to stay up - it disappears a second after it appears.

Works for me. I tried it with DOSbox 0.72.

EDIT: I remember the problem. Yes, it is a dashkit-bug and the solution is simple: Just put the game and the dashkit in a sub directory.
I will upload a fixed image in a few moments.

Here is a fixed image: http://www.sendspace.com/file/1slzxd