Like many other Bullfrog games, Magic Carpet has a number of graphical settings that are a bit obscure because there's no options menu in the game and you won't discover them unless you start hitting keys at random or read the manual. And who does that?

So here's my guide for making Magic Carpet as pretty as it can be. I'm also including some tricks on improving the music and controls.

1. Change the CPU Cycles
Go to your Magic Carpet directory (by default it's "C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Magic Carpet") and open the file "dosboxMC.conf" with Notepad. Search for a line called "cycles". In my experience 180000 is a great setting for the game.

The game will run incredibly fast at first but don't worry: it will run just fine once we enable high resolution / SVGA mode.

And if it is still going to run too fast, you can of course experiment with different cycles setting until you're happy. You can press Ctrl+F11 and Ctrl+12 to adjust cycles during gameplay. In windowed mode (Alt + Enter) you can see your current cycles and later enter the setting you feel is best into your configuration file.

Fun fact: if you set the CPU type to "pentium_simple" you will get an Intel intro after game launch. However, I don't know if this setting also does anything else to the game.

2. Set proper audio configuration
By default the game is configured to play Soundblaster / AdLib music which may cause your ears to bleed. It sounds a lot nicer when you change the midi device to General MIDI. So after game launch, choose these settings:

Sound Source: Soundblaster 16
Music Source: General MIDI
Sound I/O: 220
Sound IRQ: 5
Sound DMA: 1
Music I/O: 330

Note that General MIDI will cause DOSBox to use your system's default MIDI device for MIDI music. You can get downright amazing results if you e.g. use Coolsoft's VirtualMIDISynth and get a nice SoundFont. Personally I recommend Fluid R3.

3. Adjust the graphics
Press the following keys once to activate some neat details:
- F4 (activate "soften" - it's actually an internal anti aliasing algorithm in a 1994 game!)
- F5 (turn on reflections - this will make the water reflect everything else)
- F6 (turn on sky - pretty self-explanatory)
- F7 (turn on shadows - this will make all objects cast shadows... even fireballs!)

Also: Owners of red/blue-goggles may actually use F10 to activate a 3D mode!

4. High resolution Mode
There is one thing that you have to set manually every single time you run the game: press R to activate SVGA (increases the screen resolution to 640x480). Makes the game look much much better (and also run much slower).

5. Rebind keys
Finally, Magic Carpet does not allow rebinding keys but DOSBox does! Just press Ctrl+F1 at any point while DOSBox is open to access its Mapper tool.

For a WASD layout you just have to click on the cursor keys, then on "Add" and press the corresponding letter keys. When you're done, click on "Save".

I also recommend binding the Return key to Tab for easier access to the map / spell menu.

Bonus: spell hotkeys
Like in most shooters you can actually quickly select specific spells using the number keys (which incidentally works a million times better with WASD controls than the default ones).

If you hold down Ctrl while pressing a number, the spell will be assigned to your second slot.

Unlike other games Magic Carpet also allows freely rebinding spells during gameplay: just open the map, point at a spell, and press the number you want to bind it to.

What's not so great is that these spell bindings don't get saved and you have to redo them each time you start or restart a level.

Thanks alot! I was stumped at why it was running so slowly. With core=max, now its waaaay too fast! I'll fiddle with the numbers....thx again

Are you sure you activated all graphics options and the high resolution? I tested this on some machines, one quad core gaming rig among others, and with all options activated (particularly "Soften" and the high resolution) it actually ran at a good speed with the cycles set to "max" - although it's quite possible that what I consider the "right" speed may seem too fast for others. If this is the case then you're right and you actually have to play around to find a cycle count that fits to your machine although unfortunately the menu may start lagging a lot once the actual game is at a decent speed - but well, that's not that big a problem, I guess.

I set my cycle=max setting but the game just ran super fast. I was pecked to death by birds within seconds. Is there something I missed, or another option to tweak?

Mine as well. Seems to vary machine to machine. Although when I turn on SVGA (with the R key) it runs only slightly fast.

You can also force pentium emulation by setting "cpu=pentium_slow" The game will actually recognize a pentium abd will display the pentium logo after it loads. This will make it slightly more efficient.

I'm trying to update my dosboxMC in notepad, but every time I try I get...
"Cannot create the C:\Program Files\GOG.com\Magic Carpet\dosboxMC.conf file.

Make sure that the path and file name are correct"

And...well, I have no clue what to do for such. Windows Vista, by the by.

Should be stickied. :)

This game also works with the Xbox PC controller. When this game first came out decades ago, I was using a Gravis Game Pad (pictured on the graphical config screen after starting game). I am surprised that it works so well. Just choose the gamepad picture when you start, click the blue world tab and it should give you a graphical indicator to push the A button (keep joystick centered as it is calibrating) and off you go.

Buttons

A = Fire Spell 1
B = Fire Spell 2
X = Change Movement (hold down to use)
Y = Minimap/Spell Selection Slot 1 and 2 (Move stick to spell, press A or B to assign)

Any time there is a check mark in a menu, you have to move the pointer with joystick and hit enter while pointer is over the check or X.

I have a quad core 3.2 and needed to set my dosbox cycles to 105000 to get the right speed so spell selection was "doable" while running higher res.

You might want to run Magic Carpet as Admin if using Win 7. I was having problems getting saves to work until that change.

Remember this is a magic carpet, you can fly backwards and shoot! To start grab the 3 red dots on the map (your starter spells) and lay down a castle with castle spell. The gold ball spell is "claim". You claim the gold mana balls that enemies drop. You can also claim tents and buildings, or be evil and kill everyone. When castle hits a limit, you have to use castle spell again on your castle to upgrade. Fireball is the third spell. You need all 3 to do anything on the first map so run and get them. Stick with the steep learning curve on flying and you will be rewarded wth incredible multi wizard battles with many spells (This is a Bullfrog game!).

Thanks for the excellent info sir! Works great with 100000 cycles on my laptop. BTW I hate those freaking birds, they suck. Talk about angry birds, jeez!

I've set this up on a PC easy enough, but has anyone got this to work on a mac. What ever i do doesn't seem to do anything and SVGA runs at 7 fps or less.

Running MC2 through wine in Ubuntu. There's quite a bit of a performance issue with the game, though setting cycles to max makes it just barely playable with the lowest settings. At least it's a point for nostalgia, since I never got the SVGA to work fast enough on my computer back in the day, either.

I'm having the same problem on Mac. I've got a Core i5 2.5GHz with 12GB of RAM running 10.7.5. I have changed the Contents>Resources>Configurations>Magic Carpet.conf file to try both cycles=max and cycles=fixed (with values between the default 30000 and 90000), but nothing makes the least bit of difference. The game plays well in low res, but switching to high res completely kills the framerate and no amount of changes to the cycles= line has any effect. It's as though the conf file isn't even being referenced at all.

A much better solution is this. Alter the lines to the following :

# Automatically alter the CPU speed to whatever makes it run reasonably
core=auto

# Ctrl-F12 to speed it up
cycleup=1000

# Ctrl-F11 to slow it down
cycledown=500


~

These numbers to bump the speed +/- can be altered to whatever you want, but I've found this degree of granularity works best. You wouldn't want to make the increment greater than 5000 or less than 500 as it'd adjust by too much or too little respectively.

When you get in the game, if it's dragging, hit Ctrl-F12 a few times until it's fast enough. If it's too fast, Ctrl-F11 until it's tame. Do this after hitting R and you should be able to get a good framerate. Actually, it'll probably do the exact opposite as you're basically asking Dosbox to do more work in emulating the extended Pentium instruction set.

You'll want to open up the Magic Carpet.boxer package (located within the /Contents/Resources folder) and edit the file DOSBox Preferences.conf file. It appears that this file supersedes all of the other .conf files on the Mac port.

I was having the same problem and it was making me crazy! Still tweaking, but as a test I have:

[cpu]
core=dynamic
cycles=max limit 85000
cputype=pentium_slow

on a 2.3 GHz Core i5 with 2 GB RAM running OS 10.7.5, and SVGA mode with image softening (F4) on is running a treat!