During that fantastic Interplay sale a little while back, I picked up all of the Descent games. I had only played the shareware of the original Descent briefly, probably over a decade ago, so I had little experience with the series. Still, I love classic FPS games, and having one where you can fly seemed fun to me. And boy was it ever.

So I beat the original Descent and had a great time, and it was off to Descent 2. That didn't go quite so smoothly, however. The current full release of DOSBox does not emulate the CD redbook audio quite properly, and you have no volume control, so it was deafening on my machine. There was an SVN release of DOSBox that fixed that, at least.

But now I'm up to Level 4, and it's just crashing randomly as I play, both in DOSBox 0.74 and the SVN version. The whole of DOSBox locks up, and the screen is filled with lines of text, saying things along the lines of "USE32, page granular limit." I have no idea what's causing this, nor how to fix it. The original Descent had no problems like this.

Since, on this forum, the general response to any problems related to Descent 1/2 is "Use a source port!," I guess now I need to know which one to use. Basically, I'm looking for a rather "conservative" port. I'm not at all interested in new gameplay features. I want one that plays as much like the original, "vanilla" engine as possible, but simply fixes bugs and stability issues that plagued the original game. I'm not interested in graphical upgrades and, in fact, will likely continue to play the game in 320x200 software mode if these ports allow that. I also have no interest in multiplayer functionality.

Any feedback would be most appreciated. Thank you!

I'm new to Descent, but in terms of a conservative port, I don't think you can go wrong with the DXX Rebirth. I've had both this and the D2X-XL port running with minimal effort (much less so with the Rebirth), but both were straightforward (the D2X-XL had me go through a bit of a runaround to find all of the components). With the Rebirth port you just throw in the executable and you're good to go.

The Rebirth port runs really nice with all of the settings turned on, on a very modest computer, so it should handle well, whatever you put it through. Not sure you can get a resolution quite that low, but I'd be surprised if you miss it.

I'd also definitely suggest Rebirth...if you go on the forum (http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/frm) you can get the Windows Installer, which makes installation an absolute breeze (plus you can keep all your savegames and such). (It's stickied in the general section)

Then if you want original graphics, I'd grab the mini-dev (It's also stickied near the installer) and compile without OpenGL. When you run that on 320x200 it looks EXACTLY like the original! :)

I downloaded D2X Rebirth and it seems to work just fine. (Couldn't get the installer to work right, though. It just unpacked the Rebirth files but didn't actually copy my game data to the new folder.)

And I wouldn't know the first thing about modifying and compiling source codes, but thankfully, Rebirth has a 320x200 resolution setting, and a "classical" texture filter that makes it look pretty much just like the original game, so everything's good.

Thanks, you two! It's time to prepare for more Descent! :)

Hey Matthew...if you don't mind...could you tell me exactly what the installer was doing? I designed it, and this sounds like a bug I should fix!! :) ...Did you select to copy the files, and select the correct directories to copy from?

As far as I'm aware, I did. I tried it twice, and all it made was a directory that was empty aside from the various EXE's and DLL's that make up DXX Rebirth--none of the game's data was successfully copied.

I'm using Win XP. I installed in English. I didn't want the port to install under Program Files, so I just had the installer create a "C:\DXX-Rebirth" folder. I specified I only wanted D2X-Rebirth installed, not DX1. I specified that I wanted all game data, including profiles and savegames, to be copied. When it came time to select where the game data was, the default directory was "C:\Program Files\GOG.com\Descent and Descent 2\Descent 2". However, this was not my game data folder, as I had ported all game data to "C:\Descent2" after installing it off of GOG. I found and selected "C:\Descent2" as the folder to copy data from.

I hope that can be of some use to you. :)

Thank you VERY much! I found the bug and fixed it...it should work fine now :)

Quite happy to help. I like testing stuff. :)