Daggerfall talk:Corrupted Saved Games

Some Explanations

Since I read some comments regarding DOS32A on the Bethesda-Forum, posted by StoneFrog and others, I want to point out why I have created this article.

1. Daggerfall was and is designed for a DOS environment, therefore running the game under anything but a hundred per cent compatible DOS-System is nothing but bare nonsense. Even in case one doesn't consider the missing quest objects caused by memory issues on an incompatible OS, not even the movement-controls will work correctly.
2. I would be rather surprised in case nobody else ever encountered corrupted savegames. Certainly one will not encounter them at lower levels, and not until you have proceeded a bit with the Main Quest. But the higher your character's level is and the more items you have in your inventory, cart, house or ship the more susceptible the savegames will behave. Such savegames crash to DOS with evidents of memory corruption and DOSBox is not to blame. I tried those savegames on a hundred per cent MS-DOS 6.22 machine and got the same errors. These corruptions even prevented my character from proceeding with the Main Quest when I played the game for the very first time. I really was pissed off because I had a very impressive collection of various armors, weapons and artifacts. After some time I started a new game, but I got stuck at exactly the same point in the Main Quest, where you must help Medora find the Unicorn horn. Again I was very pissed off because the situation was exactly as it has been before. I didn't touch the game for a very long time. Until I was tuning my installed version of DOSBox. I read about the DOS32A Memory-Extender and thought, why not give it a try. And behold, the game proceeded without problems when I used the program. If I hadn't given it a try, I probably wouldn't have touched Daggerfall ever again. And certain savegames I have with particularly advanced characters won't even run without DOS32A. Considering characters where I used DOS32A from the beginning I don't have such problems even at higher levels and even with a museum full of of various armors, weapons and artifacts.--PLRDLF 18:58, 14 February 2009 (EST)

he's right about this you know. older dos extenders (including older version of 32a it's self) were not only slow but commonly had memory leaks issues and, <gasp> worst of all had memory alignment glitches which causes the extender to write to the wrong memory bank, often overwriting crucial data, corrupting it. --3371-Alpha (talk) 19:08, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Setup.exe

I notice setup.exe on the free version is quite unstable, crashing unless you select only the soundblaster. The problem however is that, like a few other executable daggerfall included, it uses an executable/binary format not supported by dos32a. daggerfall by default uses the Causeway Dos Extender for all it's programs. Anyone know how to rebind an updated version to setup.exe? --70.170.67.244 01:28, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Though a little off topic, I also managed found some tweaks for setup.exe here: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=24541 this might help with gus support, though the patches.ini will probably need tweaks for daggerfall specific music. --70.170.67.244 19:28, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

update again, I obtained a copy (by somewhat deplorable means) of bethesda's Terminator: SkyNet game in order to examine it's hmi sound drivers. although the various .386 files are exactly the same, the setup.exe is larger in size in skynet. It's also bindable with dos32a and appears more stable. Perhaps bethesda shipped a damaged copy with the freeware daggerfall, or perhaps they used one of the many executable compression methods some dos extenders support (including causeway) on daggerfall. to clarify, compressing the executable with a dos extender causes the executable's format to change, usually to a proprietary format and also prevents modification, reverse engineering and hacking of the executable. this would explain why dos32a could neither modify nor detect setup.exe's binary format. --70.170.67.244 21:57, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

I inspected an un-updated copy of daggerfall to find it also has a bindable setup.exe. something must have changed with this files structure at a later date. I've also tested it on various daggerfall utilities, both official and fan made, and have found that dos32a can be bound to the following executables in addition to fall.exe: fixmaps.exe, fixsave.exe, install.exe, dag213.exe (and presumable other updaters at well), dfskills.exe, dfwagon.exe & thaw.exe. note that I haven't tested any file editors/cheat tools, just utilities. --3371-Alpha (talk) 18:48, 28 April 2017 (UTC)