Battlezone

What works

The installer runs great. The only thing that is not working correctly is the sound, and the movies, wich position and size are wrong, and they are mirrored, but that's not a problem since you dont need them.

What does not

The game itself doesnt work. When you try to start it it gives an error: "BeginScene failed in SetRenderState. Unrecognised error value." When you click ok, the game continues to start and you'll get the activision movie but after that you'll get a black screen, and you're not able to continue.

Workarounds

What was not tested

obviously, the gameplay itself couldn't be tested since you cannot fully start the game

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I will check if removing video's will help.

Battlezone works fairly well with the old 1.4 patch, but has to be tweaked an awful lot, especially if you want it to be full-screen and play in multiplayer.

1) Install CD

2) Download and install the 1.4 patch - can be located still on activision's servers here: download.activision.com/activision/battlezone/patch/bzpat14.exe

3) Delete or rename the 'anims' folder in the Battlezone base directory

4) Modify 'render.cfg' (in the battlezone base directory) to allow higher resolutions, triple buffer and mipmaps..and disable zbuffer (helps greatly with graphics performance)

5) Download dsound via winetricks (sorts out some background noise problems)

6) In Wine Config, set the main bzone.exe to Windows 98.

7a) If wanting to play in fullscreen - untick 'Emulate a virtual desktop', 'Allow the window manager to control the windows' and 'allow the window manager to decorate the windows' in the graphics tab..and tick 'allow directx apps to stop the mouse leaving their window'

7b)If wanting to play in a window (safer) - *tick* 'Emulate a virtual desktop', 'Allow the window manager to control the windows' and 'allow the window manager to decorate the windows' in the graphics tab and set the emulated window to something 1280x1024 or under (the max resolution for BZ 1.4) depending on your screen resolution. *Untick* 'allow directx apps to stop the mouse leaving their window'

8) You can now run the bzone executable (wine bzone.exe) to avoid the slow splash screen and run the game in single player. If you want to play multiplayer (well worth it)..then you will need an up-to-date servers.dat file in the base battlezone directory..the one that is generated will not show any servers. One can be found here: www.battlezone1.net/downloads/

9) In MP, excessive FPS causes problems with other players..so limiting FPS by enabling 'Sync to Vblank' in Nvidia / ATI control settings is helpful (it will just cap at your refresh rate).

For some reason, Wine doesn't seem to cope well with mixed-mode CDs so CD audio / music doesn't seem to happen..

Worth noting that Ken Miller, one of the original programmers, is at work creating a 1.5 patch which addresses many of the current problems and necessary tweaking.

The anims directory needs to be removed or renamed before Battlezone will load

 -- Matt Bee