We hope you enjoy Modeling the Dream CD. This title contains over 500 MB of animation and music. It is unique in that it uses 4 different technologies for music and sound playback: MIDI, MOD/S3M, and two types of digital samples. You'll hear full-stereo, sample-based compositions play behind some of the most ambitious and creative 3D Studio and Polyray animations ever made. There are many different demos on the disk, many of which interact with your hardware on a very low level. All of the demos have been tested to run on typical PC-compatible systems, but please read on if you experience any difficulties. Here is some late-breaking technical news on Modeling the Dream CD (MTD): ************************************************************************ * * MEMORY* * * If you have less than 540K conventional memory when you start MTD, * * you will get an error message. Many of the demos may still run, but * * the MIDPAK/DIGPAK Bigdemo, as well as certain other demos, may crash. * * You can use MEMMAKER or another memory management utility to increase * * the amount of conventional memory on your system. * ************************************************************************ IMPORTANT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ When you first enter the SpaceBar, the message at the top of the screen reads "Advance to position 2." It should read "Advance to position 1." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please note that if you press Ctrl-C from the MTD menuing system you will exit to DOS directly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you have DoubleSpace installed, you will be unable to run the following demos from the Protected Mode Boot Floppy: Elements by Xography Hex Appeal The Good, the Bad and the Ugly The Turricon 3 Preview 1 of 2 This is because the DoubleSpace driver is loaded into conventional memory when EMM386 Expanded Memory Manager is not installed. Therefore, you will have insufficient memory to run the above demos. To run the Expanded Memory Demos, you will need to modify the boot floppy's CONFIG.SYS file to load DBLSPACE.SYS into the Upper Memory Block (UMB). Please see your MS-DOS manual for instructions on how to do this. ------------------------------------------------------------------- In the boot disk procedure, if you choose to copy the demos to a SCSI drive, other tan C:, this drive will not be available when you boot from the boot disk unless you first edit the CONFIG.SYS on the boot floppy so that it loads your SCSI drivers. (See the documentation on your SCSI controller card.) If you do this, it is possible that you will not have enough conventional memory left to run the boot disk demos. We recommend that you install the boot disk demos to the C drive to avoid these problems. You will need 10 megabytes of free space for this procedure. VESA ------------------------------------------------ Aniplay requires a Vesa driver to play 640x480 animations. If you are unable to find a 640x480 vesa driver when you install Aniplay, you can try loading one of the drivers provided in the VESADR.EXE archive, which is located in the \PROGRAMS directory of Modeling the Dream CD. However, please note that these drivers are provided without warranty or support, and that the safest course is to obtain a VESA driver directly from your graphics card manufacturer. ------------------------------------------------------------- Please note that the instructions in the Troubleshooting section of the book for finding the Univesa driver on CompuServe are outdated. The product is now called UNIVBE, and it is developed by Kendall Bennett and licensed by SciTech Software. You can download it from library 6 of the CompuServe ASOFT forum. SOUND ------------------------------------------------------------------ When you install MTD, if your Sound Blaster card's I/O address is 260, you may have trouble installing a MIDPAK driver for a Sound Blaster. To get around this, try choosing the Adlib Compatible driver from the MIDPAK sound driver scrolling list. --------------------------------------------------------------------- If during the DIGPAK driver setup portion of the installation procedure you get an error in a red box that states "unable to load Soundrv.com" the FILES= statement in your CONFIG.SYS file needs to be increased. Open your CONFIG.SYS file in DOS EDIT and look for a file that resembles this: FILES=15 Increase the number by some amount (20 should work), then save CONFIG.SYS and reboot. If you don't have a FILES= statement, then you should add it. After you have installed MTD, you can reset your FILES= statement to its previous value and still run MTD. For more information on the FILES= statement, see your DOS documentation. ---------------------------------------------------------------- It has been observed that running some of the Sound Blaster demos, particularly Copper and Tangle, can affect the subsequent running of other Sound Blaster demos. If you are having trouble running a particular demo, try rebooting and then running the demo you are having problems with first. --------------------------------------------------------------------- During installation, if you have a Sound Blaster 16 make sure you choose the Sound Blaster Pro OPL3 option from the MIDPAK driver configuration menu. If you have an older Sound Blaster Pro and your MIDI music seems to be playing out of sync, you may have chosen the wrong MIDI driver. Try reinstalling, and this time choose the Sound Blaster Pro Yamaha MIDI driver. ------------------------------------------------------------------- The Nanotechnology demo will play MIDI music on Sound Blaster cards if it finds the file SBFMDRV.COM on your path, or if SBFMDRV.COM is in the directory specified in the SOUND environment variable. The SBFMDRV.COM file is located in your Sound Blaster directory (for example, \SBPRO or \SB16). For more information on your path see your DOS documentation. For information on the SOUND environment variable, see your Sound Blaster documentation. The reference in the Nanotechnology demo to a SOUND.BAT file refers to an earlier publication of this demo. The SOUND.BAT batch file does not apply to Modeling The Dream CD. GENERAL --------------------------------------------------------- If you have generated boot floppies and then erased the contents of the \MTDTEMP directory, you will no longer be able to run demos from the boot floppy, and will get an error message if you try to do so. If this is the case, you must re-generate your boot floppies from the Sound Blaster Demos menu. -------------------------------------------------------------- If you have a removable media hard drive, such as a Syquest drive, and that drive contains no cartridge or disk, you may get error messages when you attempt to install or run the Modeling The Dream CD. To work around this, either turn off your removable media drive, or make sure that there is media (cartridge, optical disk) in the drive when you install and run Modeling The Dream CD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- If you begin to download either of the Bigdemos to the hard drive, you can abort the process by pressing CTRL-C, which will exit to DOS. If you do this, you must then erase the contents of the \MTDTEMP directory. If you do not erase \MTDTEMP, then MTD will no longer offer you the option of downloading the demos to the hard drive. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- If you quit the XOGRAPHY demo before it ends by pressing the reset button, a temporary subdirectory called $$$TEMP_.$$$ will be left in your \MTDTEMP directory. This directory will NOT be removed automatically if you choose the "Erase everything from \MTDTEMP" option from the main menu. You will have to remove this directory yourself using DOS or a file management utility. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The two BigDemos require different amounts of hard disk space if you want to download them to the hard disk. The DMP Bigdemo requires 140 MB, and the MIDPAK/DIGPAK Bigdemo requires 167 MB. Both the Bigdemos play back fine from the CD provided you have a double-speed or better CD-ROM drive, so downloading to your hard drive is recommended only if you have a single-speed CD-ROM drive. --------------------------------------------------------------------- As stated in the book, if you need to increase your environment space to run MTD, you will have to edit the SHELL statement in your CONFIG.SYS file or add the statement if you don't have one in your CONFIG.SYS file. Please make sure that your SHELL statement includes a /p switch, as shown here: SHELL=C:\DOS\COMMAND.COM C:\DOS\ /E:512 /p The version of the instructions printed in the book does not show the /p switch. To increase your environment space, increase the number after the E:, then save your CONFIG.SYS file and reboot. If you use a word processor to edit your CONFIG.SYS file, make sure that you save the file as plain ASCII text; or better yet, edit and save the file in a text editor such as DOS EDIT. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The file STRNT301.ARJ, mentioned in Chapter 6 of the book, which contains the Scream Tracker music sequencer, has been excluded from the CD because of technical problems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The DMP BigDemo will loop continuously. Exit by pressing Escape, or press Return to advance to the next animation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- During the boot disk generation procedure you may notice an error message indicating that the Lollypop demo files already exist. This is because they are extracted with the Inconexia files. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ It is suspected that on some machines the Lollypop demo will crash if you don't have a joystick.