Dark Forces is a first-person fast action game where you are dropped into the boots of mercenary for hire, Kyle Katarn. Initially charged with retrieving the Death Star plans from an Imperial base, Kyle subsequently is employed by the Rebel Alliance to seek out and destroy a new, deadly threat: the dark troopers.
This demonstration version of Dark Forces lets you guide Kyle through one simple mission. The full Dark Forces game has 14 highly-detailed missions for you to accomplish. If you enjoyed playing the demonstration version of Dark Forces and would like to order the full game, please check with your local software retailer or call 1-800-STARWARS.
Topics
Solutions to Common Problems
Performance
Memory
Joysticks
Technical Support
Solutions to Common Problems
Sometimes when I play, I get no sound.
Dark Forces is using up every last scrap of memory, and there is no room left to play sounds. To fix this, you should lower Dark ForcesÕ memory partition to leave a little room left over. This procedure is explained below in the Memory Before Playing section.
The sound breaks up and stutters during play.
You probably either have virtual memory turned on in the Memory control panel or you are running with RAMDoubler installed. In either case, the solution is to disable the offender. To disable virtual memory, select the Memory control panel and click the ÒOffÓ button in the virtual memory section. To disable RAMDoubler, use the Extensions Manager control panel to turn it off before playing. In either case, you will need to restart for the changes to take effect.
On some levels, Dark Forces pauses and reads from the disk during play.
This is a result of Dark ForcesÕ internal caching mechanism, which saves memory by only reading in certain graphics and sounds when they are needed. See the Performance section below for more details. If the pauses are affecting gameplay too much, you can sacrifice texture quality for more memory by choosing Reduce Texture Resolution from the Video menu.
Dark Forces just crawls on my system, even on the smallest screen setting.
If your system is a particularly slow 68040-based Macintosh (especially the Centris 610), you may find that you have to turn off music to get acceptable performance. The amount of work that needs to be done to mix the music is simply overwhelming your system. For other performance tips, see the Performance section of this document below.
I have a Thrustmaster FCS joystick, but it wonÕt kick in when I run Dark Forces.
See the Joysticks section, below, under the Thrustmaster description for an explanation and workaround.
My joystick is centered, but Kyle keeps spinning around in circles.
Either your joystick is not calibrated correctly, or you have bumped the mouse during play. To recalibrate your joystick, choose Calibrate Joystick from the Game menu. Also, due to the way Macintosh joysticks are read, moving the mouse during play can sometimes send you spinning; usually a quick tap on the joystick will reset things.
Everything seems to be playing all right, but I donÕt see anything on my screen.
Your video system may be incompatible with the direct screen drawing Dark Forces uses. To force Dark Forces into using more standard ways of drawing to the screen, you can activate compatibility mode by holding down the key as you launch Dark Forces. It will then ask if you wish to run in compatibility mode. Note that some resolutions, in particular Low Resolution, Doubled and Low Resolution, Interlaced, may be unplayably slow in compatibility mode, so avoid them if possible.
Performance
Performance Tips for 68040 Macintoshes
If you are running on a 68040-based system, Dark Forces is guaranteed to push the limits of your computerÕs power. In order to achieve a satisfactory frame rate, Dark Forces provides a number of options you can use to trade off video and/or sound quality for speed. Most of these are accessible via the Preferences item in the File menu.
Here is a list of things you can do to increase performance on your system:
¥ turn off music. Generating the music in Dark Forces takes a considerable chunk of the available processing power. By setting the music volume to 0 in the Preferences dialog, or by toggling music off via the Music item in the Sound menu, you can often realize a large performance gain, especially on slower machines.
¥ reduce sound quality. In its standard configuration, Dark Forces generates up to 16-bit stereo sound if your hardware supports it. By turning off the Stereo Panning option and/or switching down to 8-bit Sound Output, you cut down the amount of sound data being manipulated by up to 75%.
¥ reduce the screen size. Dark Forces provides a total of 10 different screen sizes, accessible either through the Screen Size pop-up menu in the Preferences dialog, or by successively choosing Smaller View from the Video menu. In general, the smaller the screen size, the more quickly the game can render each frame, and the faster your frame rate will be.
¥ use interlaced or small displays. Another bottleneck is the speed at which Dark Forces can copy data from its buffers to the screen. By switching the Screen Detail pop-up menu to low-resolution, interlaced display, you cut down the amount of data to copy by 50%. Using the low-resolution, small display mode buys you another 50% reduction.
¥ turn off virtual memory. If you havenÕt done so already, go into the Memory control panel and turn off virtual memory, if it is enabled. Although virtual memory may give you more memory space to load Dark Forces, it has an adverse effect on performance. It is always better to reduce Dark ForcesÕ memory partition than to turn on virtual memory so that you can increase the memory partition.
In addition, on slower 68040 machines, Dark Forces will automatically display the cutscenes in a small window for you. This is done to ensure correct timing with music and sound effects.
Performance Tips for PowerPC Macintoshes
Dark Forces is written in 100% native optimized PowerPC code. This means that in general, performance should not be an issue unless you are using High Resolution rendering with a large screen size. If things are still not running satisfactorily speedy, you can use the same techniques outlined above. Be aware, however, that turning off music does not help PowerPC frame rates nearly as much as it does 68040 frame rates.
Memory
Memory Before Playing
Dark Forces is a highly memory-intensive game. If you have a Macintosh with 8MB of RAM, you may have difficulty finding the 4500k minimum that Dark Forces requires. And even though Dark Forces runs just fine at that level, the more memory you can give it, the better its performance and quality of play will be.
Before increasing the amount of memory given to Dark Forces, you can find out how much memory is available on your system by choosing About This Macintosh from the Apple menu in the Finder. Look at the value next to the ÒLargest Unused BlockÓ; that value indicates how much memory you have available for running Dark Forces. Note that if you have other applications running, they will eat up some of your memory, so you should quit them first to determine the maximum available.
In its standard configuration, Dark Forces will attempt to gobble up to 7000k of memory to run in; if you have less than 7000k available, it will use whatever memory it can get its hands on. Unfortunately, on certain configurations using up all available memory will prevent sounds from playing. Dark Forces attempts to detect this when starting up, and can fix the problem automatically; however, if for some reason it is not detected, you will need to manually change Dark ForcesÕ preferred memory size.
To adjust Dark ForcesÕ memory partition, select the Dark Forces icon in the Finder, choose Get Info from the FinderÕs File menu, and type a new number in the ÒPreferred SizeÓ box. A good value to choose would be the value shown in the About This Macintosh box, minus about 40k.
Here are some suggestions for reducing the memory requirements of your system, in order to give more leeway to Dark Forces. After trying these, look again at the About This Macintosh box and adjust Dark ForcesÕ memory partition accordingly:
¥ disable unnecessary extensions and control panels. Although the Dark Forces manual mentions this, it is worth repeating here. Use the Extensions Manager control panel to create a Dark Forces extension set which includes only those extensions and control panels that are absolutely necessary to run Dark Forces. Check out the manual for a detailed explanation of what to do.
¥ quit all applications before running. Each application that is running takes up some memory that Dark Forces could be using. To really maximize memory, you can also tell Dark Forces to quit all applications, which will quit everything, including the Finder, buying you an extra 200k or so for music.
¥ reduce the disk cache size and turn off any RAM disks. In AppleÕs Memory control panel are options for controlling the disk cache size and for creating RAM disks. If you have created a RAM disk, turn it off and restart your system before running Dark Forces. If you really want to push your memory to its max, reducing the disk cache to 96k or less can also help, at the expense of slower disk access.
Memory While Playing
In order to make best use of the memory available, Dark Forces takes some automatic steps to reduce its memory requirements while it is running. Because each level in Dark Forces can be a different size, these steps are taken on a level-by-level basis to ensure the best gameplay possible.
Briefly, here are the steps that are taken to reduce memory requirements:
¥ weapon graphics, enemy graphics, and sounds are all ÒcachedÓ, meaning they are thrown away when not in use and then re-loaded from disk when needed. To ensure best performance while this happens, make sure that you have used the Dark Forces Standard Install or Dark Forces Large Install to install the proper data files on your hard disk, which is much faster at loading than the CD-ROM. Caching occurs automatically, with no feedback apart from occasional short pauses in gameplay.
¥ music can be forced off. This happens automatically if memory is extremely low, and frees up all the memory used by the music. Note that simply turning music off from the Sound menu is not the same thing; that option merely reduces the volume of the music to 0. If music is forced off, a message will be displayed in the upper-left corner of your screen.
¥ texture quality can be reduced, sacrificing display quality to get more memory. This can be done up to three times, either automatically or manually by choosing Reduce Texture Quality from the Video menu. When texture quality is reduced, a message is displayed in the upper-left corner of your screen. If the game is running in fits and starts due to caching, you may want to try freeing up some extra memory by manually reducing texture quality.
IMPORTANT: Reducing texture quality and forcing music off are one-way operations; once activated, their effects can not be reversed without aborting the mission and reloading.
Memory Preferences
There are two options in the Preferences dialog available to help you customize Dark Forces memory usage. Turning on the first option, Quit all Open Applications, will tell Dark Forces to automatically quit any open applicationsÑincluding the FinderÑduring startup. Dark Forces can then use the extra memory for loading extra data. When you quit Dark Forces, the Finder will automatically reload itself.
The second option allows you to control which low-memory operation will happen first: reducing texture quality or turning off music. In general, choosing to first Reduce Texture Quality will buy you the most memory; however, if you do not intend to listen to the music, you may want to choose Turn Off Music instead. Note that selecting one does not mean that the other will be prevented from happening; if memory really is tight, you may still lose both texture quality and music.
Joysticks
General Information
If you choose to use a joystick while playing Dark Forces, you have a wide range of choices. The joysticks supported by the game are:
¥ Advanced Gravis Mac GamePad
¥ Advanced Gravis MouseStick II
¥ CH Products Flightstick Pro
¥ MicroQue QueStick
¥ MicroQue QuePad
¥ Thrustmaster Mark I Flight Control System
Because proper configuration for most of these joysticks requires that they take over the mouse pointer, you may find that moving the mouse during gameplay can affect your movement. Unfortunately, the only real solution to the problem is to just be careful not to move the mouse while youÕre playing.
Gravis GamePad
Copy the included Dark Forces file from the GamePad folder in the Controller Settings folder on the Dark Forces CD-ROM into the GamePad sets folder in your system folder. Open the GamePad control panel, select the Dark Forces set, and drag the selection to the image of the gamepad you are using. IMPORTANT: In Dark Forces, do not turn on joystick controls, as everything is emulated through the keyboard.
Gravis MouseStick II
Copy the included Dark Forces file from the MouseStick folder in the Controller Settings folder on the Dark Forces CD-ROM into the MouseStick sets folder in your system folder. Open the MouseStick II control panel, select the Dark Forces set, and drag the selection to the image of the joystick you are using.
CH Flightstick Pro
Open the Flightstick Pro control panel and select the Im-/Export button. Press Open... and open the file ÒFlightstickÓ from the Controller Settings folder on the Dark Forces CD-ROM. Select the Dark Forces setting in the right side window and press <<<Import<<<. Press Done when you have completed this.
MicroQue QueStick
Open the QueStick control panel and go the configure menu. Select the Import button and choose the file ÒQueStickÓ from the Controller Settings folder on the Dark Forces CD-ROM. IMPORTANT: The ÒprimaryÓ button is the finger trigger with the AUTO switch set to the On (forward) position; you will need to make sure that the AUTO switch is set properly during calibration so that the button will register.
MicroQue QuePad
Open the QuePad control panel and click the Configure button. Select the Import button and choose the file ÒQuePadÓ from the Controller Settings folder on the Dark Forces CD-ROM. IMPORTANT: In Dark Forces, do not turn on joystick controls, as everything is emulated through the keyboard.
Thrustmaster Mark I FCS
Copy the strokes set ÒDark ForcesÓ from the Thrustmaster folder in the Controller Settings folder on the Dark Forces CD-ROM into your ThrustMaster Strokes Sets folder (located in the Preferences folder of your system folder). IMPORTANT: If Dark Forces is taking up nearly all of your systemÕs memory, you may have trouble getting the FCS to kick in. To get around this problem, press the Esc key, move the mouse and then move the joystick until it kicks in; after that, you will need to recalibrate before playing Dark Forces.
For any joystick not listed here, check the instructions that came with the joystick. If the joystick supports cursor movement, then you should be able to use it with Dark Forces. To set your joystick for play in Dark Forces, configure your joystick using the software that came with it, so that centering the joystick centers the cursor on the screen, and the joystick is able to move the cursor over the full range of the screen (this is often referred to as ÒAbsolute ModeÓ). You can then configure the remaining hats/switches/buttons to simulate standard keypresses.
Technical Support
If you need technical assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us after reading this Read Me and the Dark Forces Reference Manual. For your convenience, if you cannot get through to a representative by phone and you have access to a fax machine or can modem into our BBS or another on-line service, please consider doing so. When contacting us, please include as much pertinent information about your computer as you can assemble: make, model, peripherals, RAM and disk size, the version of the system software used for the game, the title and version of the game, and a detailed description of the problem. If you send us a fax, include your name, return fax number with the area code, and a voice phone number so we can contact you.
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