Installing the Cavewars Demo Create a directory for the game on your hard drive. Copy the cavewars.zip file into the directory, and then unzip it, using the -d option. Example: c: md \cavewars cd \cavewars copy d:\demo\cavewars.zip pkunzip -d cavewars.zip Cavewars Demo This is the Cavewars demo. You'll start out on Turn 30, and will be able to play until Turn 70. A few things you might want to know while you're playing: Food (the mushrooms) is harvested automatically if you have a city within three squares. Starvation does happen in the game, though, so don't sweat it too much. The demo has you playing the Gakkar, who are pretty terrible at researching magic. Their specialty is weapons research. Magic isn't disabled in the demo, so feel free to research it, just don't expect to do too well if you do. You'll want metal. You can get it with the engineers. They look like big, automated drills, by the way. Just dig into one of the bronze, iron, or mithril deposits, and then mine it using the engineer. If you have a city within three squares, the city will take over the mining, leaving the engineer free to do other things, such as more digging or city building. If you get the game, you'll be able to: Use the random map generator, and the pre-built scenario. Play multi-player games. Adjust the difficulty setting. Choose from eight different races. Listen to the great music on the cd. Watch the intro. Finish the game. Discuss Shakespeare intelligently! So get it! Running the demo You'll need about 8 meg of free hard drive space when you run the demo. Simply type "cave" to start it up. If you are running from a system with more than 8 meg of RAM, and the demo seems at all slow, or performs disk access too often for your taste, typing "cavedemo" might speed it up somewhat. Do not use cavedemo on a system with 8 meg of RAM or less. If you get the message "Out of environment space" when running "cave", it generally means that DOS has run out of space to define system variables. To remedy this, comment out or remove unnecessary SET commands in autoexec.bat; if you're unsure, create a clean boot disk with only the necessary drivers(mouse, VESA, cd-rom) and the SET BLASTER command. *TROUBLESHOOTING* Configuration Details The demo requires a few things to be in your config.sys and autoexec.bat files. First of all, you will need to load a mouse driver. Second, if your video card doesn't have hardware compliance with VESA 1.2 or later, you'll need to load a software driver that provides it. We have found that the ATI MACH 32 card requires this. UniVBE, by SciTech, is one such driver. It is available electronically from ftp.scitechsoft.com, or call SciTech at 1-800-4UNIVBE. Some cards may have their own VESA driver software. Consult your video card documentation. You will need the following line in your config.sys file: FILES=15 (A number bigger than 15 is also fine.) The BLASTER environment variable in autoexec.bat must be set properly for sound to work (this is necessary even for GUS emulators to function properly). If you are using a Sound Blaster card, you can use the DIAGNOSE utility to set the BLASTER variable automatically. The IRQ for your soundcard must be 7 or under. A line similar to the following must be present in your autoexec.bat file: SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 Note that expanded memory managers, such as QEMM or emm386 may slow the demo down. Sound ----- Before you run the Cavewars demo, be sure that your sound card is configured on IRQ 7 or below. To get music, your CD-ROM must be connected to your sound card via the audio cable. The BLASTER environment variable must be set in autoexec.bat. For Gravis users it is necessary to use a software emulator to enable sound. We have found IWSBOS to be easier to use. On installation Gravis defaults to IRQ 11, which will not work. Both the Gravis IRQ and the Soundblaster IRQ must be set to 7 or less. This can be done in the Gravis setup program. Win95 Users ----------- Cavewars runs in a DOS box without a reboot. The default properties should work. If the demo behaves strangely, you may want to create a new shortcut to MS-DOS using the default properties. If you create a shortcut for the demo itself, make sure you include the Cavewars directory as the working directory in the Properties box. Be sure that the Win95 audio CD player's Autoplay option is turned off before you run the demo. This is not always necessary, but some video cards will have a tendency to cause video corruption when the Win95 audio CD player is loaded. To turn Autoplay off: 1. Double-click on the My Computer icon in the Win95 desktop. 2. In the View menu, click Options. 3. Click the File Type tab. 4. Select the CD Audio type. 5. Click on the word Play in the lower part of the window to toggle Autoplay. Boldface means that Autoplay is on. Also, some systems may require you to disable the Windows screen saver if you plan on leaving the demo unattended. Consult your Windows documentation for instructions on how to do this. If you wish to play the demo in DOS mode (with a reboot), be sure that all the necessary drivers (MSCDEX, mouse, disk caching software) are loaded. Note that Cavewars will suffer a large performance hit if no disk-caching software is loaded.