Prisoner of Ice -in WinXP

1. To run this game you will need dosbox ver .61 and the boxer front-end. You can download them from here: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1 Install Dosbox and Boxer if you don't already have them.

Extract the game. (this example assumes that you installed to c:\games\ice -The installer puts the files into a subfolder called \prisoner- So the game will end up at c:\games\ice\prisoner )

2. Create a folder at c:\ called \infogram
Create a folder under that called \ice

i.e. C:\infogram\ice

3. Copy ice.cfg from C:\games\ice\prisoner\saves to C:\infogram\ice

4. Open c:\games\ice\prisoner\__ICE__.PAR with notepad and change it to look like this:

LANGUAGE_LETTER=E
OPTIONS_PATH=c:\infogram\ice

And save.

5. Start Dosbox via Boxer

6. Type in:

mount c c:\ [press enter]

mount d c:\games\ice\prisoner -t cdrom [press enter]

d: [press enter]

dir [press enter]

ice640 [press enter]

And the game should run and you should be able to save.

Note: You can use these Dosbox commands to speedup/slowdown gameplay...

CTRL-F7 Decrease frameskip.
CTRL-F8 Increase frameskip.
CTRL-F11 Slow down emulation (Decrease DOSBox Cycles).
CTRL-F12 Speed up emulation (Increase DOSox Cycles).

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Prisoner of Ice -with Win9x (or WinXP with a Fat32 partition)

1. Make or download a boot disk (You can find one on the faq page here: http://www.the-underdogs.org/faq.php )

2. Follow steps 2, 3, 4 above.

3. Download a program called FakeCD (It's on the "Goodies" pages somewhere: http://community.the-underdogs.org/pub/index.php ) extract and place it at c:\games\ice\prisoner

4. Start Notepad and create a new file called start.bat at c:\games\ice\prisoner with the following lines:

fakecd C:\games\ice\PRISONER /L:F
f:
ICE640.EXE

-If the file should end up as start.bat.txt, "rename" it to start.bat

-If needed, change the "F" above to the letter after your last used drive letter.

5. Start up your computer with the boot disk.

6. Type in...

c: [press enter]

cd C:\games\ice\prisoner [press enter]

start [press enter]

And the game should run and you should be able to save.



YMMV.

Good Luck!

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Notes:

For those of you who are curious about what was happening......

See that file called CDEMU2.COM in the games folder? It's there for a reason....

Not being able to save is probably this game's copy protection (and the crash after the tentacle takes the captain is the same problem -it's an autosave point). This was originally solved by using CDEMU2.COM to fool the game. However, this doesn't work in XP.

CDEMU2.COM should still work with a boot disk for Win98 users, but I don't remember the usage/switches for it so I used FakeCd instead.

I have no idea why you have to do a "dir" command with Dosbox for the game to work, but it consistantly crashes with an error about one of the *french* versions files being missing! if I don't.

Steps 2, 3, 4 above may not be necessary for boot disk users, but that's the way I had the game set up when I tested that method.

Steps 2, 3, 4 above may not be necessary for DOsbox users either, but that's the way I had the game set up when I finally got it working.

The "Dir" command step was almost pure accident!