Savage Quest HELP!

AtariShag

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I just received my Savage Quest PC off eBay. It came with the security dongle that plugs into the parallel printer port in the back. It seems to be similar in design to other PC-based arcade titles of the late 90's early 00's. I purchased a Happ Controls fighting I/O board separate from it to connect it to an empty cabinet I have but there is a problem: I turn the machine on and it starts loading the game in MS-DOS. It then gets to a certain point (it does mention a few errors of not finding files but continues on loading for a few minutes after that) which I have attached in a pic below. It just sits there with some sort of incoherent message in the upper left hand corner of the screen and I'm stuck about what to do. I'd love to get this game setup particularly for my son who is crazy about dinosaurs so any help would be appreciated.

I should add that it gets to this point and there is no difference whether I have the I/O board connected to the USB port in the back or not.

I also opened it up and it appears to have two graphics cards for some reason. I plug the monitor into the larger one with 3DFX logos on it and I get some BIOS beeps when I turn it on and no image. The image wants to go through the smaller S3 card. That's a little strange, I know of SLI but I thought that this game just used a single card
 

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It's a DOS based program, the IO board for that game
runs through a serial port if I remember correctly. The
game video comes off the second video card. The monitor
showing the text messages is not needed for gameplay.

JD


I just received my Savage Quest PC off eBay. It came with the security dongle that plugs into the parallel printer port in the back. It seems to be similar in design to other PC-based arcade titles of the late 90's early 00's. I purchased a Happ Controls fighting I/O board separate from it to connect it to an empty cabinet I have but there is a problem: I turn the machine on and it starts loading the game in MS-DOS. It then gets to a certain point (it does mention a few errors of not finding files but continues on loading for a few minutes after that) which I have attached in a pic below. It just sits there with some sort of incoherent message in the upper left hand corner of the screen and I'm stuck about what to do. I'd love to get this game setup particularly for my son who is crazy about dinosaurs so any help would be appreciated.

I should add that it gets to this point and there is no difference whether I have the I/O board connected to the USB port in the back or not.

I also opened it up and it appears to have two graphics cards for some reason. I plug the monitor into the larger one with 3DFX logos on it and I get some BIOS beeps when I turn it on and no image. The image wants to go through the smaller S3 card. That's a little strange, I know of SLI but I thought that this game just used a single card
 
It's a DOS based program, the IO board for that game
runs through a serial port if I remember correctly. The
game video comes off the second video card. The monitor
showing the text messages is not needed for gameplay.

JD

So would I be able to use a Happ Controls fighting I/O board by using a serial-to-USB adapter or will I have to find the specific I/O board that was made for this?

Does that also mean that the game doesn't use VGA for the monitor but it goes through the I/O board and does something like JAMMA or is there a way to use a PC monitor for the output? (when I plug the monitor into the 3DFX card, I get some BIOS beeps of 1 long, 3 short and no video displays).

Thank you very much for the info.
 
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So would I be able to use a Happ Controls fighting I/O board by using a serial-to-USB adapter or will I have to find the specific I/O board that was made for this?

Does that also mean that the game doesn't use VGA for the monitor but it goes through the I/O board and does something like JAMMA or is there a way to use a PC monitor for the output? (when I plug the monitor into the 3DFX card, I get some BIOS beeps of 1 long, 3 short and no video displays).

Thank you very much for the info.

I am pretty sure you need to use the IO board specific to that game. I don't have
a manual for that game but I can tell you it used an analog joystick. A standard
VGA monitor should work off that 3DFX card but I really don't know why you are
getting the BIOS beeps.

JD
 
I am pretty sure you need to use the IO board specific to that game. I don't have
a manual for that game but I can tell you it used an analog joystick. A standard
VGA monitor should work off that 3DFX card but I really don't know why you are
getting the BIOS beeps.

JD

Hmm, I was afraid of that. I guess I should have found out more prior to purchasing it. :\

That's good to know it uses an analog stick, the KLOV entry for this is wrong then. How many buttons does it use as well? I guess this will have to stay on as a backburner project for when I can find the right boards to make it work.
 
Hmm, I was afraid of that. I guess I should have found out more prior to purchasing it. :\

That's good to know it uses an analog stick, the KLOV entry for this is wrong then. How many buttons does it use as well? I guess this will have to stay on as a backburner project for when I can find the right boards to make it work.

Three buttons I think, the thumb button is for running, the trigger
for biting and control panel button for roar.

JD
 
FYI, the 3dfx card isn't really considered a videocard by the BIOS. In PC-based arcade games of this vintage, the second card is purely to appease the BIOS and get past POST, and the game displays via the 3dfx card. So, what you're seeing off the S3 card is normal.

Two possibilities:
  • The game isn't seeing the 3dfx card, or failing to initialize it for some reason (look for errors related to "glide")
  • The game is successfully initializing the card, and may well be displaying something on it; you just weren't patient enough.

Try this: hook up two monitors, one on each card. Once the first screen gets to the same spot, give it 30 seconds or so to get something going on the second screen. If nothing comes up, you probably have a problem with that videocard. PC-based games are usually pretty verbose about missing I/O cards and whatnot.

Caveat: IT MAY NOT BE RUNNING AT VGA! Early 3dfx chipsets could run at pretty much whatever they damn well please, so the card outputting 15khz is a very real possibility. Hook up a tri-sync arcade monitor for the dry run if you have one.
 
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Thanks for the advice. I did wait for several minutes on the 3Dfx but it could just be the resolution thing here. I'll have to see about another type of monitor, I do have one of those in a working cabinet.

Would you happen to know what I/O board is used here? That is the other part, I have had zero luck in figuring that part out, so even if I get the display showing correctly I'm still out of luck in playing the game.
 
I can make some guesses, but I don't know about that specific game. Most 3dfx-era PC-based games used a game-specific card that connected via serial port, parallel port, or both, though there were a few "generic" I/O boards floating around at the time. Also worth noting, it wasn't unheard of to wire buttons directly to the parallel port.

If you make a dd image of the hard drive and get in contact with someone that has reverse engineering talent, they'll be able to give you insight into how the board communicates with the game, which may help you find one, or maybe even straight-up make one. They may even put together a hack to let you play with KB/mouse :)
 
Someone seems to think it is standard res:

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9441

Also, the MAME team has this documented on it:

Code:
/***************************************************************************

    savquest.c

    "Savage Quest" (c) 1999 Interactive Light, developed by Angel Studios.
    Skeleton by R. Belmont

    H/W is a white-box PC consisting of:
    Pentium II 450 CPU
    DFI P2XBL motherboard (i440BX chipset)
    128 MB RAM
    Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D2 Voodoo II
    Sound Blaster AWE64

    Protected by a HASP brand parallel port dongle.
    I/O board has a PIC17C43 which is not readable.

    Copyright Nicola Salmoria and the MAME Team.
    Visit http://mamedev.org for licensing and usage restrictions.

***************************************************************************/
 
Code:
I/O board has a PIC17C43 which is not readable.

Don't let this discourage you. Someone with experience in disassembly could easily figure out what that I/O board is expected to do. It's been done countless times, PIUIO for instance (IIRC, OpenITG's driver was written using information released by someone who disassembled Exceed 2.)

You DO have the dongle though right? It won't boot without it. HASP is kinda nasty in that it contains encryption keys that can't really be brute-forced. It's crackable, but you need a dongle first.
 
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Someone seems to think it is standard res:

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9441

Also, the MAME team has this documented on it:

Probably the same person who thinks Arm Champs II is a medium
res game when in fact it is standard res.

I am pretty sure this is a VGA game. Mame shows it running at 640x200.
I've worked on a couple in the past that had Pentranic VGA monitors.

As I recall there was also a conversion kit which let you run some kind
of fighter jet game, which was definitely VGA.

My company converted a bunch of these cabinets into Big Buck Hunter
and Carnival Kings.

Oh, and lookie what I've got ...
 

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Probably the same person who thinks Arm Champs II is a medium
res game when in fact it is standard res.

I am pretty sure this is a VGA game. Mame shows it running at 640x200.
I've worked on a couple in the past that had Pentranic VGA monitors.

As I recall there was also a conversion kit which let you run some kind
of fighter jet game, which was definitely VGA.

My company converted a bunch of these cabinets into Big Buck Hunter
and Carnival Kings.

Oh, and lookie what I've got ...

Actually, 640x200@60Hz (looked it up in MAWS myself) is a hsync of 12kHz. (horizontal pixels are irrelevant -- 200 lines * 60 refreshes per second = 12,000 lines per second...) They probably add a big front/back porch (~20-25 lines each) to get it to 15kHz so it'll sync on a std res monitor. Based on the info in MAWS, there's no way it's a VGA game.

Even if it said x480@60, that could be interlaced, which would be std res anyway. MAWS doesn't specify progressive/interlace and there are a LOT of games like this (e.g. Time Crisis series and anything Sega ST-V. Actually, pretty much anything std res made in the mid-late 90s.)
 
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