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This page will hopefully contain any known bugs and their possible workarounds along with information on how to opitimize performance of the game. This includes any technical information on how the game works.

Running Off the Hard Disk - 6 March 1998

How to make the game run totally off the hard disk, thus speeding the game up slightly.

Speeding the Game Up - 28 February 1998

Possible changes you can make to run the game a little faster, but no guaruntees.

Disk Swapping Info - 17 January 1998

Information on how the game uses disk swapping including how to correct several error messages.

Running Off the Hard Disk - 6 March 1998

I have a high end system but still there were annoying pauses of several seconds when the game accessed the CDROM. This can be very deadly if your in the middle of a jump over lava, and at the least, very annoying. After a little bit of hacking I've successfully got the game running with no CD.

1. Make some space on one hard drive. You'll need at least 450 MB free to copy everything. It _may_ be possible to use two hard drives but thats asking for trouble.
2. Make sure your Battlspire directory is named BATSPIRE and is in the root directory. So E:\BATSPIRE or C:\BATSPIRE is fine but E:\GAMES\BATSPIRE isn't.
3. Copy the file WAVES.BSA into the BATSPIRE directory from your CD. This is a 104MB file.
4. Create a directory on your Battle named VIDEOS. So if the game was on drive D the directory would be E:\VIDEOS.
5. Copy all the files in the VIDEOS directory on the CD to this new directory. There are 120MB in four files here.
6. Edit the SPIRE.CFG file in the Battlespire directory. Change the pathnames at the top to the appropiate values. Your CD path is now the drive where Battlespire is installed.
7. Take the CD out of the drive and start up the game. Hopefully everything will work. I've played through Level 6 to the end this way with no problems, and no pauses.

Disk Swapping Info - 23 January 1998

Some people have had a bug/error message where the game either causes a GPF in Win95 or the message "You do not have more than 40MB free". The message is still displayed even if the Battlespire install drive has much more than 40MB free. The reason is because it appears that the game (currently verified in v1.3 and earlier) uses the DOS directory for its swap file (SPIRE.SWP). That means even if you installed the game on drive D:, E:, ..., you still need to have enough free space on the DOS drive for the games swap file. The game doesn't appear to use the 'SET TEMP' variables in the autoexec file so these won't help. It is not yet known how the game with respond on a 'true' Win95 machine (ie, one with no DOS directory). Hopefully future versions of the game will make use of these to avoid problems with some users systems.

Don't forget that the 40MB-65MB needed for the swap needs to be unfragmented space. If you still get this error and you are sure you have enough space defrag your hard drives with the 'Maximize Free Space' option. Users who run Battlespire under DOS will need a larger swap file (65 MB or so). Edit the file SPIRE.BAT and change all the 40's in the set command to 65s. This will give you a bigger swap file and hence allow Battlespire to run without the warning message hopefully.

Increasing Game Speed - 28 February 1998

Not much here at the moment, but as soon as I get a copy and people start to send suggestions in, there should be more. If you find a way to make the game run faster (or slower), just contact the WebMaster.

1. Some people have reported that using smartdrv in the first version has increased the game speed by reducing disk access times. This even has an effect when running under Win95. The patch v1.3 may have fixed this problem.
2. I have a PII 233 and I've found that using fastvid increases frame rates by about 20%. Fastvid is a freeware utility that only works on PII's and P Pro's (it's easy to find it with a standard internet search engine).

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