#"Murmurs of the Earth"
8 messages in this thread
For Christmas I received a Sony CDROM drive along with several CD's for it.
"Murmurs of the Earth" (by Warners New Media) won't show me the pictures (taken
by Voyager). "Great Wonders" by Interoptica Publishing doesn't show where the
cursor is and eventually locks up.
Warners sent an update of the driver (reader?) s/w on a new CD. It was
different (three interferring images vs none). They now say they can do no more
for me.
Interoptica keeps telling me they will ship an update at the end of the month.
(January, February, March??)
Any ideas on how to fix?
John,
FWIW, I purchased Murmurs of the Earth for the PC a few weeks ago. Not only
did it not work on my system, but it crashed my system and trashed my Norton
Desktop for Windows desktop.
I returned it the next day. The Egghead salesman told me that he had
received several reports of incompatibilities with Diamond Stealth Super VGA
cards. Too bad this wasn't documented.
— EVAN
Evan, thanks for the feedback. I sometimes think that it may be only me or my
equipment.
I run NDW also and have had no apparent trouble with it or with system crashes.
The folks at Warners New Media seem like they are trying to help but just
can't. I've had several converstions with a Mike LaJoi there, who in turn has
had several conversations with the maker of my video card. Apparently the
culprit is the S3 chip set. Not really a culprit, it is just that their
applications software isn't compatible with any video driver using the S3
chips. (I think the Diamond Stealth may use S3 also.) Worse yet, they
apparently haven't had enough volume to justify modifying their software for
all the various Windows accelerators around.
In addition to the one non-functional update I was sent, they have offerred to
exchange "Murmurs" for any of their other products.
But I really want those pictures! There must be some other way???
If I hear of something I'll let you know.
Diamond Stealth…
I have had a number of compatibility problems with this card at work – with a
number of different bits of software. Updated drivers for Stealth are
available on the WINADV forum (I think) – they cured most of my problems, but
not all. I think that some of the problems may be "hardwired"-type problems
on the card. Maybe its unfair to blame your CDROM suppliers when the real
culprits may be the card mfrs. I certainly wouldn't recommend the Diamond
Stealth card after my experiences with it.
dw
The only way I have been able to get my copy of "Murmurs of Earth" to work on
my system (Texel 3024 with ET-3000-based Amdek VGA card) is to disable my
expanded memory manager (EMM386.exe), and rem out everything else so that there
is at least 535K of conventional memory. Then, at least, you can see the
pictures. You can use the "mem/c" or "chkdsk" from DOS to see how much
conventional memory you have available.
No matter what I do, Windows usually gives me an "application viloated system
integrity" error when I try to execute the murmurs.exe file. To my mind, it
may be a bit premature to blame the video card when the soft- ware refuses to
run under Windows on two different platforms (IMHO).
Good luck in trying to make it work!
Best regards, PC
Paul,
Thanks for the help!
I grumbled at Warners and received an updated disk. It no longer has the
MURMURS.exe, instead it has a MURMURS.bat (dated 11/09/92), a GRASPRT.exe and
then MURMURS.GL. Apparently the GRASPRT.exe is a file viewer of some sort.
My system should have plenty of memory (currently showing 598 K available
through mem/c).
The video card is made by STB for COMPUSA (called "Whiplash") and uses the S-3
chipset.
In the early exploration I seem to remember clearing most of the autoexec.bat
and config.sys items and trying to cause things to work. It was a modest
success at best.
Thanks! s/jmb
John,
As I asked Paul in my previous message. Have you tried using a boot disk???
Max
Paul,
I'm fairly new to this CDROM stuff myself. I solved most of my problems getting
my multimedia programs to run by using a "boot disk". I have two, one for
running under DOS and one for running under Windows. To me, it's the best way
to access as much free memory as possible and a lot easier than disabling your
memory manager and REMing out a bunch of lines in your CONFIG.SYS each time. So
far so good! You might want to give it a try.
Max