Battlespire:Technical Info

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Below is some information that will help improve Battlespire.

Running off of the HardDrive. (Playing without using the Compact Disc.)

1.) Have at least 450MB of hard drive space on a hard drive for file transfer.

2.) Be sure that your Battlespire directory is named BATSPIRE and is in the root directory of the drive, such as C:\ or D:\.

3.) Transfer the WAVES.BSA into the BATSPIRE directory from your Compact Disc.( 104MB File.)

4.) Create a directory in your root directory named VIDEOS, so that it would be C:\VIDEOS or D:\VIDEOS.

5.) Copy all the files in the VIDEOS directory on your Battlespire Compact Disc into the VIDEOS directory on your hard disc.

6.) Edit your SPIRE.CFG that is in your BATSPIRE directory and change the "pathcd" line that has your Compact Disc drive letter such as D:\ and change it to the videos directory such as C:\VIDEOS.

[edit] How to Play Multi-Player.

Battlespire features a multi-player component that isn't exactly easy to understand or use, once to use the Internet it had to use software that no longer exists, namely Mplayer (Which is now Gamespy). But, there is still hope and a number of ways that you can play the game with other people on-line. I'm writing this article to allow people to easily understand and use the various methods that I will explain below. This article will not go into detail about how to play it over a Local Area Network (LAN) except in comment below since it works fine if you have the network setup correctly. Also, this article goes with the assumption that Battlespire is already installed and setup correctly on your computer.

1.) DosBox – Version .70. DosBox .70 is finally at a point that most people are able to run it smoothly without problems, and since most people are on Windows XP or higher and do not have any support at all for Battlespire this is the most relevant method for most people.

A.) First you need to get DosBox (At the time of this writing it was at .70 from http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/ and install it.

B.) You need to enable IPX emulation within the 'dosbox.conf' file in your DosBox director (Default is: C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.70\). Scroll down in the file till you get to

[ipx]
# ipx -- Enable ipx over UDP/IP emulation.

ipx=false

Change 'ipx=false' to 'ipx=true', save and close dosbox.conf.

C.) Load up DosBox and use the following commands;

Host: IPXNET STARTSERVER – Starts the sever, on default it will accept connections on UDP port 213. You can change the port by putting it after the command line. Like;

IPXNET STARTSERVER <port>

IPXNET STOPSERVER – Stops the server and disconnects any clients that are connected to the host computer.

IPXNET PING – Will send a ping request to all connected clients.

IPXNET STATUS – Will report the state of the session.

Client:

IPXNET CONNECT [Address] <port> -- This will allow a client computer to connect to a host, the [Address] can include an ip address, the name of a computer on the network or a website (such as person.site.com). The default port is 213, this can be changed by the host.

D.) Mount your Battlespire disc using the following command: mount [drive letter] [drive letter]:\ -t cdrom

For example it would be 'mount D D:\ -t cdrom'.

E.) Load up Battlespire, go to multi-player and enjoy!

1.) Kali

A.) You need the Kali software, you can either buy a license or you can do a free trial (one per email address). Then you can download the client from http://www.kali.net/ .

B.) Install the client and add a custom game and have it point to Battlespire, leave the rest of the options alone.

C.) Create a room, you can launch the game with or without more people. Press the green 'start' button. Load the game up and play.

Note, this can only work on computers that works with Battlespire, aka a computer with Dos. (Win 98?)

3.) Hamachi – Will be expanded if Battlespire can ever run in Windows XP and higher, since in theory it would work with Battlespire fine. (It creates a virtual IPX network.)

These are currently the only ways to play Battlespire on-line that I know of. Please feel free to comment on the methods or anything about this article!