The elder scrolls: My saves are corrupted

[Umbro]

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First off, thanks using your instructions I finally got the game running in DOSbox. Mostly appreciated. I am having one major problem, though. Almost my entire save games get corrupted to the point that I can't load them again, causing crash after crash. As you know, the golden rule in DF is "Save often!" So I do. After every combat or two, for example. But when I save, the screen freezes, and I have to shut the game down. When I start it up again, the save is visible in its slot, but if I try to load the game I get this message.

[Erie]

The cycles auto is broken in DOSBox. Set frame skip to 0 and cycles to max. Yes this should run Daggerfall beautifully on your system. You only need 16MB to 32MB of memory, and generally more memory causes problems, unless you set it to some insanely high number, which will prolong the problems occurring for some amount of time. I run with 16MB, max cycles, and no frame skip and it runs just fine. Also use the dynamic core, if you're not already using it. Ah, I see the problem. Your core is set to auto. Set your core to dynamic, leave cycles at max, and try it with either 16 or 32MB of memory.

[Fox28]

Dagger fall use about 30-35 mb of RAM, though. So unless people want DOSBox to work with a swapfile which Dagger fall will use if RAM is low, it should be set to 40 or higher. 40 should give enough of a safety margin so a higher value is really a waste of RAM. Svinlesha, it's possible to change the mouse sensitivity in DOSBox with sensitivity 100 but I don't think it will actually help. It seems to me that it's your CPU that is at it's limit here trying to emulate a system powerful enough for Daggerfall.

[Huron]

This may be true under Win98 or Win95, but in DOS under a normal configuration using EMM386.EXE, you couldn't even address that much RAM. EMM386 was limited to 32MB of memory, and Daggerfall ran fine still does, actually on my older systems in DOS. If you took EMM386 out of the picture and did some really good tweaking to HIMEM.SYS, you could address up to 64MB of RAM. This was using a long line of commands following the HIMEM.SYS line in your config.sys file though, and to be quite honest I don't remember much about it without hooking up one of my old DOS machines and checking their system files out.

[Patrician]

What I am getting at, is that Daggerfall at version 2.13 rarely crosses the 20MB boundary, and as such using more than 32MB is a waste. My personal experience here is that when I allow DOS or DOSBox to use more than 32MB of memory, Daggerfall starts doing stupid things like sending my character into the void or crashing with error numbers when I go into stores and such. Taking it down to 32, 24, or 16MB fixes those problems. Daggerfall has a memory manager that is uses under Win9X that does use more memory and I regularly saw it at around 30~40MB, but I've never seen it use that much in DOS. The most likely cause for this was that most DOS configurations had the granularity of the segment limit set to bytes, not the 4KB blocks used in Win9X. This allowed for more efficient use of memory, but at the cost of having less total memory accessible.

[Logistical]

I don't remember the exact filename, but it should be in the same folder where Daggerfall is installed. My 16mb 486 is collecting dust in my parents basement and my current DOS computer is a Pentium 166 with 64mb, so I'm unable to check what the filename is at the moment. It's only created if one start the game with dagger.exe and not with the fall.exe z.cfg trick since it bypasses the RAM check and other checks which will cause a crash on a 16mb machine eventually. I also recall the swapfile being deleted when one quit Daggerfall although my memory could be faulty regarding that and only Battlespire remove it's swapfile, so the easiest way to see the file would be to let the game crash, or just reboot the computer while playing the game.

[Gajendra1]

At this point I'd have to say that either your processor is getting too hot or throttling it, you have an OS problem, or possibly some spyware/adware that isn't showing up as a process that is eating your CPU. I say this due to DOSBox running Daggerfall on slower systems with better performance than you're reporting. I have a friend run it wide-open on a P4/1.90GHz machine with only 512MB of RDRAM, and I have run it just fine on my clunky old AMD Turion laptop at 1.60GHz. If your system is at 2.2GHz and it won't run using a dynamic core with max cycles, I have to believe one of the above scenarios.