Theme Hospital Issues

[TheBritt2001]

Firstly, I hope I've posted this in the appropriate place. :mellow:

Okay, so I downloaded Theme Hospital from BitComet. I mounted it with Daemon Tools Lite and all goes well, the game starts up and runs fine and dandy and happily. However the real issue is with the mouse cursor. I've scoured Google for answer but most people don't seem to quite 'get it'.

I think that the mouse keeps trying to re-centre itself or something, hence why it moves at a jerky snail's pace across the screen.

I already start up the program under compatibility of Windows 2000, I checked 'Disable Visual Themes' and 'Disable Desktop Composition' (which got my Dungeon Keeper 2 download to work). I also set it to Run in 640 x 480, just in case. None of this helped.

Then I found that if I switched the in-game mode from Hi-res to lo-res, the cursor works just bloody fine! Only the game now looks like a bunch of pixelated crap and it's not what I remember (which is why I'm playing it in the first place. Ah, memories. :P ).

I heard DOSBox might work, so I installed it and (finally) figured out how to get the game to run in it but the computer says no. The program isn't designed to run in DOS. Why? Well I think it's because the version I downloaded was a Windows Vista version. So yes I have tried it in normal Vista mode, everything turned back on and still no luck, which really make me wonder! I mean if it's designed to work on Vista then why the bloody h*** doesn't it?? :angry:

I would have no problem if I could figure out a way to get the cursor to move with the keyboard, but the screen itself just moves when I use the arrow keys.

It really gets awkward when menu's come up, or you try to build a room or place an item. It's then that it glitches. It's just d*** weird and very annoying. I'm trying to re-live my youth here! :rolleyes:

Anybody have any ideas or know of any fixes? Or better yet, know why they released something for Vista that doesn't work with Vista!? :huh:

[kluelos]

Are we doing game support now? I hope not. We, here at this forum, are mostly unpaid volunteers who try to support the BitComet bittorrent client. To a lesser extent we try to support the new CometBird browser.

But games? These games aren't even made by BitComet, who is merely the distributor. That's a step further removed than "publisher" from the people who actually wrote the game and could answer any questions about it. We are not really in any position to support them at all, and have no resources that you don't have.

I will tell you that your symptoms sound like you're trying to run on a system that's vastly underpowered for the game. I don't know, don't have any idea what your system specs are like and have never played that game -- but that IS what it sounds like.

DOSBox is absolutely the wrong direction to go. DOSBox is for very, very old games that were relying on the computer for timing, and just weren't made with any concept of "Gigahertz" or "Gigabyte" in mind, much less high-resolution graphics or DirectX. DOSBox give a game a virtual computing environment from 20 years ago (when a Megabyte was a lot of RAM, and 60 MHz was a fast machine) to run in, back before Windows took off and most computers used a command-line interface without a mouse.

[TheBritt2001]

Ah sorry, I thought this was the forum to post all PC stuff that wasn't related to BitComet. To be honest it wasn't meant as a 'you guys answer this' specifically but I thought that anyone that uses BitComet probably comes through here and surely someone else must have downloaded Theme Hospital and either found the same problem or not. I didn't realise the board was aimed at asking only you admin/mods for help! So sorry about that! I thought anyone came along to answer stuff! :(

And, uh, you've never heard of Theme Hospital? :blink: . As far as I can tell, it was a DOS game (though admittedly I've certainly never played it through DOS before). It is a very old game made by Bullfrog, along with the likes of Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper. It's definitely not the machine. If anything the problem is more likely to be the reverse (it's too good for the game); I play the likes of Sims 3 which came out this year or Empire: Total War and Dawn of War 2 full graphics no problems. Theme Hospital came out in 1997; Quick Wiki Article if you're curious.

But as you said, you would think it was a slow machine trying to run a new game but it's the other way around! It's just weird. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one judging from the forums I've found through Google. I just figured that since people actually torrented the same game, there would be someone that knew what the problem with it was, hence why I asked on a torrent forum. :unsure:

[kluelos]

You might encounter people like that in the future, but the ToComet forum has only just been abandoned. Not many people have made it here except through the avenue of having a problem with BitComet and seeing the forum link in the toolbar.

If we are going to be doing game discussions, then they probably need their own subforum so you guys can find each other. If more people show up asking, that will probably happen.

It just concerned me that anyone was thinking (or worse, saying) that we were any kind of official support forum for the games, because as I said, we don't have the resources for it -- nothing you don't have.

DungeonKeeper, I have played. I mostly use DOSBox for Darklands (which I used to have on 5" floppies) once in a while. I also used it for a game called "Connections" after the old James Burke tv show. When a game needs DOSBox it either won't run at all, or runs so fast that you can't really play it. There were some timed puzzles that relied on the processor, so time was up the moment it started. The mouse is uncontrollable, and so are the arrow keys - one press and you're on the other side of the game field, whatever that may be. Things are far too fast, not slow. Video isn't usually a terrible problem, except that those resolutions look very clunky now.

All that means I think your problem is elsewhere, especially if the game's being published as Vista-compatible. If you can borrow another mouse temporarily, I'd try plugging that in and see if it changes.