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(heroes.info)Troubleshooting

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Troubleshooting
===============

Video mode
----------

   This game was primary made for MS-DOS, with VGA 320x200x8bits
display.  If GGI is used to manage the video modes and you run into
trouble with video modes, I suggest you play with a environment
variable called `GGI_DISPLAY' used to select the display used.  LibGGI
come with a file `env.txt' that describes this variable.  As an
alternative you may use heroes' `--gfx-options' option instead of the
above variable.  If you want to force X display, you can add a line
     Options: --gfx-options=X
   in your `~/.heroes/heroesrc' file.  Note: `--gfx-options' has no
effect if you are using SDL.

   We suggest you to run the game under X because in console modes
(libvga, frame buffers, ...) it's easy to get stuck if the game freeze.

   People using an X server that supports 8bit visuals although the
default visual is not 8bit (run `xdpyinfo' to see a list of visuals that
your X server supports) are subject to what is probably a GGI bug.
Basically GGI's X driver fails to allocate the 8bit mode correctly.
The symptom is
     X Error of failed request:  BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
       Major opcode of failed request:  1 (X_CreateWindow)
       Serial number of failed request:  24
       Current serial number in output stream:  31
   One workaround is to prevent Heroes from negociating a 8bit video
mode.  Specify `--gfx-options not8' to that effect.  The default visual
depth for your server will then be selected by GGI.  (Of course this is
slower because Heroes internally works in 8bit mode; use of another
display depth involves a conversion.)

Keyboard
--------

   There is a menu `KEYS' in the submenu `OPTIONS' that lets you change
the key bindings used during the game.  Please set the keys here before
playing since key codes can vary from place to place (hmm...  is that
right?).

Sound effects
-------------

   You may find that there is some delay between an action and the
associated sound effect.  This is because libmikmod is polling in a
buffer and is thus always one buffer ahead in the playback. It is
possible to reduce the size of that buffer using some driver parameters,
please see the section `DRIVER PARAMETERS' of libmikmod's `README'.  For
instance I'm using the OSS driver and I reduce the size of libmikmod's
buffer by running heroes with the line
     Options: -d3,buffer=11,count=4
   in my `~/.heroes/heroesrc' file.  If you can find correct values for
other drivers, please send them to me <duret_g@epita.fr>!

Sound errors
------------

   If Heroes try to tell you that:
     Could not initialize sound, reason: Could not set sample size
   That means that MikMod couldn't setup the 16bits output, may be
because your sound card doesn't support that.  Use the `-8' option to
have the game running with 8bits sound output.

   If you get:
     Could not initialize sound, reason: Could not set mono/stereo setting
   You will have to run the game with `-m', because stereo is not
available.

   Remember that you can always put these options in your
`~/.heroes/heroes' file (Note: heroesrc) so that you don't need to
type them every time you run the game.

SegFault when using Alsa drivers with and LibMikMod
---------------------------------------------------

   If you are using Alsa 0.5.x drivers(1) Heroes is likely to crash
during it's startup.  This is because the current version of LibMikMod
(3.1.9 at the time of writing) lacks support for Alsa 0.5.

   A solution is to run Alsa in OSS-emulation mode: simply run `heroes
-d x' (where x is the OSS driver number printed by `heroes -n') to
force LibMikMod using its OSS(2) interface.

   As a more general solution, you may want to compile LibMikMod
without Alsa support (`./configure --disable-alsa') so that it never
crash for any application.

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) Alsa is a project to improve the Linux sound subsystem
(See the Alsa page (http://www.alsa-project.org/) for details).

   (2) Open Sound System is a set of device drivers that provide a
uniform API across all the major UNIX architectures.  The Linux kernel
contain free code from the commercial OSS (See this page
(http://www.linux.org.uk/OSS/) for details).