Fixing flickering screen, vertical mouse movement and ability to rebind your keys.

Few tweaks to make your gaming experience more enjoyable.

Getting rid of the screen flicker.

There are two ways of fixing this, one is to switch to 320x200 resolution in game setup (which we wont do since it makes the game look way worse), the other one is to tweak the dosbox config file to slow the emulation a bit.

First you need to navigate to your game folder, you can browse local files or navigate directly - it should be in
[your drive letter]:\Steam\steamapps\common\Shadow Warrior Original\gameroot



Now open the dosbox_swarrior.conf file with notepad and find the [cpu] section:



In the line
cycles=auto
add
limit 300000
so it looks as in the screenshot.

Save and close the file.

What this basically does is limits dosbox cycle count to 300000 cycles, since modern CPUs nowadays are able to run dosbox at much higher cycle count (with cycles set to auto or max) limiting this to 300000 will not let the emulation pass this threshold.

You can experiment with different values - if you raise it, at some point the flicker should appear, lowering it will make the game run with lower FPS.

Interestingly you can run the VGA mode (320x200) just fine without this limit and the flicker will not appear, it's probably the way the video is being rendered at higher resolution in implemented VESA mode at higher cycle count.

Also this issue will not happen on PCs with slower CPUs, since they wont be able to hit that cycle count inducing the issue.

Improving mouse Y axis response / rebind your keys.

Mouse aiming is pretty sluggish in vertical axis. We can fix that by going into game setup. With Shadow Warrior Classic (part of the paid Shadow Warrior Redux) version it's nicely built into startup screen where we can select the base game, expansions or setup. Here there's no option, you just start the game. So what to do?

First, browse local files or navigate directly to:
[your drive letter]:\Steam\steamapps\common\Shadow Warrior Original\bin



Double click on dosbox.exe, this screen should appear:



type in: mount c ..\gameroot followed by enter press



type: c: (confirm with enter press)

and follow that with: dir (again enter)
to see if you mounted the drive correctly, you should see this:



this are the files from the game's folder, you can see the setup.exe right there, we have to run that, to do so type in: setup (enter)



From this screen select Controller Setup



choose Setup Advanced Controller Options



pick Advance Mouse Setup



opt for Mouse Y Axis Scale



now increase the value from 1 all the way to 4 by pressing the right arrow key, accept by pressing enter and go back the menu by pressing Esc several times



When you reach this point press Esc once more



Save your changes by choosing Yes



When you exit to DOS prompt you can close the dosbox window.

With this setup you can also rebind you controls (Controller Setup -> Setup Keyboard).



or mess with your sound and graphics options, which is not advisable since the game is configured fine in that regard, but if you want to run it in VGA (320x200) mode, there's nothing stopping you.

Summary

All in all, the dosbox config of this game is pretty much fine compared to other DOS based games on Steam (or GOG) that use dosbox, not much to change to make it run better. You could rebind your keys with dosbox mapper feature, but doing it in the setup is more convenient in my opinion. Overall good release of good old DOS classic, with only minor things to fix.

You can apply this guide to SW Classic from SW Redux release, though you can easily enter the setup without messing with dosbox yourself there from the add-on select screen.

[WyseFool]

step 1: download eduke, place folder anywhere
step 2: move sw.rts and sw micrsoft program group files to eduke folder
step 3: run voidsw from the eduke folder.
step 4: get the gog version that's also free but includes the wanton destruction dlc file
step 5: move the WT file to the eduke folder to enjoy expansion