DeathMask.net

Hi,
Just want to let you know that Blood's awesome add-on Cryptic Passage can be played multiplayer/coop in XP.
If you have Blood running well on XP you can get Cryptic Passage to run.
CP runs a little jerky compared to Blood as this site's guide says (more on this below).

CP does not support multiplayer/coop out of the box so you need to grab a hold of a file called CPMULTI.EXE from here:

http://files.filefront.com/cpmulti/;845 ... einfo.html

Put it in your blood directory and create a new vdms shortcut to it like you did for blood.exe etc.. NOTE: Make sure you also click on 'Enable Low Level Network Support' in the shortcut properties.

You will most likely get a "Run Time Error 200" when you try to run it.
Now grab this utility called TPPATCH.EXE here to fix this:

http://www.brain.uni-freiburg.de/~klaus ... ml#TpPatch
(located in the TpPatch.zip)

Extract tppatch.exe into the blood directory where cpmulti.exe is and from a command line run 'tppatch cpmulti.exe' from your blood directory

Now click on the shortcut and you will get the Blood setup screen, select 'Network Game' and Launch Blood. NOTE: This will only support LAN games like Blood multiplayer. Other players do the same thing and you are good to go..

except in CP multiplayer the game & sound might be very jerky (a lot more so than with single player CP) which is what happened for me.

I found that in the vdms shortcut when I unclicked 'CAP DOS timer frequency' (in Advanced../Performance) the jerkiness dissipated considerably. I think this has also helped my single player CP jerkniess too.

Like with all vdms emulated DOS games may want to play with your vdms/in game settings to get the best results. I have an athlon 3400 and a pentium with 3.0GHZ and Cryptic Passage mulitplayer coop & sound is working well.

Good luck.

Oh yeah, you need to make sure you have COMMIT.EXE v1.4 in your blood directory IIRC.
This should be fairly easy to find on the net if you dont have it.

haha and I forgot to mention to make sure that windowsXP has the IPX protocol installed
I cant remember if you actually need COMMIT.EXE v1.4 but its a good idea to use that version if things are not working network-wise, which is the version I'm using.

How do you unclick the "Cap DOS timer frequency" in the cryptic VDM shortcut? I have very jerky single player performance in Cryptic Passage and was hoping this might help.

right click on the shortcut, then click on properties, then click on the performance tab on the dialog which pops up, then under the 'DOS Scheduling' section you'll see the checkbox there.
This seemed to get both SP & MP Cryptic Passage running smoothly for me.

BTW, Im running Crytpic Passage viw the CPmulti.exe, which may also be helping. You may want to try this, its basically like going to setup.exe, so you'll be able to launch SP Blood from that.