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Jill of the Jungle Issue (Specifically Jill 2)

trmg

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Amazingly one of my kids favorite retro games is Jill of the Jungle. The could spend hours watching me play, or simply watching the demo sequence. I have the entire series. Jill 1 and Jill 3 run without issue on my 486 (DX4 100MHz running MS-DOS 6.22...I should work on my signature :D). Jill 2 on the other hand is another story. Originally, I could not get past the main menu without the system locking up. I just tested it now, and it seems to be "working" kind-of. I have no clue what changed. At any rate, even though it's working the graphics are a bit choppy and I have no music, even though running through the game's configuration I have enabled it (sound fx work fine). Again, Jill 1 and Jill 3 are 100% functioning on this box.

When I would boot clean in the past, I could initiate gameplay, but it would be super sluggish and the system would lock up within a minute of gameplay. I cannot test a clean boot today as I'm down on floppies (I ordered a bunch and they are on the way) and the floppy I had used to create a boot disk has seemed to go bad...

I'm curious if any of y'all have any ideas on what may be going on?

Thanks!
 
Maybe your media is bad for the game? Perhaps you can find another copy somewhere and try that?
 
You know, I was thinking that. I was playing around with the game yesterday and even though it's working without music, some of the sound fx's are not right. I'll have to source another copy and see if it behaves any differently.
 
Yeah, I'd guess you've got a bad copy of the game there. Difficult to say for sure, though - some of Epic's early-'90s titles weren't exactly bug-free.
 
You can try it on another machine and see what it does there. It could be a quirk specific to the machine you're currently running it on.
 
I've got a couple of different versions of Jill. One seems to be missing a few files, and this one runs quite slowly and has no music. The other has music and runs at normal speed. The Jill 2 .exe file has a reference to PEAKS.DDT which is the main menu music, and this file is missing from the version that runs slowly.

Does your version include PEAKS.DDT? If not, the solution appears to be to find another version that includes this file (plus the other missing files, there are more than just PEAKS.DDT missing.)

I'm guessing if the file is not there, the game is constantly trying to loop/restart the background music and that slows things down.
 
Grabbed another copy of Jill 2 (I had the bundled complete trilogy) and it works without issue. I even copied it into the same directory the trilogy exists, overwriting whatever it prompted me to overwrite, and all 3 seem to work fine. Yay!
 
Annnd beat it. I'm not normally a gamer, but for some reason I really enjoy Jill of the Jungle. Any recommendations on where to go from here? :D
 
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