Pages: 1 2 Much of the 1980s and ’90s were dominated by point-and-click adventure games, with LucasArts leading this genre with classics like Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle. These games were designed to work on computers that don’t even have a fraction of the power of a typical smartphone, so it’s no surprise they usually don’t work on today’s machines. Thankfully, Eugene Sandulenko and his massive team created ScummVM, a tool that runs LucasArts classics at their respective speeds and scales them up perfectly for today’s screens. The team has since expanded to support point-and-click games from other makers, including Simon the Sorcerer and Leisure Suit Larry.
Nowadays, ScummVM doesn’t just run on PCs, but on basically every platform you can imagine. Versions exist for Sega’s 2000-era DreamCast console, Nintendo 64, Bada and even Nintendo DS. With rare or closed platforms, you’ll need to do some hacking to make the classic games work. But on the most popular platforms like PCs, Android, Linux or Mac, this process should only take seconds.
 So how does this work? Go to the ScummVM download page and find the right version for your platform. Once it is installed, you’ll need the original versions of the games you want to play. If you don’t have these, try looking online or on eBay. Then, simply copy the contents of the game discs into a folder. For example, I have the regular PC version of ScummVM, to which I copied and sorted all of my LucasArts adventures, so I can easily access them using the tool.
Then, fire up ScummVM, and click on “Add Game” and browse to the folder of any game. In my case, I clicked on The Secret of Monkey Island, and hit “Select.” Next, you can go through the settings and see if you like any of the graphical enhancements that ScummVM offers. Once you’re ready, click “Ok” and “Start” to launch the game. To save a game at any point or exit, hit “F5″ to pull up ScummVM’s main menu.
Not all classic games run under DOS. In fact, many of the games developed between 1995 and 2002 require Windows 95, 98 or Millennium Edition. These modern classics also ran on the early version of DirectX, which is still around today. So, if you want to play Windows 9x-era games, just install and run them using compatibility settings.
 You’ll need to right-click on the executable files or game files (game.exe), go to “Properties” and select “Compatibility.” Also, be sure to run them under the Windows 95 or 98 settings, and select “Reduced Color Mode” and the “Run in 640×480” screen resolution. After doing this, however, if the game won’t run, you’ll need to jump through some hoops and install a Windows 95/98 virtual machine using VirtualBox.
If the game runs, be prepared for its color palette to be slightly off. This is because the DirectX component, DirectDraw, has been severely depreciated in later versions, causing older games that require it to run poorly—or not at all. Thankfully, some fans have already gone out and written their own DirectDraw file hacks, which will allow you to not just run the games, but run them under your native display resolution of 1920×1200. The most notable of those hacks is DDHack—you can get a very detailed description of how it works here and get the latest version here.
What’s old is new again when it comes to video games, with even the Smithsonian unveiling a new exhibition, The Art of Video Games, for aficionados of the classics. But thankfully, revisiting retro games isn’t limited to visiting museums; you can enjoy them on your Windows machine using easy tricks like these. For more PC gaming optimization tips, please visit the TuneUp Blog about Windows.
Pages: 1 2 |
There several apps that allow you to setup your DosBox games with the commands so that you just double click the entry. It then launches DosBox and passes the command line strings to it. The links for those apps are on the DosBox site.
I have used several in the past and currently use ProGammaX to launch Moo1, Moo2, Alien Legacy and Ascendancy.
There are also commercial sites where you can buy classic games legitimately, for not much money at all. Good Old Games, for example (www.gog.com). These usually have a pre-configured DOSBox front-end, too.
Oh, and depending on the game you’re playing, you might want to look into a modern source port. Anything ID or on the Build engine have nice community engines which work better and often have new features.
Or, if you’re trying to play Descent, drop everything now and lookup Descent Rebirth, pretty much the only way to play this gem today.
Yeah, there are a lot of free remakes out there too. Wing Commander Privateer Gold, for example, basically recreates the whole game. There’s another one too, on a different engine, which tries to be more expansive but isn’t quite as good even if it looks prettier.
Glide wrappers are handy things too for a lot of old games both of the DOS flavour (Tomb Raider for example) and the Win 9X variety as well as being handy for some console emulators (their Glide plugins are often the most error free, especially for the varied N64 emulators out there).
The best of the bunch are Zeckensack’s and NGlide (openGL and D3D respectively) with NGlide having the slight edge of being more frequently updated to support a wider range of games and having instructions for how to use it with Dosbox as well as a helpful list of games and “problem fixes” for them on their website.
It’s worth remembering that while Nvidia and AMD are the daddies of video cards now it was 3DFX who ruled the roost when many of the old classics were released.
For Starfleet Command and Silent Storm, I went the lazy route and just did a search for someones fix for the game.
Oh, and here’s a fix for Crimson Skies. It doesn’t play well with modern GPUs. There was a point were I almost considered building a 2000-era machine just to play this. Thanks to this man’s work, we can all be happy again: (It’s the CSFIX at the very bottom) http://timeslip.chorrol.com/
Oh sweet! So now I can fire up Crimson Skies AND use a glide wrapper for the old X-wing games!!
@Kahless, thanks for reminding me about Zeckensack’s and nGlide. Two of my favorite flight sims, Jane’s USAF and Jane’s IAF, don’t work properly under Windows 7… in fact, they don’t work properly under Windows XP. The game works, if you can navigate the menus blindly. Apparently they used some programming tricks (undocumented system calls, maybe?) that cause the menus and the arming screen to not work the way it should, even in Compatibility mode, and I’ve had no success in getting them to run on a virtual machine.
As for Jane’s USAF, some fan (or an ex-employee of Jane’s Combat Sims? I don’t know) has patched it to work with Windows XP/Vista/7 (and even added more content), but there’s still no fix for IAF. Until now. IAF does support Glide, so I’m going to test it with a Glide wrapper and see if I can make it work the way it’s supposed to. I’ll post here if it does.
Okay, I’ll keep this short. Jane’s IAF still won’t work even with a Glide wrapper… because it only switches to Glide while you’re in a mission. The menus still don’t work properly. Guess it’s time to take one of my ten-year-old machines and turn it into a Windows 98 machine for playing older stuff. I even have an old 3dfx card somewhere in the shop, that still works after all this time.
Old classic games are best ever. It is lite and east to play also.
Thanks Michael
Dosbox is great. I would have loved it even more if it had save states. I usually don’t condone cheating, but some DOS era games were excruciatingly difficult or didn’t have a saving system to begin with.
Post a Comment