Zombeaver

SentaiBrad said I never thought to look there. Yeah, when I saw the suggestion in a Steam thread for Gorky 17 I was like "...what the hell is DEP?" I've never seen it before, or changed any of its settings before. I'm sure this is an instance where Windows did an update and saw a "problem" that it felt it needed to fix and changed the setting. I'm just glad there's nothing wrong with my computer... I was seriously sweating bullets for a few moments there thinking "What...have I done?" haha.

I FIXED IT! By god this thing didn't beat me. So, after all that ridiculous SHIT that I went through... it had nothing to do with any of that. I had resigned myself to the fact that it just wasn't going to work and that I would move on. But I noticed that another completely separate game that I had recently installed (and had tested to confirm it was working) suddenly had stopped working too - Odium aka Gorky 17. I tried a couple others that were from the same period - MDK, Deus Ex, a few others... all had stopped working. I got pretty worried at this point that somehow I had messed up something in Windows. So I started doing some googling on Odium to see if anybody else had encountered a similar problem (Heavy Gear is really obscure for whatever reason so I never found help by that route). Odium (Gorky 17), on the other hand, is on Steam. It's a kinda buggy game to begin with, so a couple of suggested fixes didn't help. But then I came across one mentioning that it needed to be added to Windows' DEP (Data Execution Prevention) exception list in order to work. I added it... it worked. I added MDK... it worked. I noticed that there were two main options under DEP - "Turn on DEP for all essential Windows programs" and "Turn on DEP for all programs except the following exceptions" where you could browse and add programs. I switched it to the first option and restarted, reinstalled Heavy Gear... works perfectly. I have *no* idea how it got switched to the exception list mode, as I'd never even heard of DEP before, and certainly didn't change that setting myself. I can only assume that it was the result of some kind of Windows update. So note to others in case that run into a problem with a game from this era - check into your DEP settings! So... it's working now. Thank god... RE-TAR-DED.

Awesome! Thanks! That shouldn't be too bad to remedy. I'd probably just backup my Gameplay - Screenshots folder, import, move the new folder elsewhere (so that the images are still available if needed) and then put the original folder back, scrape the images from scratch, and use the imported (moved) folder to fill in any gaps.

It is a 95 game, yeah. It came out in 97. I noticed in the release notes that he said there were some early 32-bit games though. Well shoot...

JESUS I like how not only do you have that many...but most of them are close to full One of these days they're gonna actually make that DNA storage I've heard about for years. It's gonna be sweet... A gram of DNA can hold about a billion terabytes of data. What does he use it for? DOS games. Ahhh yeah... But... do I have to feed it? Can it get a real virus? How do I reformat my bio-drive? My digital movie and video game collection demand answers. On a serious note, can anybody confirm whether or not the game Heavy Gear is in the Win3Xo collection? I haven't been able to find an actual list. After fighting with it for about 7 hours last night I'm looking for other options.

Hahaha, yeah yeah, I know!

That'd be awesome, if possible! I've still gotta figure out how exactly I'm going to store these massive collections... and then actually download them (I've got a pretty decent connection but I still have the feeling these are gonna take...a bit haha). Welp, I might be buying another external hard drive this weekend :P (that'd put me at 5).

@CriticalCid Is there any risk of doing this with the updated Launchbox folder structure? I don't have eXoDOS/Win3Xo currently but have been considering checking them out. I just wanna make sure the export/import process isn't broken now that the structure is different.

Hell, I wish late 90s games were as easy to deal with as DOSbox. DOSBox is a dream by comparison as far as I'm concerned. I've actually been collecting some CD-era DOS games recently and it's weirdly enjoyable to throw in a 20+ year old CD and install it through DOSbox haha. There really haven't been any DOS games that I haven't been able to get to work with a bit of effort. It's just that awkward period post-DOS but pre-W7-onward (late 90's to early 00's) that are frequently annoying as hell. Things like nglide/dgVoodoo help, but there are other issues at play too. Like I said I've used VirtualBox with a 95 environment in the past and it worked, though it was a bit more unwieldy than DOSbox; more than I'd like, to be honest. I'm not familiar with PCem, I'll definitely check that out. Regarding Heavy Gear, it's really mind-boggling; especially since it WAS working two days ago. But now, for no apparent reason, it invariably just gives me a "one or more DLLs not found" error and then a "unable to configure Heavy Gear parameter file" error and crashes immediately, no matter what I try. I really didn't make any dramatic OS changes during that period - just installing a couple of other older games. I cover most of the steps I tried in the comments here. I usually stick it out on this sort of thing but I think this one's got me beat. Maybe one day GOG will add it to their library; I can hope anyway (and vote for it in the community wishlist haha). SentaiBrad said: ...and even worse on 10. 10 removed backend stuff that specific late 90's and early 2000's (up to mid 2000 I think) used as DRM. Virtualization also doesn't work because there is little to no support when it comes to 3D accelerated anything, or playing games. This is actually my primary reason for not going to 10 on this machine, as dumb as that sounds EDIT: Have you ever used Windows Virtual PC? I've never used it but the videos I've seen look pretty straightforward. I don't recall having issues with 95-98 era stuff on XP, which is the environment that this provides. I'm not sure how it does on 3D accelerated stuff though... might primarily be for business applications, I'm not sure.

I think that at least some part of the reason I enjoy emulation is because I like the process of getting things to work, especially if it's particularly arcane or being used in a way (or on a platform) that wasn't originally intended. "Tinkering" would probably be the most appropriate term. It's fun for me. Testing and then tweaking, testing again, more tweaking... I don't know what it is, it's just enjoyable for me. I'm assuming I'm probably not alone in that regard here, but who knows. And yet, I think everyone has their limits. I think that even the most devoted of tinkerers can only hit a brick wall a finite number of times before eventually saying "Screw this..." I spent about 7 hours last night trying to get a PC game from 1997 to work (Heavy Gear). A game which, the day prior, was working perfectly fine, despite some initial hurdles. You can probably see how that might drive someone a bit nuts. I used ProcMon to monitor the attempted file and registry accesses, edited my registry, uninstalled and reinstalled about a dozen times in varying ways (it evidently doesn't like having an install folder that has spaces in it, i.e. "Heavy Gear" instead of "HeavyGear"), tried patches, tried using replacement files from another person who has the game, tried various compatibility settings, tried dgvoodoo and nglide wrappers, tried everything I could think of. I have some experience with VirtualBox as I used it years ago to run W95 but I no longer have my install/key for 95, so that's out. I briefly considered a system restore (since it was working previously) but ultimately decided "No. Sorry. I am not doing a system restore for a 20 year old game." And so, the night ended in bitter failure and with the entire evening wasted. Annoying. As. Shit. I'm assuming that others here have had this experience in some form at some point. Feel free to vent!

Sure thing! :D I will admit that there's a certain charm to the distinctive, highly synthetic sound of an old fashioned sound blaster, probably in no small part because it's just what I'm so accustomed to for these games - ordinarily I always opt for unaltered aesthetics and try to keep things as close to my childhood recollection as I can get (I'll take chunky-ass software-mode Quake over any other variant, any day of the week); but... my jaw dropped on a few of these. Based on the reading I've been doing, Sierra actually composed nearly all of their soundtracks on the MT-32 from the beginning (it's my understanding that they actually used the hardware as a way to attract professional composers for their games), so it is indeed the "way they intended". Unfortunately, most gamers couldn't afford to drop the $500+ that these went for at the time so most of us grew up only knowing the sound blaster version. Wikipedia: Despite its original purpose as a companion to other professional MIDI equipment, the MT-32 became one of several de facto standards for PC computer game publishers. Sierra On-Line, a leading PC game publisher of the time, took an interest in the sound-design of its PC games. Sierra secured a distribution deal to sell the MT-32 in the US, and invested heavily in giving its game titles (at the time) state-of-the-art sound by hiring professional composers to write in-game music. King's Quest IV, released in 1988, was the first Sierra title with a complete musical soundtrack scored on the MT-32. The MT-32 with a necessary MPU-401 interface cost $550.00 to purchase from Sierra when it first sold the device. Although the MT-32's high price prevented it from dominating the end-user market of gamers, other PC publishers quickly followed Sierra's lead, expanding the role of music in their own game titles with Roland supporting the industry by releasing CM modules for computer users. The MT-32 remained the gold-standard for musical composition well into the early 1990s, when the game-industry began to shift toward General MIDI and later CD Audio. Mobygames has a list of all games that offer MT-32 support that's pretty useful. Just keep in mind that, outside of Sierra stuff, not everything that supports MT-32 was necessarily designed with MT-32 in mind. I think Descent, for example, sounds terrible with non-SB/Adlib OST; so some experimentation is still necessary from game to game. Since yesterday, I've started a spreadsheet for Sound and Music driver settings for all my DOS games so I can keep track of what I'm using for them and note what seems to sound the "best" to me. Yay! Even more things to catalog! I think I have a problem...

I've been working pretty much non-stop on DOS stuff lately, which has been pretty time consuming because there are tons of things to tweak and I'm pretty OCD about getting everything just right. From Novert (for getting rid of the annoying forward/backward movement from vertical mouse movement that was present in a lot of early FPSs) to enabling Gravis Ultrasound support to tweaking ini/cfg files for custom controls and of course the standard adjustment of Dosbox cycles, output, etc... there's a lot of stuff to do. Yesterday I came across a program called "Munt". This is a pretty fantastic Roland MT-32 (and CM-32L) emulator which can be used with DosBox. Not sure why that's significant or why you should care? Check out the two videos below. The first half is Adlib/Soundblaster and the second half is with MT-32. It's actually fairly easy to setup as well. I just followed this guide and it worked great! Obviously your mileage will vary depending on the game because support for it varies, but when it's available it's usually pretty fantastic. I've found Sierra games, in particular, to be phenomenal with MT-32; especially the earlier titles. I've played some of these games since I was a kid and I was pretty blown away. Obviously it's all subjective and I will admit that it takes some adjustment if you're used to hearing something a certain way for so many years, but it's been a pretty exciting experience for me - it's almost like playing entirely new games. Check it out! NOTE: This requires MT-32 rom files, which aren't included with Munt.

I've been keeping an eye on Axiom Verge for a bit. It looks pretty good and I do love me some Metroidvania. Still a bit more than I'd like to pay for it though. Have you seen Megasphere? It's still in early access, but it looks awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWmfhI9jx8I

Yeah I kindof assumed that was what you meant after I posted that. I just got excited when I saw you mention "The DOS importer" and "replac[ing] the default version of DOSBox" in the same breath - I thought you meant I could do the latter through the importer It seems like this should be capable of providing the options that I want... but I haven't been able to get it to work. Hopefully alec can provide some assistance. As a temporary workaround I was able to setup Daum as an emulator, with standard "DOSBox" implementation in LB being regular old 0.74, so when I want to use Daum instead of 0.74 I just uncheck "Use Dosbox" in the game details, use Daum as the emulator, and then tell it to use the command line parameter -conf [specific path to the conf file]. It works but it's overly time consuming and you don't have access to the special integrated features LB has with DOSBox doing it this way, which means there'll be times where you'll be manually editing the autoexec section in the conf file

Anybody pick up anything so far? I grabbed a few more things: Life is Strange: Complete Season: $9.99 Broforce: $5.99 Risen 3: $4.99 Ryse: Son of Rome: $4.99 Age of Empires Legacy Bundle: $8.99 Voyage: Journey to the Moon: $1.99 Sinking Island: $1.99 Nevermind: $3.99

alec100_94 I'm not having any luck getting this to work. I've got both 0.74 and Daum in the Launchbox Dosbox folder. I dropped your files in there and used Dosbox Version Selector.exe. It created version.ini. Now what? It shows 0.74 as the default in the ini. Am I supposed to be adding a line so that Daum can be used? "The filename must contain "Dosbox" and have no spaces (e.g "Dosbox_SVN.exe"), and then it can be set in the ini file." Set where? Am I replacing "DefaultVersion = DosBox_0.74.exe" with "DefaultVersion = dosbox_x64.exe" (the Daum Dosbox .exe)? I don't actually want to change the default, I just want to use Daum on certain occasions. "To override this setting from within launchbox (on a per-game basis), simply add the version of DosBox you want to use (minus the .exe extension) as the last command line parameter, (e.g "Dosbox_SVN" without quotes)." The last command line parameter in what? The "application command-line parameters" in the game entry itself? Putting dosbox_x64 doesn't seem to do anything there. Sorry, I just found the instructions to be incredibly vague. Thank you for making this! I hope I'm able to get it to work.

SentaiBrad said The DOS importer works really well and you can replace the default version of DOSBox for a more advanced fork of it like DOSBox Daum or DOSBox X or something like that. @SentaiBrad I've been messing around with DOSbox Daum recently - how exactly do you do this via the importer? I don't see anything in the prompts that indicate an option for an alternate version to be used. Or are you just talking about replacing the DOSBox folder in the Launchbox directory with an alternate version? I messed around with that a bit and it kinda works, but it's not exactly ideal. I'd definitely like to be able to just specify during the import "Use this version of Dosbox for this game". I was also able to successfully set up and use Daum as an "emulator" but that method gets kinda clunky when you need to specify a conf because then you have to specify in the game entry to use command line parameters and then "-conf [path to .conf file]".

DOS76 said I was more hoping to let people know to get the update for free and to keep on using the OS they have this way they have a copy they don't have to pay anything for regardless of what anyone's personal reasons for upgrading or not upgrading. I get that, and it's fair enough, but from what I understand it's only usable on the specific PC that you're potentially upgrading correct? If I could just get a one-time-use key that I could just use whenever (including a future PC) then I'd be all over it, but I don't think that's how it works right? Basically what I'm saying is, I have no intention of upgrading my current PC to W10 and, because of that, the free upgrade wouldn't be viable. I realize eventually I'll be on W10, but it'll be my next PC at this point.

SentaiBrad said If you're not buying games from the Windows Store, and I sure as hell am not, then it should have absolutely zero bearing on your decision. The Windows Store isn't the problem. The issue is with UWP specifically. The two are related but not interchangeable. UWP isn't the store, it's the underlying architecture. I (like Tim Sweeney in the article I linked) am in no way opposed to Microsoft having their own storefront. It's going to be shit, but there's nothing wrong with them having one and there's nothing wrong with more competition. The problem is that Microsoft is locking down Windows features to be usable exclusively through UWP, creating their own little walled garden so that they can get a nice little cut. Sure, nobody's forcing developers to use UWP, but hey "If you want to be able to do [insert], you can only do it if it's in UWP, and if it is, you're going through us." I'm opposed to that on the very principle, regardless of the real world consequences (or, potentially, lack thereof). My guess (or perhaps hope) is that enough developers will continue to not develop for it and that it'll just collapse in on itself before I have to go near W10.

Honestly, I've heard no small number reports about compatibility with certain applications (especially older ones, which is a big deal for me) and I'm not at all a fan of the rather draconian approach that Microsoft is taking with UWP. Everybody remember how awesome Games for Windows Live was? Oh yeah, now I remember... it was a steaming pile of shit. I'm sure I'll be on W10 someday, when I have little (or no) choice, but that's likely a couple years down the road... probably when I'm working on a completely new PC from scratch. In my experience, it's rarely a good idea to immediately migrate to a new version of Windows - there are always unforeseen issues, no matter when you do it, but early adopters get to deal with the brunt of the problems that are inherent in any new OS. W7 is doing everything I need it to do (and doing it without issue) for me currently. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

SentaiBrad said I own Anachronox actually! So you're not alone. Nice! I've got my big box displayed proudly on my PC shelf :P It's criminally underappreciated; one of my all-time favorites for sure. SentaiBrad said Also, I agree with the others, thank you for doing this! I've asked Jason to give you the permission to edit your posts. I will let you know when he does. No problem and thank you!

I can't edit the original post currently, so I'll add new banners as thread replies for the time being. This is a banner I made for a custom platform I created in LB called "Classic PC". I use it for games from around 1995 - 2005 (they have to be a minimum of 10 years old) that are post-DOS era like Wizardry 8, The Longest Journey, Gothic, Outcast, Thief, etc. I felt weird about lumping this period of PC games in with say Crysis. The background is from Anachronox - an amazingly unique and hilarious PC RPG that nobody played (and just so happens to be a whopping $1.74 currently on the Steam sale *nudge*). Next up will be Gameboy.

@GonjaT Wow, that actually sounds pretty sweet. I love setting up stuff like that. I use something called Remote Launcher to do some neat things, though not quite to that level - when I get home from work (and am in the garage, two floors below my PC) I can use it to start Plex Home Theater on my PC, then I connect to my Plex network via the Plex app on my phone and play (cast) something to it, and then I can use Remote Launcher again to switch the audio output from my headphones to speakers (because I usually forget about it and leave them on headphones the night before). As a bonus, it's a great and hilarious way of scaring the crap out of my wife. She thought my PC was possessed or something the first time. I also use it for doing certain things with the Steam Link - certain emulators can be a little extra difficult to cooperate and are difficult to close via normal methods while streaming through the Link, so I have it setup to issue close commands to specific .exes on command. Rincewind said Can I ask how you create the sketch style ones It's actually just a couple simple Photoshop filters. First you want to use "Poster Edges" Edge thickness: 2 Edge intensity: 1 Posterization: 2 Then you use "Cutout". The actual settings vary depending on the image and they have to be tweaked, but my usual starting point is Number of levels: 4 Edge simplicity: 4 Edge fidelity: 2 Number of levels in particular gets adjusted quite a bit from image to image.

Overwatch is awesome. It's extremely polished and I have very little negative to say about it. I like that there are a lot of different playstyles available because of all the different heroes - there's really something for everybody, and even the types that I wouldn't normally gravitate to have proven to be extremely fun; there are very few heroes that I don't enjoy playing (and that's rarely a knock on their design - there's just some of them I'm completely horrendous with). In fact, completely to my shock, the hero that I have the single most playtime with is Mercy - a healer. That was the last thing I expected, but I just find her really fun and satisfying to play. Mercy, Roadhog, and Junkrat are my favorites. I haven't had any issues with the matchmaking per se - there are definitely times where you'll run into lopsided matches, but that's true for pretty much anything. That said, it can sometimes be a frustrating experience to play alone - which is why I have a couple people I play with regularly. The matches are only 6v6 so just having about 3+ in an existing group is beneficial. It's not terrible to solo queue or anything, but having a preexisting group makes it easier to coordinate. The only real complaint I have is that the loot box system is pretty much garbage - it's actually really rare that you get anything worthwhile. Most of the time it's just minor junk. Granted, 100% of the unlocks are cosmetic, so it's nothing that's actually game/balance changing, but it is a significant driving force/motivator for continuing to play - so when you get nothing but garbage 5+ levels in a row (and it'll take several matches to level up once after you're 30+) it can be annoying. There are a few characters that I think need a couple minor tweaks, but Blizzard's actually great about that kind of thing. As I said though - it's extremely polished, plays very well, is very balanced, has a huge amount of depth, and is a blast.

GonjaT said Gameboy, Gameboy color, ps4. That's all I'm missing so far. Thanks! I really like the sketch ones. I'll see what I can come up with for Gameboy and GBC. I'll try to do a PS4 one eventually as well but that's a lower priority since there's no PS4 emulation currently - so most people wouldn't find it useful. GonjaT said Is there a way I can donate to you for these artwork pieces? I genuinely appreciate the thought, but no - this is something I do for fun and to help the community; no compensation is necessary. Thank you though! You could certainly donate to the GoFundMe campaign that's currently ongoing for some alternate banners, however. @SentaiBrad is there a way I could get "trusted" status or whatever it's called in order for me to edit my original post? I made a new banner but I can't edit the original post to add it currently.