Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics

[roy1975]

Cyberstorm is a turn-based strategy spin-off of the Earthsiege games, although I don't recall it being released as freeware like those games were. Come to think of it, I never was able to get Earthsiege 2 to install properly...

[Zombeaver]

I'm working on something rather different for the next project. It's a pretty massive undertaking so I may go radio silent for the next several days at least. I'm pretty excited about it though.

[JamesBond@ge]

Naughty Zombie Beaver teasing us like that! I that is a Commodore logo possibly. Or some advert for a gay parade. I hope it's the former personally. Nothing against a gay march, but I can't play one of them in BigBox ;-)

[plutonick]

The suspense is killing me

[Zombeaver]

It should be done in a day or two at the most. I'm about half-way done.

I can confirm it is not related to a gay parade 

[JamesBond@ge]

Haha, it's good news all round then! 

[plutonick]

I just installed the Darkseed collection. Darkseed 1 runs flawless so far. Darkseed 2 has stuttering sound for me (running either dosbox.exe or dosbox64.exe (or even just using the shortcut).
Am I doing something wrong?


Update:
I also tried running bladerunner (win7 64). It keeps crashing no matter which exe I try. I tried them all actually. Also there is a readme in there that is hard to decypher.
"Just copy the two files in your Blade Runner game directory to patch the game for modern CPUs!

Big thanks to Aqrit's ddraw-Wrapper - http://bitpatch.com/ddwrapper.html - which makes this possible!

Blade Runner Installer (C) 2012 by www.replaying.de (Mr.Blade)"

But I am not sure which two files it means (supposing it's not a leftover file).

Edited March 13, 2018 by plutonick

[Zombeaver]

That note isn't by me, that's from one of the patches I had to use.

I have a special note on Blade Runner on my site, on archive, and here.

Long story short is you have to have some type of disc drive visible - it can be physical or virtual, mounted or not - when you start Blade Runner or it will crash.

I use DaemonTools but something like VirtualCloneDrive would work as well - there are a lot of options. If you're on Windows 10, it has its own built in disc mounting feature but the drive disappears when unmounted. If you don't have any dedicated disc mounting software and you're on 10, you can mount an image - any disc image - and it will work. The point is that the game needs to see some type of drive, and then it'll work.

As far as Dark Seed 2, try messing with the cycles in the .conf. Try setting a fixed value of say 40,000 cycles and then using Ctrl+F12 and Ctrl+F11 to increase and decrease them respectively while the game is running. Hit Alt+Enter after starting the game when you want to adjust the cycles so that you can see the current cycle rate - it has the number at the top of the window. Once you find a good number, put it in the .conf. The settings I used work well for me but everybody has different hardware.

[plutonick]

Blade Runner: Ah dammit, I remember reading this on the site yesterday now that you mention it!
Dark Seed 2: Didn't cross my mind. Will do it and report back if it doesn't fix it.

Thanks for the help.

[dmjohn0x]

Can we get some Temujin? Was one of those multi-disc FMV adventure games. I had little luck finding it last I looked a few years ago. Wish there were a project that archived all those obscure FMV games from the mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s.

[plutonick]

Zomb, I've been thinking about it last night. May I suggest you also include a small readme within each installer detailing some game specific nuisances like the one in Blade Runner? I can't be the only one that barely skims the site prior to downloading the game. And there are times that I dont install it straight away, forgetting the instructions posted on the site (and there might be people that get the file from other means. I for one, plan to copy them to a usb and give them it to my childhood friends that used to play those games together.

I don't mean to criticize or anything. I am grateful to all your hardwork and since English is not my first language I hope my proposals are not coming across as whinning   Thanks for your efforts! 

[guineu]

@plutonick, what I do after torrenting the games from Archive.org, which already puts the cover images with the installer, is to manually copy the description into a txt file and keep everything in an external hard drive.

Edited March 14, 2018 by guineu

[plutonick]

20 minutes ago, guineu said:

@plutonick, what I do after torrenting the games from Archive.org, which already puts the cover images with the installer, is to manually copy the description into a txt file and keep everything in an external hard drive.

This is what I am going to do in the future as well, but I am going to have to keep both the installer and the installed instance on my HDD... ok, who am I kidding, the collector in me is forcing me to do this anyway...

[Zombeaver]

5 hours ago, plutonick said:

Zomb, I've been thinking about it last night. May I suggest you also include a small readme within each installer detailing some game specific nuisances like the one in Blade Runner? I can't be the only one that barely skims the site prior to downloading the game. And there are times that I dont install it straight away, forgetting the instructions posted on the site (and there might be people that get the file from other means. I for one, plan to copy them to a usb and give them it to my childhood friends that used to play those games together.

I don't mean to criticize or anything. I am grateful to all your hardwork and since English is not my first language I hope my proposals are not coming across as whinning   Thanks for your efforts! 

There is a readme in all the installers. It's usually called the license section, though it depends on which program I'm using to make the package. They all have them though. They have the same "Please note" info I have on the archive.org description. If you want them in their own text file, you could just copy the text on each archive page. Again though, the installers themselves have this - you just have to not skip over them haha

[Zombeaver]

6 hours ago, dmjohn0x said:

Can we get some Temujin? Was one of those multi-disc FMV adventure games. I had little luck finding it last I looked a few years ago. Wish there were a project that archived all those obscure FMV games from the mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s.

I'll add it to my list. I played that one years ago.

[plutonick]

 

19 minutes ago, Zombeaver said:

There is a readme in all the installers. It's usually called the license section, though it depends on which program I'm using to make the package. They all have them though. They have the same "Please note" info I have on the archive.org description. If you want them in their own text file, you could just copy the text on each archive page. Again though, the installers themselves have this - you just have to not skip over them haha

Are you talking about the text that pops up once during installation? That can be easy to forget, especially if you are like me and install everything proactively only to play it months later

[Zombeaver]

19 minutes ago, plutonick said:

Are you talking about the text that pops up once during installation? 

Yes.

At this point I can make text files to attach on archive but I won't be remaking all my packages just to include info that's already in them, and listed multiple other places.

EDIT: And to be clear, I don't mind including that same info in a readme that gets installed by the packages going forward, that's not a problem. I'm just not going to remake all of the previously made ones for that 

[dmjohn0x]

inb4 Launchbox, Zomb's Classic Games build.

[Zombeaver]

Just as a little tease:

[plutonick]

How to run Blade Runner in windowed Mode.

Haven't seen this discussed here, so...

I love Blade Runner, but playing it full screen makes the resolution seem awful. Also, fullscreen messes up the aspect ration. What you need is to get dxwnd from https://sourceforge.net/projects/dxwnd/  (and perhaps read this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dxwnd/). Run it and direct it to blade runner's .exe (whichever you need). You also need to rename your ddraw.dll (or simply delete). Chose window mode and I think you are set. If not read the discussion I posted above.