28th July 2004, 11:25 PM
If you want to get KQ5 working under XP, there's a bunch of hoops you gotta jump through. First, you MUST be running in 256 colors and 640x480 resolution. Sadly, XP's "automatic" switching via shortcut options won't work. You have to go into display properties, not that first one, since it doesn't go low enough, but deeper in "advanced", then go to the adapter tab of that level, and click the "all modes" button, THERE you'll finally be able to set things nice and low.
After THAT, ya gotta make sure the sound is working. That's VERY tricky in XP as you might imagine... There's a special program out there that does the trick from what I understand... Eh, anyway suffice it to say keeping 98 is a good move for retro gaming.
Oh and, yeah running in a window is a bit of an annoyance, but since the gameplay screens were never filling the moniter anyway, it's no big deal. Also, if you have the resolution set correctly, the gameplay area won't be a small box. It's a lot of work and all, but it can get to working. As far as DOS modes, well I never bothered with those, especially when I'd rather they use Windows sound instead of the SB16 DOS emulator sound for the midi's.
Anyway, fun games, but Win 3 was NOT a good system to design games for, and KQ7's 95 remake really didn't remake enough of the code... If MI3 came out then, then yes, Sierra was fine by then. Before then, Lucas was still doing DOS games, though honestly I've had a lot of trouble getting The Dig to work due to that. It's working now though, it's just sorta annoying that there's no way at all for me to change the save file directory (it'll ALWAYS be on drive C, when I want my DOS stuff on drive D). Oh well, it's fine.
Anyway, backwards compatibility for old win 3.x games as well as DOS games is a VERY tricky thing. Maybe it might be best to just build a "retro" computer system with the latest hardware that fully supported ye ol' DOS games, then an even slower machine for the REALLY old games that didn't have proper timing design, and thus blur by on today's machines.
After THAT, ya gotta make sure the sound is working. That's VERY tricky in XP as you might imagine... There's a special program out there that does the trick from what I understand... Eh, anyway suffice it to say keeping 98 is a good move for retro gaming.
Oh and, yeah running in a window is a bit of an annoyance, but since the gameplay screens were never filling the moniter anyway, it's no big deal. Also, if you have the resolution set correctly, the gameplay area won't be a small box. It's a lot of work and all, but it can get to working. As far as DOS modes, well I never bothered with those, especially when I'd rather they use Windows sound instead of the SB16 DOS emulator sound for the midi's.
Anyway, fun games, but Win 3 was NOT a good system to design games for, and KQ7's 95 remake really didn't remake enough of the code... If MI3 came out then, then yes, Sierra was fine by then. Before then, Lucas was still doing DOS games, though honestly I've had a lot of trouble getting The Dig to work due to that. It's working now though, it's just sorta annoying that there's no way at all for me to change the save file directory (it'll ALWAYS be on drive C, when I want my DOS stuff on drive D). Oh well, it's fine.
Anyway, backwards compatibility for old win 3.x games as well as DOS games is a VERY tricky thing. Maybe it might be best to just build a "retro" computer system with the latest hardware that fully supported ye ol' DOS games, then an even slower machine for the REALLY old games that didn't have proper timing design, and thus blur by on today's machines.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)