On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Jim Leonard wrote:
[snip]
> > Secret of Monkey Island II behaves this way on my modern computer, as do a
> > couple other that I have written down that I can't recall.
>
> You can force SoMI II's sound usage; supply a command-line option and
> it won't use it's detection routines and should start fine every time.
> I wrote about that in the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer for the "Best
> Games of All Time" CDROM.
This happens on my machine even if I do use the command-line option. (If
I do a hardware slowdown, this problem disappears.)
> > I once decided to sit down and try to get every single game in my
> > collection to work on my modern computer. Well, it isn't so modern any
> > more, but ah well, it should still be good enough to play Civ III, Heroes
> > IV, MOO III, Warcraft III, and Wizardry VIII. Anyway, I managed to get
> > nearly everything to play properly with appropriate tweaking. One game
> > that notably refused to behave was The Two Towers, which was glitchy in
> > VGA mode though okay in EGA mode. I even e-mailed its designer asking for
> > help, to no avail. I still keep and maintain the list.
>
> The Two Towers? I haven't run that one, but if it was programmed
> after 1990, there's a good chance it uses a tweaked video mode that
> isn't set up properly. Either that, or timing issues rear their ugly
> head and the program writes to the ports faster than the card can
> process them. Or your VGA card isn't 100% compatible with what the
> developer had in his machine. :-) Let me take a wild guess here:
> In VGA, the program doesn't scroll smoothly? Screen panning is all
> jerky, right? Or is it that the colors are all wrong? (another common
> problem)
The problem with The Two Towers and Future Wars (both Interplay games, I
don't think that's a coincidence) isn't any of these; the graphics get
screwed up (stripes running across pictures, blocks of random junk in
place of "sprites", etc.). I hadn't heard of this sort of problem with
VGA compatibility before (though I have heard that you could get the
symptoms you list, or a few others like the screen going black
completely).
> > I plan on acquiring an XT eventually (640K, 80MB hard drive, DOS 3.3, the
> > works :) but thought that an EGA card would work fine; I thought EGA and
> > the original VGA cards were fully backward-compatible WRT CGA (most modern
> > cards aren't). Is this not true?
>
> Some CGA control ports are re-used *for different purposes* on EGA and
> VGA. Ever play Leisure Suit Larry 2 on a true CGA card? It (and a
> handful of other programs) tweaks a neat "third" CGA palette: White,
> Red, Cyan, and the background color. The register used to do this is
> used for something else on a VGA, so it doesn't do the same thing;
> running Leisure Suit Larry 2 in CGA on a VGA card results in the
> standard White, Magenta, Cyan, and background color palette. (LSL2 is
> a bad example because it also supports EGA and this situation would
> never come up in practice, but you get the idea.)
Wow ... hmm. Do you know of other games are like this? I thought that
EGA would be the best way to go (then again, most games that use EGA
should work on a 486).
I'm also surprised that more than a handful of people would even bother
trying to run a later game like LSL2 on an original PC with a CGA card.
(When I tried Ultima VI on my original PC, I wondered how many people
could put up with it. Apparently not many, as Origin did not catch the
bug which made the game unplayable on a floppy-drive-only system until
later.)
> > Also, where can I find one of these suckers? They seem to be starting to
> > get to be hard to find. 386's still seem to be readily available for $30
> > or so, but every time I've tried (admittedly not too hard) to locate an XT
> > (preferably already equipped with 640K and a hard drive, since I'm not too
> > keen on learning *that* much about its weird hardware) I couldn't.
>
> ebay is my suggestion, but the shipping costs will kill you ($50 usually).
> I've done this successfully for one of my 5160s. However, be absolutely sure
> that you work out a couple of things:
I'm prepared to deal with the shipping costs, though I'm still hoping for
a way to get one locally. I have no idea where to look, though; thrift
stores generally won't even accept anything below a Pentium these days.
> - Any listing that refers to the model number (5150 for PC, 5160
> through 5163 for XT) is probably from a seller with a head on his
> shoulders. Prefer those guys over people who list "IBMPC RARE
> ORIGINAL L@@K!!!" as those people probably don't have kloo.
For the purposes of playing old games, is there any difference between a
PC and an XT (other than that the latter is more likely to come armed with
640K and a hard drive)? I vaguely remember that there are a few, but my
memory is really rusty on this one.
Anyway, thanks for the advice!
-- Stephen
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