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RPGs you always wanted to play, but couldn't get them to run (Instructions welcome)

felipepepe

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1. Llygamyn Saga PC version

Great Wiz 1 remaster from japan 1995. Pc version has the cool segmented UI and I like how abstracted it is
Runs perfectly on VMPlayer with a Windows XP installation, and there's an English translation patch as well: https://www.romhacking.net/translations/2312/

Y6deqLz.png


For Amiga games like Perihelion, Rincewind's pack is nice but you can also have a much easier time using FS-UAE (much more friendly than Winuae) and googling for WHDLoad packs.

With emulators, this virtual machine and tools like DXWnd I never found a game I was unable to run. My biggest issue are games I'm unable to find, like Land of Legends, an indie tactical RPG from 2005 that simply vanished from the internet.
 

dacencora

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I could never get M&M 4-5 (World of Xeen) to run satisfactorily under DOSBox (annoying micro-freezes, laggy mouse, etc) until ScummVM came along and saved the day. Now it runs perfectly.

Yeah the DOS version is quite broken, it's impossible to get the MT-32 sound working, it always causes random crashes after a few minutes. Another prestigious way is to use the Mac version (e.g. check this LP out).
Try the eXoDOS version. It has working MT-32. The Mac version of Isles of Terra is superior, so probably the Mac version of WoX is superior too. So that’s probably a better bet than the DOS version altogether.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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You can play that game with much the same steps I described on the first page (in the post on Pathways into Darkness) for the Macintosh version. It should work in the same setting I described. If Windows is absolutely necessary I don't think there's a way to play it without using a Windows emulator of some kind, judging by the GOG page. VMWare should work fine in that case.
 

Sharpedge

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You can find a full explanation of everything you need to get it to run here. You will need to read the entire first post, since there are instructions littered throughout the entire thing. With that being said however, once you actually can play it, you probably won't want to play it.
 

dacencora

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FS-UAE (much more friendly than Winuae) and googling for WHDLoad packs.
+1 to FS-UAE and WHDLoad. WinUAE is way more complicated than it needs to be and is much more prone to breakage/acting strange. I’ve used a lot of emulators in my day, and WinUAE is by far the most cumbersome.
 

Rincewind

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Try the eXoDOS version. It has working MT-32. The Mac version of Isles of Terra is superior, so probably the Mac version of WoX is superior too. So that’s probably a better bet than the DOS version altogether.

Have you played through the whole game with the eXoDOS version successfully? It works for a while with MT-32 sound, sure, but for me at least it crashes in less than 30 minutes. People at the Vogons forum reported the exact same issue using real hardware -- the MT-32 support is just an unfinished buggy mess.

Like you said, the Mac version is superior for many reasons, e.g. NPCs are fully voiced, and often it's quite hilarious, whereas in the DOS port only the quest dialogs have voiceovers. I've read that's because in the DOS version they couldn't use audio compression for some reason, but they could in the Mac port (so that's the reason it's still just a single CD on the Mac but with *far* more audio content). Then you have to use the correct CPU cycles setting in the DOS version, otherwise you can't use the mouse the pointer in the upper half of the screen in the menus sometimes, no matter what you do the intro animations always plays at the wrong speed, etc. It's a mess. The Mac version JustWorks(TM). Although as far as I know they were not an Apple/Mac-first company, I find the Mac versions of their earlier games superior in every respect.
 

Rincewind

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For Amiga games like Perihelion, Rincewind's pack is nice but you can also have a much easier time using FS-UAE (much more friendly than Winuae) and googling for WHDLoad packs.

Good advice for newcomers, but I'm an Amiga veteran; it's WinUAE or go home for me :)
 

dacencora

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Have you played through the whole game with the eXoDOS version successfully? It works for a while with MT-32 sound, sure, but for me at least it crashes in less than 30 minutes. People at the Vogons forum reported the exact same issue using real hardware -- the MT-32 support is just an unfinished buggy mess.

Oh if people with real hardware are having issues, it may not work. Still might be worth a try, perhaps, but probably not super optimistic if real hardware has issues too. For the record, I haven’t played through the whole game, just booted it up and went through a few buildings and stuff.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
for my non-IBM PC RPG thread I tried quite a few of the games and the hardest platform for me to get games running on was Macintosh+Apple II.
A lot of the games seemed to only work on very specific versions of Mac/Apple II and I don't really know much of anything about it so I had to spend a lot of time fiddling and downloading various install images to get a single game to work.

OTOH, FS-UAE made Amiga just work out of the box.
 

AdolfSatan

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Well, I got Blind Justice to run properly.

It's janky as fuck, the pathfinding can't deal with anything more complex than an unimpeded straight line.
UI is awful. Like really, really bad.
Combat consists in smashing RMB as fast as you can.
There's a yuge amount of idling NPCs, most of whom you can't interact with (other than to kill them).

At one point at the bar, a bouncer got the jump on me because I stepped somewhere I shouldn't have. Unable to switch to the fight mode in time (you circle modes with LMB) and seeing he had twice as much HP as I did, I began to run. Blind with rage, he ran behind me until he came across another patron whom he mauled to death. That seemed to appease him, because he didn't give me shit afterwards.

Cool detail: If you die, the game quits and takes you back to DOS. Git gud, scrub!

But the real problem, is that some files are simply missing or broken. At some points when transitioning to other maps, DOSBox will show a couple of illegal recall lines to some hex codes and the game will shut down.
In the folders there are some MAP00* files, and some numbers are missing. I wonder if it'll have anything to do.
I checked the two different versions online (one is the entire game, the other needs to load 6 different floppies), but both have the same files.

I guess I could examine the files with a hex editor and see if there's a simple fix, but none of what the game has shown implies that the effort would be worth the hassle.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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I guess I could examine the files with a hex editor and see if there's a simple fix, but none of what the game has shown implies that the effort would be worth the hassle.
My apologizes if you tried this already, but the final download link on this site I already mentioned to you modifies the EXE, so maybe that fixes it? It seems funny to me that someone would go to the trouble of making the game playable but not checking to see if it was winnable. Though it is always a huge problem on abandonware websites that people check to make sure its playable, but not that its beatable.
EDIT: Hell, piracy too, The third Spyro game's DRM was specifically based around this whole phenomena.
 
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Rincewind

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It seems funny to me that someone would go to the trouble of making the game playable but not checking to see if it was winnable. Though it is always a huge problem on abandonware websites that people check to make sure its playable, but not that its beatable.

One of the big reasons why I try to play uncracked originals of old games these days. I don't really trust WHDLoad anymore; they need to remove all sorts of disk-based copy protection during the HDD conversion (with varying results); if you check out the changelogs of some WHDLoad games, often you can see late-game crash fixes released 5-10 years later after the initial WHDLoad release... That's the last thing you want to encounter when playing a 30+ hour RPG. Not saying all WHDLoad conversions are shit, but it's a roll of the dice. You can bet on it that very few crackers completed those games they cracked.

This problem is very real; I remember this was an issue in the 80s/90s in Hungary as you couldn't buy games legally in the country. Therefore all computer magazines had to resort to using cracked copies as well. It was not uncommon that they couldn't publish a complete walkthrough because they had a faulty crack that just stopped working halfway through the game... Sometimes they could continue a few months later when they found a working crack, sometimes not.

eXoDOS is good because they strive to use originals, or minimally cracked ones with just the copy protection removed. For Amiga the SPS archive is your best bet that has original exact replicas of the disks with the copy-protection intact. For some reason, C64 cracks are generally of higher quality.
 
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Viata

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That sucks. Never had an Amiga and was planning to play some of those games this year, but reading this makes me not want to try any of them any time soon.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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That sucks. Never had an Amiga and was planning to play some of those games this year, but reading this makes me not want to try any of them any time soon.
Honestly, the problem is only going to happen if you're going to play an obscure title and even then that's not a guaranteed issue. Like, you're not about to have this problem with Dungeon Master or the Gold Box games. I've played about 20 games on the Amiga (and more that were on it, but not that version) over the past 2 years and the only 3 ever failed me. Two of them, The Kristal and The Hunt for Red October (1987) were shit, so who cares? The other, Galactic Empire (1990) is a cross between adventure and FPS so nobody ever possessed the skills to actually win the game. And some of these games I played were pretty obscure, so I think your chances of not getting a screwed game are pretty good. Its just something people like me and Rincewind notice because we play quite a few titles on the system.
 

Rincewind

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That sucks. Never had an Amiga and was planning to play some of those games this year, but reading this makes me not want to try any of them any time soon.
Honestly, the problem is only going to happen if you're going to play an obscure title and even then that's not a guaranteed issue. Like, you're not about to have this problem with Dungeon Master or the Gold Box games. I've played about 20 games on the Amiga (and more that were on it, but not that version) over the past 2 years and the only 3 ever failed me. Two of them, The Kristal and The Hunt for Red October (1987) were shit, so who cares? The other, Galactic Empire (1990) is a cross between adventure and FPS so nobody ever possessed the skills to actually win the game. And some of these games I played were pretty obscure, so I think your chances of not getting a screwed game are pretty good. Its just something people like me and Rincewind notice because we play quite a few titles on the system.

Well, me complaining a bit shouldn't stop you from playing some good old Amiga games. You have a few options:
  • Just buy Amiga Forever which is probably the most user-friendly way to just play some Amiga games — this is what the CRPGAddict has been doing with good results, btw.
  • Like rusty_shackleford said, you can use FS-UAE (a user-friendlier offshoot of WinUAE) with WHDLoad packs that just work with minimal hassle. As Morpheus Kitami mentioned, you won't know what you're missing (if anything) and you won't notice the glitches if you never played the originals on A500, and probably most well-known games are completable.
  • Get the Amiga Dungeoneering Collection I posted previously, which is preconfigured WinUAE with WHDLoad games, basically. Might be a good idea to update the bundled WinUAE to the latest version, though (although that might break the configs...)
  • Ask me nicely to upload a ZIP of a portable WinUAE installation somewhere configured for classic Amiga 500 floppy gaming, and download Software Preservation Society's uncracked disk images from the CAPSDI website (magnet link on the left... it's not really supposed to be publicly distributed, but well, as you can see it is). They're in IPF format which are bit-exact replicas of the original disks (ADF images don't contain that kind of low-level information), and WinUAE needs to be extended with a special plugin so it can read IPF images. That would give you practically 100% compatibility and you'd experience everything as people did back in the day — including disk swapping and the exact same loading times (which you can speed up by toggling WinUAE's "turbo mode" manually, but it will still be a slower than the WHDLoad conversions). However, this is what I do and recommend.
Having said that, I played the Eye of the Beholder AGA conversion that uses WHDLoad and had zero issues (that's not even a crack; it's a fan-made version that has the 256-colours graphics transplanted into the Amiga version from the PC original). But Lemmings randomly freezes after 10-20 minutes (you'd think one of the most iconic Amiga titles would work flawlessly, but no), and while Pool of Radiance works, saving for the first time after loading the game can take up to a minute (it's faster afterwards). There are similar slowdowns in Ishar 1 and King's Bounty, for example; opening the map is super slow in Ishar 1 (*much* slower than in the HD installed A500 version, makes me want to never look at the map...), in King's Bounty opening certain menu screens takes *ages*... and so on.

If you ask me, emulating a classic Amiga 500 with the extra 512 Mb trapdoor expansion is all you need. 99% of all Amiga games will run on this setup flawlessly. Pop in some disks and play the games, that's it. With hard-drive systems you'll eventually need to learn about the Workbench (the OS), AmigaDOS, and so forth, because inevitably you'll get yourself into trouble that you won't be able to resolve on your own without learning about the Amiga first (it's really similar to MS-DOS; you just *have* learn about the hardware a bit, about CONFIG.SYS, configuring Sound Blaster, etc. — it's a computer, not a console that you just turn on).
 

Nifft Batuff

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Morpheus Kitami

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Thank you, really really want to try this
I'm curious, did the instructions for installing a Macintosh emulator not work for you? Or did you find the control scheme unbearable? I can help you if there's anything wrong going on with the former, unfortunately I can't with the latter.
 
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Macintosh emulators are, despite how relatively popular the platform was, notoriously shitty. I had a lot of trouble getting them to work correctly when compiling the non-PC games list thread. After some tard wrangling I managed to get them to work to some degree, but definitely one of the more difficult platforms to emulate that actually has games.

wait, I already posted in this thread. Yeah, younger Rusty was right.
for my non-IBM PC RPG thread I tried quite a few of the games and the hardest platform for me to get games running on was Macintosh+Apple II.
A lot of the games seemed to only work on very specific versions of Mac/Apple II and I don't really know much of anything about it so I had to spend a lot of time fiddling and downloading various install images to get a single game to work.
Which is a shame because it seems the Macintosh actually had the superior version of many games from what I've looked at.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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Macintosh emulators are, despite how relatively popular the platform was, notoriously shitty. I had a lot of trouble getting them to work correctly when compiling the non-PC games list thread. After some tard wrangling I managed to get them to work to some degree, but definitely one of the more difficult platforms to emulate that actually has games.
That reminds me that the last two times I played Mac games they both had this issue with the disk/disc drive, one kept ejecting its media while the other kept saying it couldn't load. No, that wasn't me being an idiot, that's was a known issue with both. At least they worked, I guess. At least in some cases there are things like SCUMMVM but even then its taking forever for Director support.
 

Rincewind

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Macintosh emulators are, despite how relatively popular the platform was, notoriously shitty. I had a lot of trouble getting them to work correctly when compiling the non-PC games list thread. After some tard wrangling I managed to get them to work to some degree, but definitely one of the more difficult platforms to emulate that actually has games.
Hmm, care to share some specifics? vMac Mini seems to be very good and stable for those early B/W games, at least I haven't encountered any weird issues or instabilities.

For later games, I've only played around a little bit with Basilisk II, but haven't encountered any problems.

But then I haven't completed any Mac games yet, just messed around with a bunch of games for 10-20 minutes. I'm even considering adding shader support to vMac Mini, seems easily hackable.
 

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