Octopus Overlords

In my recent post about how much I love Warhammer: Chaos Gate, I posted a bunch of Win XP fixes to help dbt get the game running. Some are pretty time consuming (like editing out offending villains that crash the game, from each map 1 at a time!).

What have you done to play that great game?

That great game? Nothing. But back in the days my father would take away the power cord of the monitor away and me and my friend made a homemade power cable in order to be able to play Chaos Engine and whatever else we were playing at that time. That is after he (my father) decided that locking the keyboard (I was so good at unlocking the keyboard lock, that I could do it with a toothpick), and taking it away (I got another keyboard from a friend of a friend) didn't work.

O.DOGG wrote:That great game? Nothing. But back in the days my father would take away the power cord of the monitor away and me and my friend made a homemade power cable in order to be able to play Chaos Engine and whatever else we were playing at that time. That is after he (my father) decided that locking the keyboard (I was so good at unlocking the keyboard lock, that I could do it with a toothpick), and taking it away (I got another keyboard from a friend of a friend) didn't work.

hehe Sounds like my brother and I. We went so far as to steal the computer lock for a day and my brother fashioned a copy at shop class in school.

s

I did go through the 50+ page instructions for getting Silent Hunter to run in WIN XP (had to break it up into a 2 day task). When I finished it still didn't run.

Years ago i used to run out and purchase upgrade parts for the PC if something didn't run. These days I just say screw it, I'll play something else.

Yea I know, those aren't too crazy, I'm reaching here.

Lassr wrote:I did go through the 50+ page instructions for getting Silent Hunter to run in WIN XP (had to break it up into a 2 day task). When I finished it still didn't run.

Years ago i used to run out and purchase upgrade parts for the PC if something didn't run. These days I just say screw it, I'll play something else.

Yea I know, those aren't too crazy, I'm reaching here.

I'd say 2 days of research is pretty crazy. I only spent a few hours on Chaos Gate.

I had to go to hell and back to play the original Settlers. Multiple patches, special debug modes in WinXP, special emulations and all kinds of wierd shit.

I think all told, it took me 3 days of messing around to finally get it working.

Whats sad, after I got it working, and got in, I tried to move my guys around and stuff, and said "Huh?", the concept was so odd to me now compared to current games - I just didn't get it.

I used to get games as text printed on paper. I'd have to type the code in in BASIC. I was rewarded by getting to control an @ running from #'s and the like.

LawBeefaroni wrote:I used to get games as text printed on paper. I'd have to type the code in in BASIC. I was rewarded by getting to control an @ running from #'s and the like.

Yep, typed them out of Commodore magazine. Problem was with my early Vic-20, i had no storage device (not even the tape deck yet), so I had to type it all back in to play again. The cassette tape was a quantum leap forward in storage technology.

Jag wrote:

LawBeefaroni wrote:I used to get games as text printed on paper. I'd have to type the code in in BASIC. I was rewarded by getting to control an @ running from #'s and the like.

Yep, typed them out of Commodore magazine. Problem was with my early Vic-20, i had no storage device (not even the tape deck yet), so I had to type it all back in to play again. The cassette tape was a quantum leap forward in storage technology.

heheh Yeah I remember hours spent typing in programs from Compute Gazette. Some of the programs were even in machine language and you had to type in a special editor program from anther issue. I suppose that would probably be the farthest I went to play a few fairly crappy games... but then again I suppose that did start my love for programming.

s

I know there where games that I would reformat and rebuild my system from scratch to prove to myself that it wasn't a configuration issue that was causing a game to crash but I can't remember which one.

baron calamity wrote:I know there where games that I would reformat and rebuild my system from scratch to prove to myself that it wasn't a configuration issue that was causing a game to crash but I can't remember which one.

Probably an old Origin game.

I remember having a devil of a time getting the Mail Order Monsters disk to be read correctly in my good old 1541 floppy drive for my C64. It used to drive me nuts too, because I was absolutely obsessed with that game, and it would run intermittantly, just enough for me to keep up hope. Taking the game back was not an option because I had bought it from a computer store in Kitchener, about 4 hours away from where I lived (and too young to drive, heh).

So, I had desperate rituals I'd do to get the game to run. It seemed to me that I could get the game to run more often if I flipped the drive upside down and ran the disk, or on its side, or even on its end! Anyone who remember the dreaded 1541 will recall that it was roughly the size of a loaf of bread, and weighted in at a svelt 30 pounds or so. One day while trying to balance it, I dropped the damned thing right square on my big toe! So that was followed by me writhing on the ground in silent agony clutching my foot for like 10 minutes. Nail went as black as the ace of spades.

Anyway, after putting the drive through contortions started failing, I found that if I thumped the drive during a particularly tortuous reading sequence, the game would continue to load. So I'd bang away at it, until one day in a fit of anger I smashed the thing so hard it went out of alignment and stopped reading ANYTHING, it would only sit there emitting a loud raspy whine. Sent it back to Commodore and actually got it repaired, heh.

I'd like to say I miss those good old days... but I certainly don't!

In the days of DOS and 5.25" floppies, I learned about config.sys and autoexec.bat and loadhigh and all kinds of things I never wanted to know, just to get various games to load.

When the original Populous first came out on the Atari ST I played it to death. Naturally, Powermonger was an automatic first-day purchase. However, the only store in town that carried ST software got it in relatively late in the day, and would be closed when I got off work. I could go the next day, of course, but they may be sold out by the time I got there. What to do?

I called the store manager, who knew me as a regular customer, and persuaded him to hold a copy for me and paid by credit card over the phone. I then hired a taxi to drive across town to the store, pick up my copy, and deliver it to my office.

Cost of game: $49.95
Cost of cab: $35

I once called Creative tech support to try to get the movies in Wing Commander Prophecy to work without stuttering.

To this day, despite trying all the fixes from usenet (IIRC it was a fairly common issue) and other tricks I knew at the time short of reformatting, that is the only PC game I was never able to get to run properly. Once or twice it magically fixed itself when I tweaked a setting on my AWE64, but then would go back to stuttering even with that same setting. Therefore, it is the only game that I have ever returned (I think I bought it from Babbages).

Wait I remember something really crazy..... I was trying to get the original Wing Commander to run with speech. I did the following..

1. created a ram disk
2. Use a drive double on the ram disk
3. Loaded up Windows 3.1 and pointed the swap file to the drive doubled ram disk.

It ran, but fairly slow.

Ummagumma wrote:I remember having a devil of a time getting the Mail Order Monsters disk to be read correctly in my good old 1541 floppy drive for my C64. It used to drive me nuts too, because I was absolutely obsessed with that game, and it would run intermittantly, just enough for me to keep up hope.

Wow, I had similar problems with that same game! Sometimes the game would load and sometimes it wouldn't. But it was such a good game that my brothers and I would just stick in the disk, try to load it up, go do something else for 30 minutes and come back to see the results. Usually the game didn't load and we'd either give up or go through the whole process once again.

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:

Ummagumma wrote:I remember having a devil of a time getting the Mail Order Monsters disk to be read correctly in my good old 1541 floppy drive for my C64. It used to drive me nuts too, because I was absolutely obsessed with that game, and it would run intermittantly, just enough for me to keep up hope.

Wow, I had similar problems with that same game! Sometimes the game would load and sometimes it wouldn't. But it was such a good game that my brothers and I would just stick in the disk, try to load it up, go do something else for 30 minutes and come back to see the results. Usually the game didn't load and we'd either give up or go through the whole process once again.

It must have been something in the copy protection scheme then, that prevented it from loading occasionally. The funny thing is, that when I first loaded MoM up on the CCS64 emulator, during the loading process I got that exact same feeling of dread of it not working, it was so crystalized in my mind that it seemed I hadn't aged a day from 1984, heh.

I upgraded to my current computer back in 2002 solely to be able to play Morrowind as soon as it came out.

Gwar21 wrote:I upgraded to my current computer back in 2002 solely to be able to play Morrowind as soon as it came out.

Who hasn't done that?

Back when I was unemployed, I had all day to game, so I did.
Problem was, my PC was in the living room at the time, and it was very bright out there during the day.

I remember playing "Thief" with a heavy bedspread draped over my head and the monitor in the middle of summer to block out the light, since the window blinds didn't get it dark enough. My central air was blowing luke-warm air and I didn't have the money to fix it. The monitor threw off a lot of heat and I was sweating like a pig under the bedspread. Good times...

I ripped apart and decoded the map file schema for a game so that I could print myself a map of the world. I kept getting lost a lot.

Getting that mofo of a game Ultima 7 to run was a bitch and a half. Great game, though. Voodoo memory manager my ass.

Heh, 1541. Fastest drive in the universe!

killbot737 wrote:I ripped apart and decoded the map file schema for a game so that I could print myself a map of the world. I kept getting lost a lot.

Getting that mofo of a game Ultima 7 to run was a bitch and a half. Great game, though. Voodoo memory manager my ass.

Heh, 1541. Fastest drive in the universe!

hah I remember those days of having to battle with any game that needed expanded memory instead of just extended memory.

s

Y'know, whenever something goes wrong with an old game in my new rig, I STILL have the powerful urge to edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat files.

In fact, whenever that happens, I curse Microsoft for taking away my real-mode DOS and the drivers that went with it.

Back in middleschool, right when I first was addicted to gaming, I was quite creative finding ways to stay home from school. The game of choice at the time was starcraft. Unfortunatly it didnt run worth a sh!t on my parents computer (486, 32M Ram). But that didnt stop me.

After that they didnt believe the fake sick routine, I upped the antee. I found the ipecac(sp?) syrup in the counter. Nasty stuff, used to induce vomiting. So being the dedicated gamer that I was, I took a swig of that and ate a banana... 30 minutes later on the way to school, pureed bananas all over the cardoor. Needless to stay, I had to stay home that day. Ah the joys of starcraft. Wonderful game...

The keyboard setup for Apple-oids (an asteroids clone for my apple ][ ) sucked, but included with the game were plans for a controller. I spent more $$$ at radio shack buying a plastic box, switches and wires, etc than the game cost.

It took me the better part of the afternoon, drilling, soldering and testing to get the thing working.

And it took me about an hour after using the controller to find the spot on the screen where the Apple-oids never went so the game became pretty easy and I never played it again.