Thursday, July 02, 2009

The Inaugural Game

Today I bought a new MacBook Pro (13", the cheapest one). It was desperately needed. And for anyone who's followed my blog for a while, you'll know how badly the previous laptop sucked. Well, it didn't suck, it just was nearing the end of its time and I kept fixing it to keep it alive.

Anyway, as I do with all new computers I get, I always put on the "inaugural game" onto the computer to christen it, so to speak. The game is always Buried in Time, one of my favorite games. However, having an Intel Mac, running this game would not be an easy task. The Intel Macs don't support < Mac OS X anymore and it obviously doesn't support any Windows thing. Now, I could have gone about this in many ways (such as VirtualBox or WINE), but instead, I chose to use DOSBox + Windows 3.11.

Windows 3.11 installs easily under DOSBox. It was simple to put the CD in and then just install. However, I had to mess around a bit for graphics. I used Windows' SVGA driver (640x480x256 colors) and then for DOSBox set the machine type to "svga_et4000" and it worked like a charm. I installed the SB16 drivers for Windows and then sound worked too. Besides a crash that happens when watching the credits video (with the title and whatnot), the game runs but a with a slight lag. Especially with screen updates. You'll see what I mean with this video:



I'll also get to try Myst and dithering under this setup now too. That's the next step ;)

2 comments:

Jonatan said...

If it's an intel mac surely you can run windows through bootcamp on it?

clone2727 said...

Of course I can. More like I really would prefer not to dual-boot anything here. I'll also try it in Wine. This was really just an experiment.