microsoft's one real saving grace is that they've always tried to keep things somewhat backward compatible with older o/s'es and software. this has kept their customer base somewhat happy, at least in that regard. thus, you've got certain aspects of the various o/s'es that run older software on newer machines and operating systems. in windows 98 you've got the dos prompt, icon propertie editing and even the older dos mode system.
well, the 'top 10 of games' thread got me thinking about the old game of Empire. i played that game forever, but when i went to win98 and later, i had pretty much quit playing it. i still have it, but just never even thought it would work in win98 or got busy with other, better games. obviously, it's a dos game.
so, tonight, i decided on a lark, to see if it would even install on my win98 machine. i have the original box, the manual, and even the promo that came in the box, plus (now this will tell you the age of this game) two 3 1/2 floppy disks that are the install disks.
so, ok, i put the disk 1 in the 3 1/2 and open windows explore and click on drive A:. i was almost even surprised that the disk could be read. it's a bit old. but, lo and behold, there was the install.exe. i double clicked on it, the screen went black and up comes an old 640 x 480 svga type screen with an install screen on it. ok, this is getting interesting. so, i go ahead and click on the install box in this screen and, amazingly, it starts to install! ok, i'm a bit impressed at this point, but still almost certain something is going to go bad.
sure enough, after disk 1 it asks for disk 2. so, i put in disk 2 and hit ok and it asks for disk 2 again. aha. i was right. this isnt going to work. prolly disk 2 is too old or something, or some piece of hardware on the machine isnt going to read or configure right....or something. so, i pull disk 2 out and put it back in again and hit ok again and it still fails. hmmm.... now, i'm pretty sure this isnt going to work, but, i liked this game and i want it to work. so, i pull disk 2 again and put in disk 1 and hit ok. it still asks for disk 2, so i pull disk 1 and put disk 2 in and this time it continues to load!
ok, now i'm getting kind of tickled. this thing might actually work....maybe. so, it gets to the end of the installing itself and wants to run a config file to 'detect my hardware and set my settings'. now, i figure again, ok, this is where it will hang up. so, the config screen comes up and my options are things like ega, vga and svga, along with 640 x 480 16 color or 640 x 480 256 color. naturally i pick 256 color, having this super machine :)
i run through a bit more of the config options and boy, was this thing dated. it even offered to let me pick which vid card i was running. lol. i didnt even recognize any of them.
so, i finally get done with the config and am now ready to try it and watch it fail. surely, at this point, it's just not going to run and going to crash my machine badly. but, it actually loaded the game! oh my lord, those graphics! and, i actually got to play a move or two before it finally did crash, but it only crashed the game and not windows. so, i killed the dos window it had been running in and tried it again, thinking maybe i'll just configure it a bit differenly and see if that will help.
when i clicked on the .exe again (no entry in the 'start' menu, thank you very much :) i got a windows message telling me that this program may not work correctly in the current mode and that it might work better in dos mode and would i like to switch it to dos mode and try again? hmm, ok. so i clicked on ok and tried the .exe again.
well, windows promptly shut down and sent my machine to rebooting. as it did so, i was again somewhat surprised to see the main menu for the game come up....in true dos mode! ok, that's pretty slick, i'm thinking, but i'm still being a bit sceptical and waiting for bill gates to have a laugh at me while this thing fails again. but, it didnt! wow!
so, i went ahead and played a game of Empire (actually, it's Empire Deluxe, the sequel to Empire, but includes the original classic version). and, i played the entire game through, no crashes, no burps or hiccups, in 640 x 480 svga, and it played quite smoothly. that was pretty slick... and it's still a fun game!
so, if you've got the inclination and an old dos game or two laying around, you know, on floppies, where you had to always rewrite your autoexec.bat or config.sys files and set himem and all that other stuff, and you've got a win98 machine, you might wish to try this out :) and quite frankly, i'm going to leave it on my machine, cause i'll be playing it again :)
K.
