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promethean -> RE: "Portable" Campaign Series (1/12/2013 2:38:27 AM)
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My physical copies of the original talonsoft version arrived in the mail, so I thought I'd update this with the details of my efforts to get these running in a portable fashion: Unfortunately, the full versions do not work as well as the West Front demo did.
In short, it comes down the requirement for the CD to be present. This is difficult to emulate on a 7" android tablet running Windows 95 through Dosbox. An older version of a program called Daemon Tools will let you mount ISO images in Win 95 if you do a bit of updating and patching of Win 95. Problematically, it then causes Win95 to completely freeze when running on Dosbox Android.
After a bunch of work trying to fix or find a way around this, I found that there is a single "No CD" patch for West Front that allows you to run the game without a CD, but there is no such patch for Rising Sun or East Front II. This patch, however, still requires the presence of a CD drive. This means I still needed to install, but then fully disable, Daemon Tools.
This configuration does produce a workable & playable installation of West Front. However, for some reason if I run the game in 16k Color mode as intended a whole bunch of "could not create bitmap surface" errors occur. If I run the game in 256 color mode then everything loads fine, though there are some minor graphic artifacts, nothing too big or annoying though. Jason, I know you've worked on the updating of the series pretty extensively-- any insight on why the bitmap surfaces might have problems in 16k but not 256? I don't expect to solve the problem of a 15 year old game running on a even older OS in emulation, I'm just curious.
Anyway, it's really unfortunate that DRM prevents enjoying the other entries in this series on a tablet, although at least West Front is playable. Maybe when Bochs or Qemu on android comes further in development and the hardware gets faster I'll be able to run more of these in a stable fashion.
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