"Okay, I guess this is the only treasure I'm gonna get... Stupid cursed whispery parrot..."

[magratpudifoot]

Alright, my darlings, it's time for the results and prize selection for the Pirate contest thingummy!

Comments

[captainchaotica]

Oh man, I am ALL FOR the idea of computer backwards compatibility. I have _so_ many old DOS games that I really wish I could just, ya know, _start_, by double-clicking them...or that DOSBox at least worked like other emulators. Where you start it up, pick which game you want off a list and _it plays it_. None of this mounting imaginary Z drives and trying to remember syntax nonsense.

My Oregon Trail works! Of course, I am still using XP as I haven't gotten around to upgrading yet. I also have a copy of Oregon Trail II that _kinda_ works...in a janky way. I think I had to...hang on, lemme check.

Okay, what I did was I set the resolution to 640 X 480 in the Compatibility tab (under Properties, when you right-click) on the .exe file. Then, whenever I go to start it, at first the screen goes blank, as if it's frozen...but when I hit the Windows key, it shows up, in (maximized) windowed form, and plays fine. It seems it'll work, it just won't fullscreen.
Whether _any_ of this will help you in Vista or Seven, however, I have no idea.

Don't know if you've ever played Oregon Trail II but I do reccommend it. Way longer, harder trail, multiple routes, multiple places you can settle at, different game-difficulty levels, huge amount of things that can happen along the way and lots of different starting years. And I like all the stuff they sell at the general store. Most of it you don't need, but it is authentically the kind of stuff people used back then and does help set the atmosphere.

It's funny you guys mentioned this 'cos a bit ago, I played a game of Oregon Trail II with...all of YOU as the wagon members! Ya know, for SCIENCE! I went and changed our names to the "nearest" old-timey-ish equivalents. I was "Caroline Caplan", the wagon-captain (I played on the medium diffculty setting, and the other pioneers vote you as captain of the wagon-train after a bit, if you're doing well--and kick you back _out_ of "office" if you screw up!), magpieinthesky was "Maggie", librarianbyday was "Libby", bizarreoptimism's name got the biggest change--the closest I could think of was "Bessie", and magrat herself was of course, just her real name, "Robin". (If I pioneerified "magrat", we'd get another Maggie.)

Unfortunately, as it turned out SHE was the only one to bite it along the way, and early on! Yes. The host of this journal, was the one to die. Of frostbite, even though I actually did the right thing, when the game gave me a choice. I tend to start early in the year--it's cold, but in this game frozen rivers are _always_ safe. If you've played Oregon Trail, you KNOW how dangerous rivers are...so to get a few guaranteed crossings at the beginning is worth a little frostbite. Heh.

Oh, and ScummVM does work fine with both Monkey Islands 1 and 2, in case anybody is curious and wants to go oldschool. Works for other old LucasArts games, too, 'cos that's what it's made for. :)

...Notorious