Old School Gaming

So since I am home I decided to break out some of my old video games and see if I could get them running on a Linux machine. I used the laptop I inherited from my wife, an HP Pavilion zv6000.

The game I wanted to play the most was Syndicate Wars, I remembered playing it for hours! I have the original disc so after getting DOSBOX from the Ubuntu repositories (via Add/Remove under Applications), I popped in the disc and went to work. I followed the instructions at the Syndicate series unofficial fan site. I used the configuration file from there as well. Most of the commands translate fairly easily, one just has to remember that Linux uses "/" where DOSBOX emulating MS-DOS uses the "\".

Where I did run into problems was in mounting the CD-ROM that contained Syndicate Wars. The CD label is "SYN WARS QA 9.0", DOS was not a fan of spaces and long names, and DOSBOX follows it in this regard. So after hours of finagling and trying many different commands and options, like the -label, to no avail, I just copied the CD to my hard drive. I just right clicked on the mounted disc icon on my desktop, then clicked on copy disc, saved it as a file image. Then instead of "mount d /media/discname" I was able to use the imgmount command instead, "imgmount d /home/computername/dosprog/discname.iso -t iso" and BINGO! I was able to install and play a bit of Syndicate Wars. The only thing that doesn't work for me is Zooming in and out, and I don't know if that is because of the laptop's keyboard layout or something else. It is a bit of an annoyance, and I tried to change the keys for zooming, but that did not work either.

I have the Ultima games, Syndicate games, Theme Hospital, and X-COM UFO defense all loaded on and ready to play. They all seem to work splendidly in DOSBOX. Sometimes I have to adjust the speed by hitting CTRL + F11, and let the mouse get released by CTRL + F10, but other than that they run fine.