I’ve got some old games that I’d like to play under Wine. I used to be able to play them, but they don’t work now. The games are so old that they use 256 colours.
I’ve tried the Wine instructions (http://wiki.winehq.org/256ColorMode) but TightVNC has dropped pseudocolor support. Reverting back to 1.3.x to get pseudocolour lets me create the session, but the colours are never right (blue “Mindscape” logos become red, brown and orange bands).
I’ve tried “-depth 8” with “-cc 3” and various combinations of “-pixelformat” but that just gives me different variations of colour.
Is there any way to get a classic 8-bit pseudocolor display on an nVidia 620 graphics card under openSUSE 13.2 using the proprietary drivers?
Such old games are usually - or have a version - for DOS. Did you try dosbox? It worked for me, IINM. Depending on the game, you could also try scummvm, I’ve been having fun with deep throttle on it.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll give it another go, but I’m 99% certain that I’ve already tried it and it is a game from that intermediate period when it isn’t a proper DOS game (so it won’t work on DOSbox) but it isn’t a modern enough Windows game to work well with Wine/modern Xorg either. Moby Games actually say it is Windows 3.x compatible.
ScummVM definitely isn’t an option, though, because that only works with old point-and-click games that use the Lucas Arts game engine (like Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Kings Quest, etc).
It might be iffy in terms of drivers. I’d try winXP in a vmplayer or virtualbox VM first. XP because guest additions don’t support win9x/ME, although in your case it might not make a difference.
I’ve already got a WinXP VM in VirtualBox, but it is a bit heavy-weight for running a 20 year old game! (Also, the game seems broken at the moment and won’t start, but that’s a different matter - it was working!)
Nope, Win 3.11 doesn’t work - the installer specifically errors out at the start saying that I must have Win95. Worth a shot, though, and interesting to know that DOSbox supports Windows 3.11!
Edit is only available for ten minutes after posting.
Then the web side of the forum is synchronized with the NNTP side, later edits would only lead to confusion as NNTP users wouldn’t see them.
Nope, Win 3.11 doesn’t work - the installer specifically errors out at the start saying that I must have Win95.
Of course. I was referring to the applications, that had to include their own drivers for various hardware configurations (VGA, Hercules adaptors, soundblasters, etc.) which might not be supported in dosbox - although I suppose at least the most popular (at the time) are.
But even back then, Windows applications had to use Windows functions to display their graphics and not need a specific graphics driver themselves I think. How should it work otherwise in a multitasking environment? (yeah, I know, Win3.x didn’t have “real” i.e. pre-emptive multitasking, but still…)
That was a travel down memory lane. Good times indeed - just like now, actually, there’s always something new to try, even if it’s only to run old games.
