A Blast from the Past

[lathany]

Apparently, Master of Magic can now be downloaded for free off the internet (from Underdogs, I've been told). I suspect that the real problem would be putting together a computer set-up to run it (I think it's a DOS game).

I'm vaguely tempted (having lost my copy with the last computer) but having beaten the game on the hardest level, I feel less incentive than I once did.

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net

I'm getting the intro "movie" with speech and music. It's clunky but it's working. Haven't got to the game itself yet.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I'm still thinking about whether I should be feeding this particular addiction!

[zandev.livejournal.com]

I was about to suggest exactly the same thing as wimble. The emulation of dosbox is a little slow, but probably about right for MoM, as a modern PC can just about emulate a low end 486.

Hmm, perhaps I should try this out.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

If you're running it in a window, you'll see that the window title is

DOSBox 0.63, Cpu Cycles: 12000, Frameskip 0, Program: DOSBOX

Or something like that.

Bring up the Task manager, and keep an eye on the CPU usage. Then, in DosBox, hit Ctrl-F12 and watch both the CPU Cycles in the title, and the CPU usage in Task manager increase. When you're just shy of 100% cpu usage, take the resulting value and put it into the dosbox.conf file.

(By default the figure is 3000, and on my laptop, the target is the 12000 I quoted above).

[wimble.livejournal.com]

D'you think I ought to read the manual yet?

[zandev.livejournal.com]

Hehe. I've now got MoM running on my Mac laptop. :)

[zandev.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't really be needed. One of the great things about MoM was the in-game help is actually helpful. Right-click on almost anything and it will explain what it is (and for numbers, how they are calculated).

[ao-lai.livejournal.com]

I've got Dosbox to run MoM in the past - 386-ish sort of speed on my current machine, but everything worked, much better than Abandon Loader or anything else I tried. I can't remember what frameskip setting I used, it's been a little while.

One of those games did go a *bit* funny - Ordinary looking lairs starting to spawn entire stacks of behemoths as rampaging monsters, and then it crashed whenever I killed a particularly annoying enemy wizard - But I put all that down to ordinary MoM bugginess...