It shows Lands of Lore 1 near the end of the video. I only skipped through, can’t sit and watch/listen properly, what with being at work :)
Comment on The Lost Art of Fancy PC Game Installers
brsrklf@jlai.lu 1 week ago
Can’t watch now so not sure what’s in the video, but Lands of Lore 2 was quite fancy.
Had a parchment scroll-like UI with animated burning transitions, did creepy chants at you to test stereo sound.
Funny thing, it tested your CD-ROM drive speed too (it used to matter). Of course on a modern PC, you’d have the whole game on your (much faster) hard drive and simulate an optical drive with DOSBox or something. The installer runs its test and literally says : “Wow, your drive is fast!”
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 week ago
DdCno1@beehaw.org 1 week ago
That’s neat, quite different from old installers not recognizing newer hardware properly (who can blame the devs after several decades?) and instead stating that the game would not work. There was a German gaming magazine (Computer Bild Spiele) that always put a system check in front of game installers (even software installers) on their discs that would compare your system to the title’s minimum specs, using a simple stoplight (green=far exceeds requirements, yellow=just meets them, red=below minimum specs). It’s kind of similar to modern online services like “Can You Run It”.
I tried to install a very old game from one of these discs recently and it didn’t quite know what to make of the hardware. IIRC, my 32 GB of RAM was more than the developers of this check anticipated and it reported that I didn’t have enough RAM (the game needed 32 MB).
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
A 32 but integer can store a number up to four billion. If measuring RAM size in integer bytes, 32GB would be 0 bytes, because that integer would wrap around four times.
Assuming windows, if you right click on the executable, you may be able to choose to run it in a compatibility mode of some sort (like XP mode or something) in which case it should report smaller memory to the game, probably.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 1 week ago
Good analysis, but I checked again and must have either misremembered or different versions of the same test were different in this regard: Upon running one of these again (this one is from 2002), it reported 32 GB of RAM as 2 GB of RAM and gave the system the green light. Notice how it also reported a fabulously high speed for the (virtual) CD-ROM drive:
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You’re right though that running it in XP SP2 compatibility mode results in the check recognizing much less RAM:
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I never thought that this compatibility mode would limit the amount of memory that is available to an application. In fact, this is the case with all other working compatibility modes as well (Vista, 7, 8 - 95 and 98/ME don’t work with this application).