It's the year 1993. I'm at a the check-out at a video-game store,
paying for my purchases, when I see - besides the register - a game in
a cardboard sleeve going for some ridiculously low sum. That's usually
a sign of a not-so-good game, but it's sci-fi, the screenshots don't
look too bad, and - like I said - it's really cheap.

(Yes, even back then I was a sucker for any old game so long as it was
selling for only a few quid).

I take my new purchase home, install it to my PC, decide I don't like
it, and shelve the CD after only a few hours of play. The game is
called "C.H.A.O.S. Continuum" and it's every bit as underwhelming as
can be expected. It's a Myst-like adventure game for Windows 3.1 and
it's the sort of game I'd have long forgotten about, except for one
thing:

I never manage to get that game to install and play correctly after
that first time.

"C.H.A.O.S. Continuum" used an early version of Quicktime and
Macromedia Director, and this - built atop the already fragile
platform of MS DOS and Windows 3.1 - meant it was extremely vulnerable
to compatibility issues. If I got it to install, it sometimes ran...
but then crashed. Or if it didn't run, the full-motion video wouldn't
play. Or maybe the sound would be disabled. Or the FMV played but the
still images were invisible. It was always something with that game,
and no matter what configuration changes I made, nothing seemed to
make the game work properly (and often those changes were so drastic
that I'd sacrifice compatibility with all my other software; hardly
worth it for a game I didn't even like!). Whatever magic combination
of hardware and software that allowed the game to run that first time,
I couldn't recreate it.

Not that I didn't keep trying. I think that, with every OS revision up
to Windows7, I popped in the disk and hopefully tried again. It never
worked (and, honestly, I never really expected it to) but I had to
try. I'd paid good money for the game; I'd be damned if I didn't get
value for my buck!

Emulation initially seemed the solution. I could more easily 'swap'
between older hardware and software combinations without cluttering up
the room with dozens of ancient machines. But whether on VMWare and
VirtualBox or DOSBox, still the game refused to run. Even Archive.org
hasn't managed it, and they've got pretty much every old DOS/Win3 game
available to stream at a moment's notice.

x86Box - which I discovered only last year - was where I found my
first success. After much tinkering (a virtualized 486 CPU, 8MB RAM,
an SB Pro v1.0, running on DOS 5.0, Windows 3.1.103, and Quicktime
2.12 seemed to do the trick) I finally got "C.H.A.O.S. Continuum" both
installed and running past the intro sequence and the first few rooms.
Still, I wasn't completely satisfied. I wanted a turn-key solution
that used DOSBox that I could launch with a single-click from Playnite
with the rest of my DOS games collection. That took longer, and
ultimately required me to switch to DOSBox-X and boot from a specially
prepared hard-disk image made solely to run the stupid game. But I
persevered.

But finally - FINALLY - after nearly 30 years, I can click on an icon,
the game will start up, and I can play it as the developers originally
intended. FMV video. Sound. No crashes. Hurrah.

And now I can play the game. So I did. For a few hours. And then I
quit and shelved the title. Because, even after all this time, it is
still a terrible game. But the journey to rediscovering this fact made
it all worth it.

Ha, you must be very bored. :)

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

> It's the year 1993. I'm at a the check-out at a video-game store,
> paying for my purchases, when I see - besides the register - a game in
> a cardboard sleeve going for some ridiculously low sum. That's usually
> a sign of a not-so-good game, but it's sci-fi, the screenshots don't
> look too bad, and - like I said - it's really cheap.

> (Yes, even back then I was a sucker for any old game so long as it was
> selling for only a few quid).

> I take my new purchase home, install it to my PC, decide I don't like
> it, and shelve the CD after only a few hours of play. The game is
> called "C.H.A.O.S. Continuum" and it's every bit as underwhelming as
> can be expected. It's a Myst-like adventure game for Windows 3.1 and
> it's the sort of game I'd have long forgotten about, except for one
> thing:

> I never manage to get that game to install and play correctly after
> that first time.

> "C.H.A.O.S. Continuum" used an early version of Quicktime and
> Macromedia Director, and this - built atop the already fragile
> platform of MS DOS and Windows 3.1 - meant it was extremely vulnerable
> to compatibility issues. If I got it to install, it sometimes ran...
> but then crashed. Or if it didn't run, the full-motion video wouldn't
> play. Or maybe the sound would be disabled. Or the FMV played but the
> still images were invisible. It was always something with that game,
> and no matter what configuration changes I made, nothing seemed to
> make the game work properly (and often those changes were so drastic
> that I'd sacrifice compatibility with all my other software; hardly
> worth it for a game I didn't even like!). Whatever magic combination
> of hardware and software that allowed the game to run that first time,
> I couldn't recreate it.

> Not that I didn't keep trying. I think that, with every OS revision up
> to Windows7, I popped in the disk and hopefully tried again. It never
> worked (and, honestly, I never really expected it to) but I had to
> try. I'd paid good money for the game; I'd be damned if I didn't get
> value for my buck!

> Emulation initially seemed the solution. I could more easily 'swap'
> between older hardware and software combinations without cluttering up
> the room with dozens of ancient machines. But whether on VMWare and
> VirtualBox or DOSBox, still the game refused to run. Even Archive.org
> hasn't managed it, and they've got pretty much every old DOS/Win3 game
> available to stream at a moment's notice.

> x86Box - which I discovered only last year - was where I found my
> first success. After much tinkering (a virtualized 486 CPU, 8MB RAM,
> an SB Pro v1.0, running on DOS 5.0, Windows 3.1.103, and Quicktime
> 2.12 seemed to do the trick) I finally got "C.H.A.O.S. Continuum" both
> installed and running past the intro sequence and the first few rooms.
> Still, I wasn't completely satisfied. I wanted a turn-key solution
> that used DOSBox that I could launch with a single-click from Playnite
> with the rest of my DOS games collection. That took longer, and
> ultimately required me to switch to DOSBox-X and boot from a specially
> prepared hard-disk image made solely to run the stupid game. But I
> persevered.

> But finally - FINALLY - after nearly 30 years, I can click on an icon,
> the game will start up, and I can play it as the developers originally
> intended. FMV video. Sound. No crashes. Hurrah.

> And now I can play the game. So I did. For a few hours. And then I
> quit and shelved the title. Because, even after all this time, it is
> still a terrible game. But the journey to rediscovering this fact made
> it all worth it.
--
"All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever." --1 Peter 1:24-25
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On Fri, 28 Oct 2022 18:25:34 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>Ha, you must be very bored. :)

No, I can't say I ever am. ;-)