Hi All,
Just installed Planetary Pack on my Win7-64 system. It's been a long while since I played, though I still had it laying around on my old WinXP system.
I followed all the patch advice I could find, applied the XP/2000 patch and the Unofficial patch from scient and I can now start either SMAC or SMAX and start a game. However, on my WinXP system I had in the Alpha Centauri.ini file this line:
WindowsFileBox=1
And I copied it to my new ini file before I first started up, which caused me no end of grief, as it seems that both SMAC and SMAX insist on staying "on top", hiding the Windows "Open FIle" box when you want to load a game or a scenario or anything else (also for Save Game, obviously). So now I am back to WindowsFileBox=0 and I get the in-game file dialogs, so that works OK. I don't like it, but it works.
BUT -- I still cannot Alt-Tab away from SMAC or SMAX to another application. Even Task Manager "Switch To" (at least Task Manager comes up on top of SMAC/X to start with) will not actually go to the other application.
Is this because we have to use DirectDraw=0 to get desktop screen resolution on modern systems? IMHO the inability to Alt-Tab away from SMAC/X would seem to be related to not being able to use the Windows file dialogs.
It's possible that Alt-Tab away from SMAC/X was never something that could be done (I honestly don't remember if I ever could), but at least with WindowsFileBox=1 the Windows file dialogs could be used.
Any thoughts or advice you may have would be greatly appreciated.
[Edit] I tried setting my graphics resolution down to 1024x768, and in that mode you can Alt-Tab away from SMAC/X and I suspect (but didn't test) that WindowsFileBox=1 would work as well. I begin to suspect that with DirectDraw=0 the Alt-Tab switch away can't change the resolution and just goes back to the game that set the "current" resolution. Just a SWAG though.
Unfortunately, staying at 1024x768 just is not an alternative on my system, the screen is just too coarse and grainy to be at all useable. I guess I'll just have to play when I don't need to switch away to some other task and live with the in-game file dialogs. My beef against the in-game file dialogs is that you can't rename or otherwise manipulate files from them as you can with regular Windows file dialogs.
I really hope scient or his team can implement a windowed version if they ever get back to it.
Just installed Planetary Pack on my Win7-64 system. It's been a long while since I played, though I still had it laying around on my old WinXP system.
I followed all the patch advice I could find, applied the XP/2000 patch and the Unofficial patch from scient and I can now start either SMAC or SMAX and start a game. However, on my WinXP system I had in the Alpha Centauri.ini file this line:
WindowsFileBox=1
And I copied it to my new ini file before I first started up, which caused me no end of grief, as it seems that both SMAC and SMAX insist on staying "on top", hiding the Windows "Open FIle" box when you want to load a game or a scenario or anything else (also for Save Game, obviously). So now I am back to WindowsFileBox=0 and I get the in-game file dialogs, so that works OK. I don't like it, but it works.
BUT -- I still cannot Alt-Tab away from SMAC or SMAX to another application. Even Task Manager "Switch To" (at least Task Manager comes up on top of SMAC/X to start with) will not actually go to the other application.
Is this because we have to use DirectDraw=0 to get desktop screen resolution on modern systems? IMHO the inability to Alt-Tab away from SMAC/X would seem to be related to not being able to use the Windows file dialogs.
It's possible that Alt-Tab away from SMAC/X was never something that could be done (I honestly don't remember if I ever could), but at least with WindowsFileBox=1 the Windows file dialogs could be used.
Any thoughts or advice you may have would be greatly appreciated.
[Edit] I tried setting my graphics resolution down to 1024x768, and in that mode you can Alt-Tab away from SMAC/X and I suspect (but didn't test) that WindowsFileBox=1 would work as well. I begin to suspect that with DirectDraw=0 the Alt-Tab switch away can't change the resolution and just goes back to the game that set the "current" resolution. Just a SWAG though.
Unfortunately, staying at 1024x768 just is not an alternative on my system, the screen is just too coarse and grainy to be at all useable. I guess I'll just have to play when I don't need to switch away to some other task and live with the in-game file dialogs. My beef against the in-game file dialogs is that you can't rename or otherwise manipulate files from them as you can with regular Windows file dialogs.
I really hope scient or his team can implement a windowed version if they ever get back to it.