[Col] Fan patches or mods for Colonization for Windows?

Hi guys,

I've recently been playing Colonization for Windows again and enjoying the fact that through a XP VM I'm able to play this old game at 1080P HD across my big 46" screen. I've attached a picture and will probably do a video soon too.

However I'm wondering if any of the experts here know if there was any good fan patches, mods or graphic overhauls out there for ColWin. I have the win95 update patch for it (which according to the main menu puts my version at 3.1415926 24-May-95) but in the readme it talks about how the game currently doesn't have the dos versions animating rivers and ocean waves but that it may be included in a future patch which I'm guessing never happened? A pity since I've also been experimenting with the similar (& older right?) Civilization 1 for Windows game which DOES have the animations when set to 256 colour mode. So did any fans ever do anything cool with ColWin? eg fix any more bugs or add anymore features?

I'm guessing the answer may be no as ColWin was never as popular was the original dos Col. I noticed CivFanatics doesn't have a file repository for classic Col so if there's nothing good for the windows version I'm wondering if anyone knows of any really cool patches/mods/popular maps for dos Col then? Any surviving website repositorys of col mods and maps etc?

 

I doubt there are any fan-made patches for the Windows-version, but DOSBox will run the original DOS-version. It's available at gog.com if you don't have that version.

 

Yeah I've got both thanks. Any good fan mods/patches for the Dos one then?

 

Never seen any.

 

Well sure enough I still never found any interesting mods or fan patches but I did find some custom maps and save editors in a WebArchive copy of the old Apolyton Col downloads section at least:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140905053349/http://apolyton.net/local_links.php?catid=337

 

I was able to get my hands on a copy of "Colonization for Windows" that ran in a DOSBox setup which was running Windows 3.1. ...And it worked!

I did have a bug where I could not set up trade routes (clicking to add cities or resources would just click-and-drag the Route window), but was able to fix it by switching the resolution to 800x600 which made the full trade-route window fit onto the screen and thus respond properly to mouse-clicks. After that, everything ran fine*, and I was able to enjoy the superior graphics and text resolution of this version of Colonization. (*There is a sound glitch at track changes where it plays a few seconds of a piece before switching to another track to play to completion)

Now, when I say that I "switched to 800x600" what I did is I modified the DOSBox launch parameters to not close immediately upon game exit, and instead would exit to Windows. Windows 3.1, which I haven't seen or used since I was a young child (complete with a solitaire game and customizable tiling background textures). I was able to change the Graphics Settings for this emulated Win3.1 to 800x600, and that fixed the bug with the trade-route screen.

I did not however see these "Animation" you mentioned, unless you are referring to the animated intro for the game? I did get to see a brave little caravel dodged an angry sea monster, but nothing in the game itself.

 

@Hans Lemurson the missing animations in Colonization for Windows I was referring to are the animating rivers and sea shoreline waves that are in the Dos version. If you open the readme file that comes with ColWin (or maybe it comes with the official ColWin patch, can't remember) you're see it mentions that they 'may' include map animations in a future patch but sadly that never happened.

But yeah another than the missing map animations the Windows version is superior to the Dos version in every way. It looks awesome at 1080P on a big screen however you won't be able to do that in the custom built ColWin in Win 3.1 in dosbox install unless there's some way to get Win 3.1 to modern resolutions haha. I ended up making my own virtual machine with Windows XP and then mounted my old Colonization for Windows CD to the virtual machine and installed it on to there. Windows XP supports HD resolutions so I was able to resize Col up to that resolution too. Looks great!

Will probably do a tour video at some point so others can see how good it looks.