Gettysburg

[Verrucosus]

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought in these days 150 years ago, so I decided to dust off Firaxis's very first game again. It's been years since my last game and it feels both fresh and familiar at the same time. A minor nuisance is the scroll speed that can be a problem with running older games on faster computers (Railroad Tycoon II is another example). Does anyone know how to slow down the scrolling? There's an in-game option to turn it off altogether, but, as far as I can see, no scroll speed setting.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Not that I can tell. I've been playing SMG this week in memory -- just skirmishes. What system are you running yours on? It's stable on my Vista, UNLESS I try to save. Then it dies. That's fine for a skirmish, not so much if I want to fight the entire battle out.

 

[Maniacal]

I haven't been able to get it working on Windows XP or Windows 7

 

[Verrucosus]

It's a Windows 7 64 bit system. The game runs fine (including saving) except for the scrolling issue. If the saving problem is limited to manual saves, you might rely on the automatic saves.

I do recall having an installation problem and ending up just copying the entire folder from the old XP machine. Even on the XP system, it needed two patches to run properly. One was the third official patch, one a Windows XP compatibility update. Firaxis seems to have removed all their pre-Civ4 game support from their site, but these patches are bound to be around somewhere. There was also a video problem (mentioned in the documentation's "Classical Addendum") related to one of the MSVCRT.dll files that needed to be copied manually from the CD.

For now, I've disabled scrolling and move about the map by right-clicking to recenter. Very Civ2-like and better than accidentally moving the view across half the map at a critical moment, but not perfect for a real-time game.

I hope you get it to work. It's good to see I'm not the only one interested in maintaining the good old games.

 

[sherbz]

Cant you use a dos emulator like dosbox? Admittedly though, some games are beyond saving on newer computers. Even if you turn it down to minimum, theme park (the original) is unplayable.

 

[Verrucosus]

I didn't try using dosbox. I doubt it will work since the box says Gettysburg requires Windows 95. I got Win 3.1 running under dosbox just to be able Civ2 on this machine, but I'd be surprised if I could install Windows 95 under Dosbox. Also, I only got Windows 95 preinstalled on a laptop. I still have the recovery CD, but that's only meant for that specific laptop.

Anyway, the scrolling issue is minor compared to that of not being able to save or (like Maniacal)get it to run at all.

 

[sherbz]

Oh my bad, i thought Gettysburg was older than it actually is. I guess your main hope is that someone will release a mod or something for it, although i think your chances are slim. Anyway, as you say, its a minor gripe as the game still works.