[ToT] Test of Time Extended Original not working properly after landing on Alpha Centauri

[ctrlshiftesc]

Hi y'all, first of all I want to say thank you for helping keep this game alive after over 25 years. Never though I'd still be playing into my 40s, but here we are!

I installed ToT yesterday on my Windows 10 Home computer and am happy to say it is working with the ToTPP...well...mostly...

I fired up a new Extended Original game and played all the way through to launching my ship. Except when the ship arrived at Alpha Centauri, the game ended. Power graph, final score, all that. Rather than retiring at that point, I clicked continue playing. Turns out I did have units land on Alpha Centauri, but it's not the behavior I remember/expect from playthroughs years ago.

• Instead of a Colonist unit, I have a unit with a Colonist sprite that behaves as a ship. Meaning, it stays in the ocean and cannot go on land. The unit type is "Extra Ship." It has the same amount of moves as a Transport, but with attack capabilities. Therefore I am unable to establish any cities on Alpha Centauri.
• The Alpha Centauri terrain looks like normal Alpha Centauri, but all the terrain names reflect their Earth counterparts instead of Alpha Centauri. Example, the forest with the lizard thing says Forest (Pheasant). The cloudy tiles say Hills. In fact, I just noticed the Civilopedia > Terrain Types does not have any entries for Alpha Centauri.

Here are my installation details.

OS: Windows 10 Home

Installation directory: C:\Program Files\Microprose\Test of Time

Installation steps:

1. Downloaded a disk image of the original game from a seemingly legit source and mounted it. (I do still have my original disk - but who has a CD-ROM drive anymore???)
2. Ran the original installer as administrator, the installation appeared to work fine.
3. Downloaded and installed the 1.1 patch, also went fine.
4. Installed the Microsoft C++ runtime libraries as specified in the ReadMe for the ToTPP. Rebooted computer.
5. Copied the latest version of the ToTPP files into my installation directory and ran TOTLauncher.exe
6. Applied the ToTPP patch and launched the game.

 

[ctrlshiftesc]

I started a new Extended Original game today to see how it behaves, and found some interesting behavior. When I first started the world I checked the Civilopedia and it had all the terrain types for Alpha Centauri (a good sign).

I saved the game in the first turn. Then toggled cheats, revealed entire map, and suddenly the Civilopedia terrain entries for Alpha Centauri were gone. I switched the map view to Alpha Centauri and the behavior is the same as my game from yesterday - all the terrain has the Earth names.

I reloaded my save from the first turn, from before toggling cheats. Lo and behold, the bug is still there. No more Alpha Centauri terrain in the Civilopedia

So it appears this behavior may be related to Toggle Cheats > Reveal Map. Yes, I admit I did do this in my game from yesterday

But I don't recall it ever causing these symptoms in past playthroughs.

 

[ctrlshiftesc]

Further details observed - this is happening any time I save and reload, regardless of whether I have toggled cheats. That was a red herring. Now the troubleshooting seems to be pointing in the direction of the game save features, which I understand were changed somewhat in the ToTPP.

I'll re-patch the game without the extended save features and see if the behavior goes back to normal.

 

[ctrlshiftesc]

Update: turning off "Save File Extensions" in ToTPP did NOT fix the issue. That is a bummer, as it is difficult to play through a good long game without saving and reloading at some point

Sorry if I am over-posting in this thread, please tell me if I should be using the edit feature instead.

 

[ctrlshiftesc]

I decided to back out the ToTPP patch by restoring the original .exe. Then I patched it with the 64-bit fix from FoxAhead here since that is the minimum requirement for running on Windows 10.

And...game saves are still broken

Same behavior, the Alpha Centauri entries disappear from the Civilopedia. (I'm using that as a proxy to detect the bug, since I don't want to play through the whole game every time I test!)

So now instead of a patch related bug, this is something about the original game and my system. Sigh...