Why do you like Civ Dos better than Win Civ? Or do you?

[void]

Clearly my memory is failing me... good to know I've been playing it at a speed slower than the programmers intended, all these years! I think though, that it did run a bit slower than the correct speed on the 386-16... it was a low-end computer even then. Darn gamers with their hot-shot hardware...

Yeah I had an Amiga 1000... you're right, the clock speeds aren't directly comparable - it was an amazing machine.

 

[stwils]

I had trouble playing Civ DOS on my Windows 98. I had to choose between no sound or very, very slow speed.

My question remains. Why do people prefer the DOS version to the Windows version?

Now that Civ Chronicles is out and has a Windows Civ 1, why don't more people play that? I know Chronicles is very expensive though.

It is too bad that Civ 1 for Windows is not a stand alone version now and available at a low price.

stwils

 

[void]

Don't you find using options 1-1-1 it takes forever when you have quite a few units on the board?

No... I'm totally used to it I guess. When I fire up Civ I sit back and expect a rather clumsy DOS experience I guess... heh. Plus, all this time I'd thought it was intentionally programmed that way!!

I do think it provides a nice sense of drama though, especially during battles. When I tried out FreeCiv, I hated the quick battles... it was like boomover. Your battleship's dead. But now I see they were just mimicking Civ...

One thing I don't like about the slowness is when discovering techs... When the game first came out I thought it was cool to see the picture slowly come into focus... but these days I just want to press Return as quickly as possible....

 

[Kernal]

I wonder why selecting "No Sounds" would be slower than one of the options with sound.

 

[octobertiger]

another interesting (and annoying) fact:

whenever I alt-tab out of Civ for a while and then come back... the game runs at increased speed for a while. The longer it stays minimized, the longer it takes to return to normal...

Aha!

On my 'old' computer from 7 years ago (with Windows 95), if you dropped an atomic bomb or attacked a unit with riflemen/battleship/cruiser, then the game speeded up amazingly. Thus indicating the sound files have some blame in this.

 

[Diviner]

my civ is actually the one that father acquired 16 years ago. so it is really one of the oldest, but i have always been able to run it on my windows. 1-2-1, and you get lot quicker

i've also realized that speedup. never figured out why.

oh and by the topic. i've seen winversion only some times, but the textures of the old one is good enough for me.

 

[Theov]

Anyone who is able to run CivDOS on XP but finds it painfully slow:

Select IBM sounds. It will now run at the correct speed. Annoying sounds, but easy gameplay.

that'd be great. I'm tired of watching horses move at half speed.

 

[GenMarshall]

It's compatible with DOSbox, both on my computer and PocketPC. Though due because of the processor on my PocketPC, it tends to run slow. Especially running on batteries.

 

[rysmiel]

I like CivDos better than WinCiv because WinCiv is hideous and CivDos is soothing, visually. [ I'm an ocular albino and have very low tolerance for bright clolours. ]

 

[honza.havlicek]

CivDOS is better than the CivWin, due to the following reasons:

• Graphics: tileset, mouse cursors, ... basically everything
• Reliability: CivWin has trouble with moving by arrows, sometimes you have to press an arrow multiple times to move a unit.
• CPU load: one of my cores is running at 100% when CivWin is running (does this happen to someone else? Win16 subsystem took some pretty bad damage during experimentation)
• Keyboard control: I don't have to switch hand from keyboard to mouse every moment I want to look at the city stats.

However there are good things about CivWin too:

• Bigger screen
• ... there has to be something...
• Included in Civ Chronicles?

I feel like spamming this forum, but I believe that the graphics won't be the reason to stick with CivDOS (coming soon? Font is different from the supplied one):

 

[Dack]

coming soon? Font is different from the supplied one):

Very very very impressive. How close are you to distributing your graphics for CIVWIN

 

[honza.havlicek]

Very very very impressive. How close are you to distributing your graphics for CIVWIN

Thank you.

I should be able to release this in a week... maybe less, maybe more. I have some real life issues to address.

My path was more or less like this:

• research of .rsc files + program routines to modify them
• Research .GIF files
• Make a encoder and decoder for .GIF
• Replace tile graphics with DOS version

Of course, after each step, problems occurred. Last one was ugly, but not difficult: heap corruption, it took a while to track down.

Now there is another hurdle: palette management. It is unrelated to red city screen and red cities in previous attachments, I have already solved that issue.

The problem is, that the palette is not stable and I have not yet figured out what colours can be changed, what is "base" palette...



Why is it a problem? Some colours are changed and are not set back (like when a new discovery is made or city screen is brought up, civwin runs in 256 colours mode, so if there is too little palette space, some currently used colours are replaces with the ones used in discovery image therefore rewriting some that are used by tileset), so you can end up with distorted screen. It is the most clearly seen in City screen:

Example (Status window, central part of city screen, fortified unit border):


As you can see, map is also weird, but colour of water is not set somewhere, it is found in "base" palette.

After I figure it out, I will write some documentation, clean up the code, make a nice RSC file and release it.

After the release, I will probably rest for a while and maybe try to get waves (and other animations) along the coast to work later.

 

[cthom]

However there are good things about CivWin too:
Bigger screen
... there has to be something...
Included in Civ Chronicles?

i have civwin only because i got chronicles. i mistakenly believed it would look pretty much the same as the amiga version. oddly, my biggest gripe is the copy protect quiz. having to switch between the pdf manual and the game screen has caused more than one crash or loss of graphics.

well, that's the quiz sorted. i actually found my old amiga manual, it seems to fit ok.

 

[GenMarshall]

I just ran across Civ1 for Mac (The version is a ported version from Windows). It only runs properly on a Macintosh Plus (Which Mini vMac can emulate) or any classic Mac OSes set to 4 Grey Colors. The only bug that it has is in the city view where I dont see the terrain tiles.

 

[Timothius]

I lost many hours to the DOS version of Civilization during my years of high school. I prefer that version more for nostalgia purposes.

 

[kaze88]

I didn't need any sort of Dos emulator to run DosCiv, it worked fine by itself. I play CivNet, DosCiv and WinCiv.

 

[Merkill]

i think the best version of civ 1 is

Civ 1 AGA for the amiga 1200
if you cant find that then civ1 normal amiga version
those are way better than win or dos civ i think.

 

[Kunelly83]

For me the first Civ game I played was on Dos, way before it became available for PC. Have I played the actually Windows version? Not really...I am more of a sucker for nostalgia!

 

[void]

Wow, a deluge of posts! Welcome to the forum Kunelly.

btw, I'm annoyed that with my new 64 bit laptop, I'm now required to use DosBox. :-/ I guess MS has finally broken backwards compatibility with DOS programs.

 

[lndm]

void, it seems some processors have broken 16bit. I can't get ntvdm to work on vista and found out it was due to the progress of AMD.