Hi, everyone. I need help getting a 16 bit game to work on Win7 64 bit.

It's called Stars!.
It's an awesome little turn based space game.

Secondly, sorry for being dead to this forum for so long. Real life is a funny thing.
My experiences with getting 16 bit games to work now is 100% fail.
So, any advice?
I know it will work in Windows 3.1, because it is that old. But Windows 3.1 doesn't come naturally with DosBox.

I tried to use a VirtualBox system from the Sun ORacle people, but there was no indication that I needed to go and buy/own the operating system it supports, in this case, Windows XP, and well, do I really need to install a copy of Windows XP just to play one game? That would be silly. Would it be the most illegal thing ever to have it emulate the capabilties of XP? Seems even more silly if that would be bad.

So, if anyone can help me figure a way to play this game on Win 7 64 bit without dual booting with Linux and working it under Wine, which I think works, I will be eternally grateful.
Because I'll be honest, me and Linux will end with an accidental deletion of the hard drive.
I just find it annoying that to play this game I have to install XP on a Virtual thingy, when it makes no sense to do so.

 

I played Stars! years ago -- it's a fun but flawed game. I can't give you specific tips since I haven't tried to get it to work myself. If you haven' tried DosBox, you may want to give it a go (can't guarantee that it will work though).

 

I just found this: http://wiki.starsautohost.org/wiki/Stars_vs_OS

 

Well, I'll try figuring out DosBox to run it. Since it works with 3.11 apparently.
Okay, that was eerily easy.
Now I have to figure out where my serial number for it is.
That shouldn't be too hard.
I feel a bit awkward now, but hey, at least it works.

 

Welcome back DavidB1111.

The Portable Virtualbox seems the easiest way to go. It is a 282 MB download and contains everything you need for it to run.

It does require you to have a spare USB flash drive to use and it must be bootable. Furthermore it has the legal requirement that you own a copy of Windows 98 and the game. (But no way to check that anyway, and if you like so many others ever had a copy and discarded it, then you still legally have an owned copy of it.)

As for the serial number there is likely more than one option. I have lost CD-Keys for games I owned in the past but discarded. It is *NOT* theft to use another key or a crack to get around such an issue. (I had some sort of beetle the size of a half-grain of rice burrow through a bunch of my media including the discs to some games I own. I feel no guilt for downloading/cracking said games to use them.)

In an unrelated story, I once purchased Legerdemain and when the disc arrived it was broke in half. I asked the author if I could send the disc back with some money to cover his expenses in making and sending another and he just e-mailed me a copy of the full version. (The point is that authors often do not care when honest people use cracks or download their software. They want you to have what you deserve. Also, Legerdemain is freeware now.)

 

Good points. And it works for me using Windows 3.11 in DosBox.
I'm very happy that it works. Plus end turn calculations don't go by in the blink of an eye.
As for the serial, I found that.

In other news, real life has bothered me a bunch, so that's why I didn't post too much lately.
Now, if someone could help me figure out how to change Incursion: the Roguelike's font so I can get it to play correctly, I'd be happy. Apparently, you have to hit Alt-Space in the game, but it doesn't work, and there's no way to resize the window, and you're supposed to be able to resize the window.
Wat.

I don't know, I just want to play that again without running it through Virtual Box.
Don't know why Win 7 64 bit prevents you from changing the size of a window... but something is preventing me from fixing it, and fullscreen makes it look like brown and orange fun times.

Also, I should change the title of this thread to let's get old games to work again.
Hey, if anyone heard of a game called Hero by Brad Miller, let me know if you still got a copy of the 1.1 version.
The wayback machine archive only has a working 1.0 link, actually, every link is to 1.0 that I can find on the Internet, and it's a bit like playing Doom Alpha compared to Doom v1.9.
So, if anyone has heard of this obscure game, and knows how to get a copy of 1.1, let me know, and I will give you money.
No, not really, but you will earn my undying thanks.
The name for the file for 1.1 is Hdemo I believe. Despite it not being a demo.

 

http://www.incursion-roguelike.org/man/Interface.html
This sounds like no help. But there is supposed to be an option to change the font size. It may still be too small.

Still no luck on Hero. I am still searching.

 

Sadly it seems Hero 1.1 does not exist in any form I have access to. I tried a number of search engines including a few that support AND/OR/NOT to be used to help ensure it only shows the relevant information. Sadly it looks like a doomed search since there is a Basketball player by the same name and 99% of the search results were about that. (It may be the same person. I have no idea.)

I must have missed something, since I never even found a working link to the 1.0 version. (I found more than one version 1.0, but they were dead links.)

 

That option to change the font size doesn't even work for me. It's like the goggles, they do nothing.

Sad to hear about Hero. I guess I'll have to find the creator himself and see if he might still have a copy lying around. Of course to find him, I might need to hire a detective.

 

I just posted a request to "alt.binaries.old.games" on Usenet. It is the last true home of all the ancient games we know and love. If anyone has a copy, then you can be certain they do. But it will likely be a day or longer before they reply. Do not despair yet. (They actually have a greater chance of retaining a copy than the author himself. )

 

Wow. Thank you, Omni. I hope for the best.
It may be really unlikely, but I have faith that if anyone has it, it will be the people on Usenet.
Or some Ninjas.

 

I am very pleased that I was able to help. BTW, when I was searching for that info, I also found a lot of different projects trying to clone Stars!. Oddly all of them that I looked at also seem to have been abandoned (a couple did have betas). I know that Stars! had a real cult following, so I'm a bit surprised. They'd probably have had more success if they simply pooled their efforts instead of creating a dozen different projects with identical or near-identical goals.

/edit In retrospect, it's possible that the original developers or owners of the game brought those projects to a close -- it seems like too much of a coincidence that they'd all be abandoned.

 

I don't know. The Dev of Stars! was a nice guy, so I think what happened is all the projects did get abandoned.
Supernova Genesis was the big sequel ,but even that died out. Sadly.

 

The game was kind of an odd fish even in its day, in how detailed and mathematically complex it was. In many games, people complain nowadays if it's easy to create non-viable builds, and it was probably easier to do that in Stars! than in virtually any other game I've ever played, because there was just so much you could fiddle with and so many ways to screw up. Granted, I'm saying this all from my dim memory of the game. On the other hand, all those things you could play with also gave it incredible replayability.

I remember reading some strategy guides and being completely put off by the whole min-max philosophy. What I learned was that in spite of it all, I wanted a game with a lot fewer options, that would do the math for me, that wouldn't have such a granular control.

 

Fair enough. I remember enjoying it a lot though. Glad to know I have a way to run it now.

 

Being a nice guy has nothing to do with needing to protect ones intellectual property. Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, another company, Zoo Digital Group, bought them out. They may no longer own the rights to the game.
There have been some interesting stories regarding 'nice' individuals who've lost the rights to their own intellectual property due to failures to protect their copyright. At least one of those stories turned out to be a popular (but untrue) legend. Another was definitely true, at least in part, for a Hugo-award winning artist (can't recall off the top of my head his name -- could have been Michael Whelan, but I think it was actually someone else), but I don't know that the guy actually lost the rights, but the fact that the art was posted everywhere damaged his ability to make a living by actually selling it).

 

Oh, okay good points. I happen to not be that well versed on how intellectual property laws work.
I've also been trying to play Dungeons of Dredmor again, and weirdly enough, I can't click on items in my inventory, they immediately drop on the ground.
On the ground, they can be moved into my inventory by being picked up, but it's annoying trying to move things around, and they all fall on the floor.

 

BTW, after some research, I still am not sure who the artist was who I mentioned above. He was a guest at a worldcon I attended and the incident was referred to by others, and by him in a talk he gave.

Michael Whelan was a victim of plagiarism, a very special case of intellectual theft, where the persons actually took credit for his work. That said, he's been, probably, one of the most successful artists in the science fiction and fantasy world in the past century -- he won so many Hugos that they eventually just gave him a 'Superhugo'. He also was regularly pulling his own name out of the competition to "give others a chance". I don't think that he was the person who was finding it difficult to make a living due to intellectual theft, it was definitely a younger, newer artist. I tried looking up a bunch of them on wikipedia and the only reference I could find to such an incident was with regards to Whelan's plagiarism case. I don't like when stories I tell don't turn out to be true (I'd rather be right) which is why I gave the disclaimer about the artist (I also had been repeating that story myself for ages until it was finally debunked).

But people should not interfere with others' rights to make a living off of their own work. That's basically my point. You can ignore everything else I said.

I click and drag -- you may just be clicking without dragging. If that's the case, that's the explanation.

 

FYI, it's one thing to mention an artists name, but it was a crime to not give you an idea of who he is and why he's considered to be so great:
https://www.google.com/search?q=mic...HAsbB4AO-iIHADw&ved=0CFIQsAQ&biw=1920&bih=910

 

Thank you for the artist information. The pictures of his art are really great.

I fixed my issue in Dungeons of Dredmor.
Don't know how, but I did.
Starting a new game worked, and now I can click on things without them immediately dropping to the floor.