Getting it running

[DavidN]

#1632

Hi everyone – kicking things off by appealing to any sources for getting the game or how to run it on a modern system!

I’ve got my copy up and running, but it took a bit of doing – the game is no longer for sale anywhere, it seems, and I couldn’t get the “CD rip” copy on myabandonware to work (but I hadn’t tried extremely hard).

I eventually found success by using a copy that I happened to have on my hard drive, probably downloaded at some point in the mid-2000s, and by using DosBOX 0.74 to run it – not the SVM-Daum version, which crashed DOS4GW with an invalid opcode error when I tried to start it up.

It seems best to put cycles at a fixed count of about 20000 – at max setting, the screen pings all the way to the opposite end of the world map when you nudge your cursor against the edge.

[dr_st]

#1640

Yes, the fast scroll is a known bag on fast CPUs. It’s a good thing DOSBox lets us control it. 🙂

I’m quite happy that I managed to snatch a cheap copy of the Warcraft Battle Chess years ago. Can’t beat those big boxes with all the manuals for the original games included!

https://www.amazon.com/Warcraft-Battle-Chest-Darkness-PC-Mac/dp/B00002SUHI

[Tijn]

#1642

Wow, I guess I’m lucky, because I haven’t ran into a lot of issues getting this to run on my Mac. I’m using Boxer, which is just a nice GUI which wraps Dosbox.

I heard from Florian that it’s also not working that great for him in his Dosbox though. I think he resorted to playing it on his 486?

[rnlf]

#1648

Yeah, but the problems with DOSBox are probably related to my DOSBox installation.

It works pretty well on my 486@80MHz. It ran like shit on the same machine in non-turbo mode (40MHz), even though the box says it needs a 33MHz 486.

In DOSBox, my videos kept stuttering, same at 40Mhz. At 80Mhz it just works perfectly in every way.

[Jozxyqk]

#7236

A small update:

In the time since the Warcraft II episode aired, the battle.net edition has been released on gog.

For getting the game running on recent systems there is also the open source reimplementation Wargus, based on the Stratagus engine: https://stratagus.com/index.html

One still has to provide the data, which wargus can conveniently extract from a gog installer or original cd.

[dr_st]

#7635

That Stratagus engine looks super-neat. I would even say that War1gus is the bigger deal, since, beyond making Warcraft 1 more playable on modern systems, it also completely overhauls the clunky interface of the original game.