Has anyone here purchased Interstate'76? Does it work on Win7 x64 with a modern video card? I'm seeing a lot of conflicting reports. I've wanted to try it ever since it was on the cover of Next Generation.
Interstate `76 is something of a mess on modern operating systems, and the GOG version isn't really going to give you much beyond the actual retail release. There really was no updating applied to the game when GOG re-released it. You can get it to work alright, but it takes some effort and results are varied.
If you want to play in software rendering mode, you'll need to do at least two things: 1 - Manually kill explorer.exe (for some reason this solves some huge graphical bugs), and 2 - Use a program to eat up the extra CPU cycles of your processor to slow the game down to a playable level. The game will run at an acceptable speed even without a CPU-throttling program, but the problem is that the physics and AI are both somehow tied to the framerate of the game. If that framerate is ~40-60 FPS, the game runs great. If it's closer to +200 FPS (most likely it will be), the AI cars will wobble around and/or drive so slowly that the game won't progress.
If you want to run the game with the improved hardware acceleration, I believe you'll need to look into a Glide wrapper. The nice thing there is that you can use VSync to set the framerate limit specifically, instead of using a program to strain your CPU to 100% constantly. GOG included a glide wrapper with the game on installation, but apparently the version they packed in isn't the best one, and so you'll need to scour the net for a more acceptable one. I'd check the forums, as was mentioned by August above, to see what people are using now.
Be aware that a few of the 'launcher' packages being distributed on the forums are being detected as malware by various AV vendors. I haven't put in any time into research them, so I can't personally say if they are false positives or not. Most likely they are, but still, fair warning.
I'd guess that all the Infinity games were tied up by the same legal hurdles, and now that those 2 are free, all of them are. That's a guess, though.
I'd be really interested to hear the story behind those legal hurdles. It took them, what, two years to make this happen?
I don't know any details, but those games were all lost in a limbo... TSR got bought by WotC, that got bought by hasbro, and then there was the whole Interplay/Bioware/Black Isle side.
Has anyone here purchased Interstate'76? Does it work on Win7 x64 with a modern video card? I'm seeing a lot of conflicting reports. I've wanted to try it ever since it was on the cover of Next Generation.
I haven't been able to get it to work, on an ATI card. Software looks like an acid trip and hardware crashes on startup.
I'll let everyone know if I find a fix for I '76. It wont be done downloading for an hour and a half. I think Planescape plus this sale has put some extra strain on their servers.
The system requirements for Myst are funny.
Windows 3.1/95
386 33MHz Processor (486 recommended)
4MB RAM (8MB for Windows 95)
4MB Hard Disk Space
2X CD-ROM Drive
SVGA 256 color 640x480 Video Card
Windows compatible Sound Card
Mouse
On the Planescape: Torment GoG page there is that little facebook icon with "1848 people like this" by it. And on the second bestselling game on GoG right now, Arcanum, it says "Be the first of your friends to like this."
It seems like Planescape: Torment is sucking the oxygen out of the room over at GoG.
How do you know it's the second best selling game on GoG?
Welp, it turns out I don't have to do anything to make Interstate '76 run. I just launch it and it works like the day it came out. Everything works 100% so I guess I got lucky.
People are right, it is like MechWarrior with cars. And awesome music.
Am I supposed to install som patches for arcanum? It seems to be running okay vanilla. Albeit a little difficult.
There's a few I'd recommend. There's an unofficial patch, a widescreen mod, a high res towns mod, and a high quality music mod. You can get them from terra-arcanum.com.
Okay, Arcanum. After a few hours of playing I can only conclude the developers didn't want you to actually play the game. Horrible UI, brutal early difficulty, complex rule system. If there wasn't clearly something good underneath all that I would have stopped playing awhile ago. Lucky for them they have good writers.
Also suggest playing without the HiRes mod or at least keeping it in the native 800x600. On higher resolutions you lose way to much detail and navigating can be pain sometimes (Which is strange since I didn't mind playing FO1 and 2 at a higher res).
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
Okay, Arcanum. After a few hours of playing I can only conclude the developers didn't want you to actually play the game. Horrible UI, brutal early difficulty, complex rule system. If there wasn't clearly something good underneath all that I would have stopped playing awhile ago. Lucky for them they have good writers.
All this is true.
Wait until you get a party of any size and the insane shuffling you have to do to get everyone's fucking goddamn equipment repaired.
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DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
edited October 2010
I've always wanted to love Arcanum. I've had it since release. But things like that stuff you guys are talking about always puts me in the mood to play something else. (Usually Fallout.)
Is anyone trying to solve the screenshot contest currently running? I glanced through all 10 and was humbled at how few of them I recognize. The only ones I know are 1 (Fallout, I think), 3 (Outcast), and 6 (Earthworm Jim 1 + 2).
Is anyone trying to solve the screenshot contest currently running? I glanced through all 10 and was humbled at how few of them I recognize. The only ones I know are 1 (Fallout, I think), 3 (Outcast), and 6 (Earthworm Jim 1 + 2).
Is anyone trying to solve the screenshot contest currently running? I glanced through all 10 and was humbled at how few of them I recognize. The only ones I know are 1 (Fallout, I think), 3 (Outcast), and 6 (Earthworm Jim 1 + 2).
You guys are crazy. There's nothing wrong with the Arcanum UI. It's not any worse than BG.
I thought BGs was, while clunky, relatively clean and straight forward.
They tried to get a little to "arty" with the Arcanum UI with the whole steampunk theme. It ends up making things needlessly confusing. I find myself constantly looking in the manual as I play because it's not always clear what things mean or where they are located. For the most part it does it's job, but it is really not easy figuring it all out.
You guys are crazy. There's nothing wrong with the Arcanum UI. It's not any worse than BG.
You're nuts, man, it's not only worse but ugly as chupacabras too.
BG UI FTW MF
Sir Carcass, thanks for the help dude, but seriously, this game is balls. The writing is fantastic but for someone who struggles with these isometric games in general, I can't like it. And yet I loved the fallout series. I am weird.
I got killed by rats in a cave right at the beginning. I mean I killed a few wolves and that dude down to the south (i think?), some elf city guy. But still. Rats.
My experience with GOG is not going well. First Myst turns out to be balls (I'm sure it was great back in the day but it's soooo tedious now) and now Arcanum is hella confusing. And I refuse to read the manual...... Its a gazillion pages long and goes on about friction between planes and electric circuitry.
Its a gazillion pages long and goes on about friction between planes and electric circuitry.
Oh my God. I need this. I want this.
Just a couple more weeks, and I should be able to use GoG.
Someone tell me that the Planescape manual is equally bulky. Bulked up with blathering about dimensions and morality.
Still kinda pissed that my Icewind Dale Ultimate Collection, Baldur's Gate 4 in 1 and Fallout Trilogy sets all came with PDFs instead of physical manuals. Woulda been so great.
I got killed by rats in a cave right at the beginning. I mean I killed a few wolves and that dude down to the south (i think?), some elf city guy. But still. Rats.
My experience with GOG is not going well. First Myst turns out to be balls (I'm sure it was great back in the day but it's soooo tedious now) and now Arcanum is hella confusing. And I refuse to read the manual...... Its a gazillion pages long and goes on about friction between planes and electric circuitry.
Go Necro. The spell Hurt is a godsend early in the game.
If I remember correctly the Planescape manual is a pretty short, no frills affair. Unlike the BG and IWD tomes.
The Arcanum manual, however isn't that long at all. Granted it's more there for flavor then to actually help you. I thought maybe I was remembering wrong so I fished it out of ye old game manual box to check. Now I'm reading it. It was a clever trap.
I got killed by rats in a cave right at the beginning. I mean I killed a few wolves and that dude down to the south (i think?), some elf city guy. But still. Rats.
My experience with GOG is not going well. First Myst turns out to be balls (I'm sure it was great back in the day but it's soooo tedious now) and now Arcanum is hella confusing. And I refuse to read the manual...... Its a gazillion pages long and goes on about friction between planes and electric circuitry.
Myst isn't tedious. Most of the puzzles just have a trick to them and go pretty quickly when you know what it is. Well, aside from the
cable car maze
And maybe the
major mechanical age puzzle?
Oh, and the
sound source puzzle.
Perhaps parts of
stoneship.
And all the reading?
Meh. But it's so enjoyable. That first spoiler was the only part that really frustrated me. You want to see tedious, go play Riven.
Windows 3.1/95
386 33MHz Processor (486 recommended)
4MB RAM (8MB for Windows 95)
4MB Hard Disk Space
2X CD-ROM Drive
SVGA 256 color 640x480 Video Card
Windows compatible Sound Card
Mouse
Man, those were the days.
I never had a 33MHz proc, my dad jumped us from a 25MHz 386SX to a 66MHz 486DX2 with 16 meg of RAM and a 250MB hard drive. Twas big pimpin' circa 1993.
Of course 3D cards started to hit near then so we upgraded less than a year later to a 100MHz Pentium, cause the 486's cache was too damn slow.
BlackDragon480 on
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Its a gazillion pages long and goes on about friction between planes and electric circuitry.
Oh my God. I need this. I want this.
Just a couple more weeks, and I should be able to use GoG.
Someone tell me that the Planescape manual is equally bulky. Bulked up with blathering about dimensions and morality.
Still kinda pissed that my Icewind Dale Ultimate Collection, Baldur's Gate 4 in 1 and Fallout Trilogy sets all came with PDFs instead of physical manuals. Woulda been so great.
I love that bit in the beginning of the book, where it discribes how the whole Magick vs. Technology delimma works in the style of in-universe do-it-yourself science experiment book.
...and then later on, when describing the races (again, in-universe) how the author is adamant that not only do humans predate elves, but elves are a branch species and decendants of humans, created when magick energies first existed in the world.
Makes me wonder when they'll put up Baldur's Gate 2. Probably when the Planescape mania dies down, because they wouldn't want two megastars eating each other up.
So Arcanum is kinda a pain at the start. There's bandits guarding the bridge, and a mine full of wolves. The premade character I grabbed, Washington someone, is crap at combat. Slowly grinding wolves is getting old. It gets better, right? Or should I just go make a character who actually has some combat skillz?
Posts
Interstate `76 is something of a mess on modern operating systems, and the GOG version isn't really going to give you much beyond the actual retail release. There really was no updating applied to the game when GOG re-released it. You can get it to work alright, but it takes some effort and results are varied.
If you want to play in software rendering mode, you'll need to do at least two things: 1 - Manually kill explorer.exe (for some reason this solves some huge graphical bugs), and 2 - Use a program to eat up the extra CPU cycles of your processor to slow the game down to a playable level. The game will run at an acceptable speed even without a CPU-throttling program, but the problem is that the physics and AI are both somehow tied to the framerate of the game. If that framerate is ~40-60 FPS, the game runs great. If it's closer to +200 FPS (most likely it will be), the AI cars will wobble around and/or drive so slowly that the game won't progress.
If you want to run the game with the improved hardware acceleration, I believe you'll need to look into a Glide wrapper. The nice thing there is that you can use VSync to set the framerate limit specifically, instead of using a program to strain your CPU to 100% constantly. GOG included a glide wrapper with the game on installation, but apparently the version they packed in isn't the best one, and so you'll need to scour the net for a more acceptable one. I'd check the forums, as was mentioned by August above, to see what people are using now.
Be aware that a few of the 'launcher' packages being distributed on the forums are being detected as malware by various AV vendors. I haven't put in any time into research them, so I can't personally say if they are false positives or not. Most likely they are, but still, fair warning.
I don't know any details, but those games were all lost in a limbo... TSR got bought by WotC, that got bought by hasbro, and then there was the whole Interplay/Bioware/Black Isle side.
I haven't been able to get it to work, on an ATI card. Software looks like an acid trip and hardware crashes on startup.
The system requirements for Myst are funny.
Windows 3.1/95
386 33MHz Processor (486 recommended)
4MB RAM (8MB for Windows 95)
4MB Hard Disk Space
2X CD-ROM Drive
SVGA 256 color 640x480 Video Card
Windows compatible Sound Card
Mouse
I think we've got that covered.
How do you know it's the second best selling game on GoG?
Do this. It's not hard.
Just make sure to pick a resolution early because they aren't compatible across saves. I'd recommend 1280 x whatever.
People are right, it is like MechWarrior with cars. And awesome music.
There's a few I'd recommend. There's an unofficial patch, a widescreen mod, a high res towns mod, and a high quality music mod. You can get them from terra-arcanum.com.
Not just on it, it's topped the list since well...since the list existed.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Also suggest playing without the HiRes mod or at least keeping it in the native 800x600. On higher resolutions you lose way to much detail and navigating can be pain sometimes (Which is strange since I didn't mind playing FO1 and 2 at a higher res).
All this is true.
Wait until you get a party of any size and the insane shuffling you have to do to get everyone's fucking goddamn equipment repaired.
9 is MDK1
#1 is Fallout Tactics
#5 is Space Quest 4+5+6
#8 is Pro Pinball Fantastic Journey
EDIT: #7 is Painkiller Black Edition
EDIT 2: #4 is Redneck Rampage Collection
I thought BGs was, while clunky, relatively clean and straight forward.
They tried to get a little to "arty" with the Arcanum UI with the whole steampunk theme. It ends up making things needlessly confusing. I find myself constantly looking in the manual as I play because it's not always clear what things mean or where they are located. For the most part it does it's job, but it is really not easy figuring it all out.
You're nuts, man, it's not only worse but ugly as chupacabras too.
BG UI FTW MF
Sir Carcass, thanks for the help dude, but seriously, this game is balls. The writing is fantastic but for someone who struggles with these isometric games in general, I can't like it. And yet I loved the fallout series. I am weird.
My experience with GOG is not going well. First Myst turns out to be balls (I'm sure it was great back in the day but it's soooo tedious now) and now Arcanum is hella confusing. And I refuse to read the manual...... Its a gazillion pages long and goes on about friction between planes and electric circuitry.
Oh my God. I need this. I want this.
Just a couple more weeks, and I should be able to use GoG.
Someone tell me that the Planescape manual is equally bulky. Bulked up with blathering about dimensions and morality.
Still kinda pissed that my Icewind Dale Ultimate Collection, Baldur's Gate 4 in 1 and Fallout Trilogy sets all came with PDFs instead of physical manuals. Woulda been so great.
Go Necro. The spell Hurt is a godsend early in the game.
The Arcanum manual, however isn't that long at all. Granted it's more there for flavor then to actually help you. I thought maybe I was remembering wrong so I fished it out of ye old game manual box to check. Now I'm reading it. It was a clever trap.
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
I got jumped in the wilderness at lv11 by 2 lv25 wererats. didn't last long. travel can be kind of awful
Myst isn't tedious. Most of the puzzles just have a trick to them and go pretty quickly when you know what it is. Well, aside from the
Meh. But it's so enjoyable. That first spoiler was the only part that really frustrated me. You want to see tedious, go play Riven.
Man, those were the days.
I never had a 33MHz proc, my dad jumped us from a 25MHz 386SX to a 66MHz 486DX2 with 16 meg of RAM and a 250MB hard drive. Twas big pimpin' circa 1993.
Of course 3D cards started to hit near then so we upgraded less than a year later to a 100MHz Pentium, cause the 486's cache was too damn slow.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I love that bit in the beginning of the book, where it discribes how the whole Magick vs. Technology delimma works in the style of in-universe do-it-yourself science experiment book.
...and then later on, when describing the races (again, in-universe) how the author is adamant that not only do humans predate elves, but elves are a branch species and decendants of humans, created when magick energies first existed in the world.
Makes me wonder if they've released something big...
Steam - Wildschwein | The Backlog
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