Here is a collection of old patches, software, mods, enhancements, commentaries, info to problems (...) on many PC games I play. I've always been a rather prolific PC gamer and mapper (when map editors were cool). As the years go by these resources are getting more scattered and no longer hosted on their primary sources, so they are archived on this page for reference and to save everyone (and myself) from digging for them. Even worse, some now have gatekeeping requiring 'an account to sign in', yeah... no thank you.
Index: Age of Empires 1, Anno 1503, Anno 1602, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Baldur's Gate II, Battle Realms, Blood II: The Chosen, Black & White 1, Caesar 3, Civilization 3, Descent 2, Dungeon Keeper 1, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, Three Kingdoms: Fate of the Dragon, Gruntz, Homeworld, Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, Lemmings 2, Lands of Lore 1 / 2 / 3, Lords of Magic: Special Edition, Lords of the Realm II, Machines: Wired for War, Magic & Mayhem, King's Quest Mask of Eternity, NoX, Populous: The Beginning, Prince of Qin, Rage of Mages 1 & 2 (aka Аллоды), Rayman 1, Red Alert 2, Rising Kingdoms, Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, Rune, Seven Kingdoms II, Siege of Avalon, Sim City 2000: Network Edition, Stonekeep, Stronghold 2, Tzar: The Burden of the Crown, Warcraft 2 BNE, Warcraft 3, Warlords 2 Deluxe, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, PC Games With Broken Multiplayer
Age of Empires 1
Probably my favourite PC game of all time; it has an aesthetic I prefer over its sequel, although AOE2 beta was more appealing than what we got (Tony Goodman wanted the colours changed to be more bright near the end of development). My only issues with it 'now' is that the AI is too primitive and 100% predictable to be enjoyable anymore. It also tends to get exhausted after too much time has passed and practically gives up (with one exception where in one game my ally started to rebuild after some tribute; it was a very rare circumstance that I've not seen again). AOE2's original AI had this problem too before it was fixed in DE.
Don't get me started on AOE1 DE, it's absolutely dreadful. 1) The visuals suck and the pre-renders are uglier, chunkier, and stiffer than the original 3D Studio 4 pre-renders, 2) the colours were ruined, 3) Todd Masten's eager remixes are overly-orchestral (Mark Knight "TDK" highlighted this problem that musicians keep doing today), detuned with wrong notes, added notes, removed notes-- they should have just hired the actual guy Stephen Rippy to redo it? It never crossed their minds to keep the colour palette the same? What a horrible remaster. UGH.
Anno 1503
As many are aware, Sunflowers Max Design has currently decided to discontinue its plans to produce a complete and working multiplayer function for Anno 1503. Now this package is not designed to be given as a replacement, but it does allow the chance for the user to play using the multiplayer code built into the game. There are only three maps supplied with two being basic maps supplied possibly by Sunflowers Max Design and one altered by myself to allow the computer to play as well. To create maps please go to: http://www.hjbomanns.de/ANNOEdit/DRKEdit.htm and download a copy of Dieter's ANNOEdit. The site is in German, but the program allows you to install English and a few other languages. Another useful tool is: Sir Henry's Anno Launch tool and allows you to launch Multiplayer games from its program. This package has been put together due to the lack of information (at least in English) and help in setting up the original multiplayer code that was included in the game but de-activated. ~ The current multiplayer code for Anno 1503 is very buggy and games can become out of sync very often. No support is supplied for the Multiplayer function of Anno 1503 and so no fixes will probably be ever made. Enjoy the game and make some impressive multiplayer maps.
Anno 1602 aka "the only good one"
It seems that you are feeling bored and tired of seeing the same islands. Here I introduce the Islandpack called "Beyond New Horizons" bringing fresh air into your Anno 1602 game. Settle exciting new islands, small or big and experience new challenges. Program used for creating the islands: Anno 1602 Island-Editor by Sir Henry. If you have some feedback then let me know. Go into the Anno 1602 editor, place any island, then press Shift+L select your island saved as an .SCP file, which can be anywhere on your PC. Your Anno Newbie, XXSparksterXX!
The original Anno 1602: Creation of a New World often has problems running on modern PCs. This is due to the fact that it;’s using DirectDraw libraries, which were abandoned by Microsoft long ago. This mod adds such support for modern operating systems. Extract to game’s main folder. The game must be set to fullscreen. To enable windowed mode, use cnc-ddraw config.exe instead cnc-ddraw does not support Direct3D games, the game must have a DirectDraw (Software) renderer.
Near its twilight, Anno 1602 was sold everywhere in bargain bins and that's how I got a copy. Pretty fun game, although the AI is very unpolished; it does not recruit land units (only naval) and builds pre-defined planned cities. But at least they actually included multiplayer. All of the future titles in the series seem to suffer from various problems and just don't stick to the formula that made this one the most fun. Hell... all they would have had to do is maybe soup up the graphics of 1602 and finish the AI, and you'd have an even better game, but nope.
Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
Arcanum was one I always wanted to play as a kid (the box was everywhere in stores), but by the time I finally got a copy as an adult, I lost interest. The game is infamously buggy, Tim Cain's gotta ship it, bois!
Baldur's Gate II
Hot take: I'm not a fan of Baldur's Gate 2, I tried-- even in multiplayer. And the first one is even worse! I actually found Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader to be more fun, that's going to ruffle some feathers. Baldur's Gate 3 is also 99x more fun than 2 ever hopes to be. I just don't like Baldur's Gate 2 and preceding games that the studio made-- including Icewind Dale... it's dry enough to put you to sleep. Kikoskia is the only one who can actually make it palpatable, bless that man :p.
Battle Realms
Came across this one when looking for "hidden gems" in the RTS genre. Oof. I do not find this one fun at all, very mediocre and dry. You'd be better off playing Kohan, which is an actual hidden gem.
Blood II: The Chosen
Multiplayer in Blood 2 is just limited to PVP and not the campaign. What a downgrade from the original.
Black & White 1
Black & White 1 is possibly the weirdest game when it comes to multiplayer. The multiplayer menu is hidden until the game senses the presence of another copy running on the network, yes... in order to start a multiplayer game it's hidden until the game sees another copy. I don't know what Peter Molyneux was thinking, but that's very bad design. Yes, it took awhile for me to figure out, some even claim Black & White 1 has no multiplayer because of this... but it gets better because for some reason multiplayer only allows specifying a fixed time? Why??? And then of course Black & White 2 they just omitted netplay entirely... thanks guys. I remember playing the game as a kid and it kept crashing whenever I attempted to save in hopes of mitigating losing my progress BECAUSE of a crash. Guess I shouldn't have saved? I like this game I really do, but the wacky decisions and bugs really hampered it.
Caesar 3
Create a folder named mp3 in the main folder where your Caesar 3 data files are. In this folder, place some or all of the following files:
ROME1.mp3 - City background music, population 0 to 1000
ROME2.mp3 - City background music, population 1000 to 2000
ROME3.mp3 - City background music, population 2000 to 5000
ROME4.mp3 - City background music, population 5000 to 7000
ROME5.mp3 - City background music, population 7000+
Combat_Long.mp3 - Battle music, 32 or more invaders on the map
Combat_Short.mp3 - Short battle music, 1-31 invaders on the map
setup.mp3 - Main menu music
For each file that is missing, Julius will play the original .wav instead.
Civilization 3
By default, the game runs in a 1024x768 resolution. To get it to run in a higher resolution, navigate to your Civilization 3 folder (default: C:/Program Files/Infogrames Interactive/Civilization 3/ - if you have PTW or C3C, go to that folder inside your CIV3 one), and open your .ini file (named: Civilization3.ini for Vanilla, ptw.ini for Play the World, and conquests.ini for Conquests). Add a line at the bottom that says: KeepRes=1 . Now, when you load your game, it'll use your computer's default resolution. For CIV3 complete GOG, it's located in: C:\GOG Games\Civilization III Complete\Conquests\conquests.ini
Descent 2
Please unzip this file into your Descent II directory. This will place the new 3D accelerated executable in your directory along with replacing your old readme.txt file with an updated version. Before using this 3D accelerated version of Descent II you must verify that you are running an updated 1.1 or 1.2 version of Descent II. To verify which version you are currently using, start Descent II. The version number appears on the bottom right corner of your screen at the Descent II main menu. If there is no version number, then you are currently running version 1.0. If you are NOT running an updated version you will NOT be able to play the 3D accelerated version until you download one of the latest v1.2 patches available at: http://www.pxsoftware.com or http://www.interplay.com. Release Notes: VR Devices are NOT Supported in the 3DFX Version of Descent II. During testing, the Force FX Joystick was found to be incompatible with Descent II 3DFX.
I actually quite liked Descent 1 and 2 on multiplayer (Descent 2 doesn't lock its CPU cycles so a faster CPU will make your ship's bobbing faster, and hilariously this gets reflected in the multiplayer session, too). Descent 2 is famously very picky and unstable with the 3dfx patch, hence the unofficial one. I still had the game freeze on me for no good reason. You have to try a bunch of different hardware combinations and 3dfx drivers to see what manages to make it stable with the most optimal speeds in-game for multiplayer. I wish you luck...
And don't get me started on "Overload", the successor the developers made. They gutted multiplayer reducing it to PVP, and it's pretty bland. They had one job, to make an actual Descent successor, and they failed. Good thing Descent 1 & 2 still exist rendering "Overload" obsolete. :)
Dungeon Keeper 1
Personally, I prefer Dungeon Keeper 1 way more than Dungeon Keeper 2. They basically finished the game at Peter Molyneux's house because he got drunk and put in his notice with EA. And then the rest of the Bullfrog IP just went downhill from there. *sigh*
Want to play on multiplayer maps against one or several AI opponents? Isn't exactly a "How To" in the classical sense as you only have to add a single line. Maybe this is common knowledge but I've always liked the skirmishes more than the actual campaign. With this change, the "Multiplayer" menu in-game has a new option, "1 Player".
Windows: Add "-1player" to the game's .exe shortcut.
Like this: ".../somewhere/Dungeon Keeper/Keeper.exe" -1 player
DOS: Add "/1player" when executing the game's .exe.
Like this: C:\Program Files\Bullfrog\Keeper\keeper/1player
Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom
The developers of Rise of the Middle Kingdom did something very dirty; if you rip your physical CD-ROM as I did (because I virtualise everything inside Windows 98 when I can, why bother with physical discs), the game will pretend to launch but just hang. It has to be ripped with more advanced tools than typical software. Also, it seems to be very buggy? When we were playing there were game breaking bugs in multiplayer in regard to resources. What a shame.
Three Kingdoms: Fate of the Dragon
Okay... if you do not install the final patch for Fate of the Dragon and play multiplayer, it will crash Windows randomly. I don't know why, really bad bug, not documented that this is the cause. The patch does fix it though.
Gruntz
Homeworld
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns aka Kohan 1
Lemmings 2
There actually used to be a lot of Lemmings 2 software (including editors), seems like a lot of that is all lost now. Shame, this one is probably my favourite Lemmings release.
When I got this game it would not work on my computer. It turns out that a call in the game (part of the protection scheme) to read the hard disk boot sector either does not work under MS-DOS 7.1 (Windows 95 OEM SR2), does not work under FAT32, or both (all my drives are FAT32 so I cannot tell if it would have worked with FAT16). I came up with a fairly simple fix. The fix should not affect users of previous (or future) DOS versions, so the game should still be usable by all. I have created 2 small fix programs that may come in handy: L2INSFIX.COM This will apply (or remove) the fixes required by INSTALL.EXE for FAT32. L2INSFIX.COM must be in the same path as the INSTALL.EXE file for it to work. If you inadvertently remove the fix, no matter! just type L2INSFIX again and it will reapply it. If you use FAT32 and attempt to do a (new) install of the game without the INSTALL.EXE fix, the machine will lock up. L2RKOFIX.COM Once the game is installed, copy this file into the game directory, and run it. It will apply (or remove) the fix for the game itself. If you use FAT32 and attempt to run the game without the fix, the machine will lock up. How to Install: 1. run INSTALL.EXE to install the game. 2. Copy L2RKOFIX.COM into the directory you installed the game in 3. run L2RKOFIX in the game directory (default is C:\L2). NOTE: YOU WILL NOT GET ALL OF THE SOUNDS (i.e. SPEECH) IF YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY EMS MEMORY. YOU WILL ONLY GET THE MUSIC.
Lands of Lore 1 / 2 / 3
Lands of Lore 2 seemed to freeze a lot on my Pentium 1 for some reason (seems to be the most 'sensitive' of the three titles). Lands of Lore 3 was fine. Also random trivia, Lands of Lore's acronym "LOL" predates the "laughing out loud" that got used later on... although today it's fallen out of fashion now. Well both "LOL" and "Lands of Lore" are technically both out of fashion these days.
Lords of Magic: Special Edition
3.01 has to be installed before the 3.02 files are copied in. Details in the included .htm. Lords of Magic is pretty neat but it's still not a true successor for Lords 2, and we don't talk about Lords 3...
Lords of the Realm II
| Author | Map Name | Size | Domains | Max Players | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| shirub | Islands | Huge | 16 | 5 | 28/11/2018 |
| shirub | Westeros | Large | 11 | 5 | 28/11/2018 |
| shirub | Middle Earth | Huge | 16 | 5 | 03/12/2018 |
| shirub | Venice | Very Large | 8 | 5 | 03/12/2018 |
| Oumor | Arbitration | Large | 13 | 5 | 01/04/2019 |
| shirub | Sunflower | Huge | 16 | 5 | 01/04/2019 |
| Oumor | Guerrilla Warfare | Small | 4 | 4 | 02/04/2019 |
| Oumor | Tug-O-War | Large | 15 | 2 | 04/04/2019 |
| Oumor | Cluster Mania | Large | 16 | 5 | 05/04/2019 |
| DavidBergquist | Sweden | Huge | 14 | 5 | 01/05/2019 |
| DavidBergquist | Britannia | Huge | 16 | 5 | 01/05/2019 |
| Impboy | Random Generated Map | ??? | ??? | ??? | 2022 |
| Impboy | Sao Paulo of Brazil | ??? | ??? | ??? | 2022 |
| Korvair | King Maker | ??? | ??? | ??? | 2024 |
| Korvair | Iberia | ??? | ??? | ??? | 2024 |
| Korvair | Byxantine 1.1 | ??? | ??? | ??? | 2024 |
| herbert3000 | New York | ??? | ??? | ??? | 2024 |
LPop_Army.exe: uncapped army size and more population in counties
LBlack_DeathFix.exe: fixing black death
LPop_Army_Res.exe: uncapped resource gain (wood, iron, stone)
LPop_Army_ResFix_ADVFarm.exe: advanced farming 127% resources
LArm_Res_Castle.exe: Uncapped Castle Limits Mod + Previous Mods (Does NOT include cheat mods)
L2_EscapeFix.exe: fixes the annoying bug when you press ESCAPE twice and get stuck on "Exit the game My Lord?" Also includes Multiplayer Messages Fix
Machines aka Machines: Wired for War
I think we applied the patches and it was still very buggy and the multiplayer wouldn't work. Adding the patches and fixes here because I have no idea where I even originally got them from.
Magic & Mayhem (1999)
Interesting game, however the multiplayer is heavily limited to just PVP.
King's Quest Mask of Eternity
I can't recall how many bugs there were in Mask of Eternity for each version. I do know that in the earlier builds there were still work arounds to the "game breaking" bugs in the dimension of death, so 1.3 isn't technically necessary. There's still a very annoying bug in the wastelands where a fire ant begins attacking you and nothing can be done while you're in "puzzle mode". I could probably talk about this game for hours, and no, it's not bad. In my opinion it's the best in the King's Quest series: enjoy that hot take. The game does not appear to work with earlier 3dfx drivers that only work for other games, and you need the 3dfx mode for the best visuals.
NoX
Westwood's NoX is one of my favourites, and Phil Robb's 3D pre-renders without anti-aliasing really gave the game its 'shimmery' look you seldom see done on pre-rendered graphics, along with choosing an oblique perspective so that the isometric tiles are perfect diamonds rather than 2:1 (yes, they're different--it seems like many people have mothballs for eyeballs and can't see major in axonometric perspectives: like how Fallout is trimetic and also not isometric as countless YouTube reviewers proclaim, but I digress). It's not anything like 'Diablo 2' so I don't get the comparisons. Supposedly EA shut down the public release of the official map editor, so it wasn't until years later that a 3rd party editor was made. The 1.2 version used by most everyone today was topped off by KITTY. The minimap in earlier versions was done by a Russian dev who refused to release the code, so KITTY decompiled it to add it into the 1.2 release.
Me: How did you program in the minimap on the map editor fork??
KITTY: Decompiled 1.0b4 and 1.0b5 then compared the changes.
Me: isn't that going to cheese off buddy from Russia?
KITTY: Hopefully.
Me: haha :0)
KITTY: :]
Me: *sees the new changes* "СУКА БЛЯТ!!!!"
KITTY: xD
Populous: The Beginning
It appears all of my archived patches, utilities, and mods for Populous The Beginning are obsolete. External link placed here instead.
Prince of Qin
You absolutely must update this game to the last patch, it has many bugs. One of them being that you have to re-equip items as they can stop working. One huge oversight is that if you're playing multiplayer and then you click an item the wrong way as I did a mushroom (producing the hilarious error of "double mushroomspore"), if whoever is joined hasn't left and saved proper, they will lose all of their progress. Only the person hosting the game has proper automatic saving, so keep that in mind.
Rage of Mages 1 & 2 (aka Аллоды)
A few caveats regarding the Rage of Mages 2/"Allods" Map Editor. Placing manual money bags never works (probably they had it as a development feature?) but due to the obvious use of cheating was probably disabled. The versioning is used specifically to prevent people with mismatched versions from joining. And finally, too many objects may cause lag / high latency. Although hopefully newer hardware rectifies that; I have never noticed anything substantial with LAN games? Regarding the Rage of Mages 1 map editor, you can do things in it not possible in ROM2's (and then load it in the second game to see the results as the map files are somewhat cross-compatible). Therefore... you set a peasant to an innkeeper portrait and equip him with a club... oh my... I won't tell you what happens, you'll just have to try it out for yourself. Placing the "demon" final boss turns him into Urd when you open the same map in Rage of Mages 2, sadly the game just crashes.
There used to be a technique to change your player's colour in the console, but alas I lost what those codes were. I had it in a notepad somewhere that's now vanished. This setting is probably configurable somewhere in the player save file then because it gets carried over.
Apply this patch to your rom2.exe, and it will create a loop delay on all screen scrolls so that the screen will scroll much more slowly. This is usually only necessary when running ROM2 on much faster CPU systems than were available when ROM2 came out.
This Rage of Mages II (ROM2) dedicated server pack significantly enhances ROM2 Internet performance, stability and security while vastly increasing the play variety by introducing new game play types and a large selection of specially designed multiplayer maps. With the dedicated server pack you will be able to create ROM2 multiplayer characters and store them on a master server, called "Hat." Logging on to Hat will give you access to your characters and the list of currently available dedicated game servers, allowing you to find and join multiplayer games easily.
Rayman 1
Ah yes, one of my personal favourites because it's a very solid platformer. Pretty tough though (especially the PC version where the water is not transparent so you can't see the fish moving very well at that horrible level in "eat at joe's"). Many say the PS1 version is the best which is odd, the PC version has the 'proper' beginning level in band land and has the map editor (isn't the map editor the most important feature?!?!!). Also, the PC version has the more advanced visual algorithms for the warping 'lava lamp' colours in the main menu selection and also in the level select screen where the binoculars zoom in (other versions don't implement the optic simulation algorithm). Anyway.
I believe most people play Rayman Redemption now, but one thing that bothers me is that it doesn't honour a fixed pixel resolution, so you get that nastiness you see in Terraria and other "8-bit style" games that use pixels as shapes rather than pixels, and it annoys me to no end. Don't even bother with ubisoft's re-release of Rayman, they removed Rémi Gazel's music...
Red Alert 2
Red Alert 2 never shipped with the map editor, so when I finally learned of its existence, the ship was long sailed for having time an interest in making maps on it. You also had very limited options when it came to AI and skirmish (this too, was rectified later on). However... the AI is still greatly messed up because it's designed around targeting human players (or more specifically one human player) so it doesn't work well targeting multiple humans, let alone another AI that you're on a team with. This is something Age of Empires never had issues with though.
Rising Kingdoms
Kind of like a spiritual successor to Tzar: Burden of the Crown, but with the addition of heroes like Warcraft 3. Unlike Tzar, Vesselin Handjiev had no involvement, but it seems to still be pretty fun regardless. Some of the voice lines are mixed up (I'm surprised the outsourced voice artists didn't bother to point this out rather than blindly reading the lines they were told).
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2
All of these are obsolete with OpenRCT, but hey, maybe someone doesn't want OpenRCT and wants the OG RCT2 client for some reason. It is possible to change the cursors in RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: they're stored inside the executable. I used ResHack.
Rune
This was an interesting one to find (when I was looking for another game to play with my stepbrother, I came across this one back in 2014). It's interesting how fluid the swimming is in this game, if only more adopted a similar design. By default it did not have co-op so that mod is needed.
Seven Kingdoms II
These patches are technically obsolete with the steam release, however, I don't wish to play it in Steam. Therefore if you're like me and you have your own old copy and just want to use that, you'll need these. As far as I can tell they're no longer offered (I've just been chipmunking them away in my archives, until now).
If you're also like me and playing them on old PC hardware (that's what the 1.12 patch is for), you'll need to segregate IPX/SPX and TCP/IP on different NICs. Yes, this is one game that suffers bizarre desyncs in its netcode when the IPX and TCP protocols are running on the same NIC. It's best practice to have a dedicated NIC for either protocol anyway; this is what was always taught 'back in the day' and I ignored it, and so too, younger peeps don't know about it anymore either (some even didn't believe me, sheesh, well you play this with both protocols in multiplayer and see for yourself). This does not apply to all games, only some whose netcode doesn't account for the presence of both protocols.
Siege of Avalon
Downloaded from Steven Davis' site when it was still up. Like Knights and Merchants remake, Siege of Avalon was programmed in everybody's favourite language, Delphi! Siege of Avalon is probably one of the few RPGs I actually got into, most just bore me to tears. I don't know why 'this' one was the exception. This also sent me down the tangent of discovering Bjørn Lynne of which Digital Tome licensed the MIDIs from (who also made the music to Worms, Seven Kingdoms...).
Siege Of Avalon 1.4 Patch (2011-11-01). Changes: Music has been re-enabled. SoundPath has been removed from siege.ini, music files must now reside in \Audio\Theme\. The black interface bug has been fixed. Windowed Mode: SoA will now run inside a window. Set Windowed=true inside the siege.ini. This may not work well on some systems (see notes). Smooth scrolling: The central character will now move within an elastic zone near the center of the screen. SoA will now run properly within a virtual machine. The introduction screen has been re-activated. This may be viewed by including ShowIntro=true in the siege.ini. Spell lighting effects have been restored For modders, pax files may now be layered. Mods may be packaged into a pax file which may be configured to override existing content without replacing it. To access this feature, there are 2 new sections in the siege.ini: [Interface], and [ArtLib]. Entries in these sections are NameOfMod=NameOfPaxFile with each subsequent entry able to override duplicates in the previous entry. Specs and tools for working with pax files will be released in the near future and will be available at www.blackflystudios.com/SiegeDev.html. Note that the entry for the German language patch (courtesy of www.SoAmigos.de) is already in place. The German language patch may be downloaded from www.blackflystudios.com/SiegeDev.html. Requirements: This patch requires an existing Siege of Avalon installation. Instructions: Extract the contents of this zip file into an existing Siege of Avalon folder (usually "C:\Program Files\Digital Tome\Siege Of Avalon"). Allow overwrites when prompted. Notes: Changes to fix the black dialog bug, and changes to support windowed mode are hardware sensitive. My resources to test on multiple platforms is limited and therefore these changes have not been thoroughly tested. I would like to know about any problems encountered. If problems are encountered, you might try setting UseVideo=false in the siege.ini. You might also try setting your Windows display settings to 16 bit. Windows compatibility settings may also prove fruitful. If all else fails, SoA will run within a virtual machine running Windows 2000.
Sim City 2000: Network Edition
Oh boy... I originally played this without the final patch (since the CD-ROM releases didn't typically come with the final versions back in those days), and my friend and I after we built two of our rather large cities, the game kept disconnecting and we couldn't figure out why. I tried many different things. Turns out it was just known to be problematic for disconnecting when there were too many objects, even more so with the earlier builds. This final patch is absolutely needed for stability. It's crazy how many times I got burned with major issues on multiplayer with some of these games. I never really had to install patches when playing this stuff single player as it exposes less problems.
In 2019 click4dylan created a new unofficial patch that actually fixes the network sync, completely. So it's now a viable game to play, nice!
I have released a new patch for Simcity 2000 Network Edition. If you have the network edition launcher, it should automatically download the new version when you launch it. If not, download the patch and the network edition launcher with server browser (SC2K_NE_PATCH.zip). Fixed desync and extremely slow or frozen city simulation when cities get very large. Clients can now connect to servers instantly instead of having to wait up to 5 minutes for the loading bar to finish. Improved city simulation speed and rendering speed. Please don't forget to use SC2KNEL.exe when hosting and playing as it connects to a master server to provide you with a server list for the game. Without it you have to know the IP of a specific server to join!
Stonekeep
Stonekeep is another one I really like. When I first started playing I had really no idea what I was doing, I ended up picking up that orb (I think it's called the orb of afri or something), which allows you to spam arrows endlessly. I didn't realise that's what was happening and effortlessly killed that skeleton. I also ended up going to the ice realm before the faerie realm (so I got really confused since the dialogue was mismatched), also funnier as the ice realm has a much higher difficulty that you're not supposed to encounter until getting stronger from the other realm first. They really made the ending kind of sloppy though... as soon as it got to that dull 90's "puzzle" thing it wasn't so fun anymore (or maybe they just had to rush it). The game has many endings and secret dialogue that can be hard to obtain, not too unlike Lands of Lore 2.
Copy SK_V12.ZIP into the Stonekeep main directory (this should be C:\INTRPLAY\STONKEEP). You can either use the RUNME.BAT batch file from the Stonekeep main directory or you can type PKUNZIP -d -o SK_V12.ZIP and then press
Stronghold 2
Why am I including these legacy patches? That's because in future patches to fix some bugs, Firefly REMOVED the ability to add AI players in multiplayer. It should be noted that the final 1.4.1 release still fixes critical netcode bugs, so multiplayer with this thing with the extra features is still never quite complete. And they famously said "well I guess you'll need to wait for Stronghold 2 Crusader". Oh thank you so much for removing features that once existed. Yes, I'm still sad/mad (smad?) about it. Stronghold Crusader 2 was horrible, Stronghold Warlords was even worse (they really lost the plot, just like the "Overload" developers). Stronghold 2 is the better game, they should have just properly fixed that one up instead???
Tzar: The Burden of the Crown
If you don't want to have to constantly insert your CD in Tzar, you can just change the 'gamestart' value in the .ini file to start on the menu instead. I forget which value it is, '3' maybe? Shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Oh and if you were wondering why all of the releases of Tzar play nothing when you choose the "redbook" option (Tzar DID in fact have official redbook music and not just the MIDI files), it's because there was a data formatting error, and the CD audio tracks were not preserved on nearly every major release of Tzar! Therefore the CD music does nothing when it's 'supposed' to switch to that OST I linked.
One of the better RTSes at the time in my opinion. It's true, Vesselin Handjiev sat down and brainstormed all of the common issues with RTS games and resolved them all in Tzar (I've no idea why Wikipedia said the game reviewed poorly, that has no bearing on its quality). I was so impressed by Tzar I looked up other games he worked on, and that happened to lead me to Knights of Honour (which at the time back in 2007 was still not as known as it is today). What a shame, if only more people knew of his work.
Warcraft 2 BNE
Warcraft 2 is prime example of how the sum of its parts made such an amazing experience. The graphics, the music, the sound. Its engine is very primitive, but it still manages to be very fun. Wargus attempts to fix a lot of those legacy issues and make it cross platform, but in its current iterations it has a lot of problems with multiplayer, I'm hoping the dev will fix some of that eventually (he did fix the hardware cursors for us to which I am forever grateful!)
There were a lot of interesting custom maps back in the day, I wish I kept them... although it was hard to keep things archived back then (especially since as a kid I got a virus on Windows 98 and it had to be rebuilt).
Warcraft 3
These are legacy installer packages (1.21b), specifically because most of my legacy replays were saved with this version, and because this release of the game is getting harder to find. I tried some of the replay "curing" tools and they did not work, at all. Running the replays in this old version worked totally fine though. Someone really should collect all of the installation versions for this reason. Although there's probably not many who kept their old replays as I have.
Warlords 2 Deluxe
X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter
This is a VERY difficult game to get running and of course needs joysticks; I did purchase a bunch of the occasion (even a Saitek CYBORG 2000) but kept running into issues getting the original game running on original hardware.
PC Games With Broken Multiplayer
I'm adding this short section to games with known critical bugs in multiplayer that was never patched by the developers; to save you time if you're wondering why they keep crashing or hanging. This is also the reason why I've not bothered to list patches for these games, above, as patching will not help you. There is no cure. :(
First, you need to duplicate the file darkwar.rtl. Right click the file and click copy. Then, paste it inside the Rott folder to have a backup of it. Rename the backup to coop.rtc Then open up WinRott(GL) and choose this file in alternative battle levels and open up a server and join and so. When you are in the game main menu, the hoster go to options -> (ext) User options -> Enable Actors in Netgame. And then choose a normal comm-bat game. Enjoy and watch out friendly fire is of course on. Difficulty in coop is very hard.
That about does it. I could talk about PC games endlessly (I know too much, I've played too much)... but at some point you have to pull the plug.
