Gaming, Programming and Random Rants

One of the most annoying recent developments in gaming is Ubisoft has, and EA plans to, implement a always-on internet requirement for their DRM in the games, including single player games. This means that even for single player games, you need to be online to play it. Which is very annoying, to say the least. Yet I frequently see people online saying that you must have a always on internet connection, and presume if you don’t, it’s your fault for being cheap or lazy.

Most frequently, this seems to come from American users, who have become accustomed to having decent internet (as much as they complain about their standard of internet). There are countries other than America out there. Here in Ireland, I have a 1 megabit connection. An unreliable 1 megabit connection, with an ISP that works 9-5, Monday to Friday. This means if my connection crashed at 6pm Friday, I have no internet until I get home at 5pm Monday. So long internet outages do happen. And, because of my ISP’s hours, they tend to happen at times when I might be at home, wanting to, maybe, play some video games.

Sure, it’s your own fault, get a better ISP, I hear some of you say. But, there is no better ISP here. I can get a more stable connection alright. It’s called dial up. But now I have to pay for usage, rather than monthly, rendering it (a) significantly dearer, and (b) on even less.

And apart from the big outages, between the fact that I have a wi-fi network, and my internet connection is a rural satelite dish pointed at tower on hill affair, smaller ones, maybe a minute long, are par for the course. Do I want to be kicked out of my game EVERY. SINGLE. TIME? Nope.

Oh, well you’re a minority, living rurally in a country with poor broadband. If I moved to a city (other than Dublin), I could get 7 meg broadband. And I’ve read Americans on forums complain at the state of broadband in America (usually whilst comparing themselves to Sweden or Japan), but on the other hand, I’ve seen Americans scoff at 10 meg connections. Which would leave the average Irish internet connection in the dust, even in a city.

There is another part to the poor internet connection, one that Ubisoft would be delighted to hear about. It renders me incapable of pirating a game, because of the sheer length of time it would take to download. Between unreliable internet corrupting downloads, the fact that I’m not home all day, and my slow speed, downloading a 5GB game would take around 2 weeks. And let’s be honest, 5GB is a conservative estimate for the size of a modern game. By which stage, all my friends would have cleared the game, and moved onto the next one, rendering it pointless.

I bought Assassins Creed 2, on 360, before this mess was announced. And now I regret it, having supported a company that does this.

Auto updaters are great. They keep Windows secure, they save me having to manually install each time with Firefox, they’re completely transparent with Chrome and on Linux, the whole system’s updates are controlled through the one interface. Some are less ideal. Paint.NET prompts you to update on startup, usually when you’ve just turned it on for a quick edit (and you can’t use it while it downloads the updates – apparently this is fixed in the newest version). It’s still better than nothing however.

There are one class of updates that aren’t quite so great however. These are the ones that decide they need to sit in your system, all running simultaneously. And when there is an update? It’s so important that they need to pop up a window to alert you of this, even if you have no intention of going near said application for a week. Or maybe they are like Apple’s. An update to iTunes includes Safari by default. Why?

The other day, I was two hours into a Supreme Commander LAN party. While I was about to start the final attack, what happens? The game minimizes, and a message pops up. New update for Adobe Reader. Last time I opened a PDF was a week ago (against my will). On my system, once you minimize any of these games:

• Oblivion
• Supreme Commander
• Call of Duty 5
• Team Fortress 2
• Unreal Tournament III
• etc.

They aren’t coming back up again. Say goodbye to your progress if there isn’t a recent save. I tried in vain to start the game again. Click the taskbar entry. Up pops another Window:

“Supreme Commander Application has stopped responding”

It closes. I end up disconnected from the LAN game. Up pops to the nearly defeated player “Macha has been defeated”. All because some stupid cruddy app to open files created by those too lazy to make an actual web page decided it needed to update itself right now. (Yes, I am aware Adobe Reader and PDFs are useful to some people in some situations. I am not one of them).

While the Java updater was not the guilty culprit this time, it has been at other times, with behavior similar to that of Adobe’s updater.

That is one clear advantage to console gaming. The nearest equivalent is the 360′s forced update or be signed out of xbox live being applied to single player games as well, and that’s not nearly as bad.

I can remove these applications from startup of course, but somehow they seem to always make their way back there.

One of my favourite old games is Theme Hospital by Bullfrog. I still have my original disc, and play it a lot. It has a lot of charm, but it’s not always simple to get running. So I’m writing up this guide on playing Theme Hospital on a modern PC. It has been re-released a couple of times, but my disc has both the Windows and DOS versions on the one disc.

First of all, if you are running a 32 bit version of Windows, have the Windows version, and have no intention of playing the multiplayer mode, just insert your disc and install away. It still runs perfectly up until XP. On Vista on my PC, I had to set the compatibility mode to Windows 95, and turn “Run as Administrator” on and it worked from then on. The same steps should work the same on Windows 7 32bit, but I don’t have a computer running that to check. [EDIT: A friend informs me that it doesn't work on his Windows 7 32bit, but I still haven't tested for myself. Try the DOSbox instructions if it doesn't work for you]

If you have 32 bit Windows, and the Windows version, just play away.

If you want multiplayer, or you have the DOS version, things become more complex. For Vista, the IPX network protocol, which was used by Theme Hospital, along with many games of it’s time has been removed. There is a hack to enable IPX in Vista, but it does not allow you to change the settings, and did not work for me. If you have XP or earlier, installing IPX to the Hamachi VPN software apparently works but I don’t have access to a XP computer to test it.

The final option which I eventually resorted to using is to install Theme Hospital to DOSbox. This works on all Windows versions from 2000 up, and for Mac OS X and Linux aswell. Download and install DOSbox. Make a folder to store the files. I recommend you make it something easy to type such as C:\hospital on windows on /home/user/hospital on Linux/OSX. Then open up DOSbox. You will be presented with a DOS prompt. Type the following:
Linux

mount C “/home/user/hospital”
mount D “/media/cdrom” -t cdrom

Or Windows (replace E: with the actual drive letter of your CD rom drive)

mount C “C:\hospital”
mount D “E:\” -t cdrom

Next we need to install Theme Hospital to DOSbox. First, when your cursor is stuck in the DOSbox window (as happens later in the process), to get it out press Ctrl-F10. Now, in dosbox type:

D:
setup.exe

This will open up the Theme Hospital DOS installer. Click the install button and let it install to C:\HOSPITAL (note: For windows users, this is equal to C:\hospital\HOSPITAL on the actual system). Then go to the configuration screen. Configure your sound card and music card. I found selecting Creative Sound Blaster Pro worked fine for me on Linux and Windows. I did have to turn my system volume up to full on Linux to hear it as the volume was stuck down low, however.

To avoid typing in the mount commands each time edit your configuration file. On Windows click the edit configuration file shortcut. If you are using Linux, you first have to issue the command CONFIG -writeconf dosbox.conf inside of DOSBox. Afterwards, the dosbox.conf file will be written to your home directory.

At the very end of the file, add the mount commands you entered before installing the game.

Afterwards click exit. The DOS version of theme hospital is now installed on DOSbox. If you want to play multiplayer, read on. Otherwise, you can stop now.

Edit your configuration file again and replace the line:

ipx=false

with

ipx=true

For each additional computer you wish to play it on, repeat the above process. Finally pick one computer as the host. On that computer start DOSbox and type the same instructions as startup last time, but add this before starting the game

ipxnet startserver
ipxnet connect 127.0.0.1

Find the host’s IP address. For internet play, try whatismyip.com. For local network play, check your network connections dialog.

Now on each client computer type the following (replace the 10.0.0.5 with your host computer’s IP address):

ipxnet connect 10.0.0.5

And start the game on all the computers, enter the network game screen and play away.

Some Final Notes

Gameplay performance on the same system was much better on Vista than it was on Linux. The game played perfectly under Vista, while under Linux the sound was noticeably choppy. Whether this  is a problem with DOSbox or with my computer’s drivers is not certain.

I’m not sure if it is possible to play the Windows version against the DOS version. I have not tried.