Railroad Tycoon (technical)

[Verrucosus]

Hello,

recent discussion of Railroad Tycoon II and plans for a sequel have tempted me to play the original Railroad Tycoon again. Having had problems with other DOS games under Windows XP, I'm very happy that there is only a minor irritation: After starting the game, I'm immediately asked to select sound, graphics and mouse configurations, but after that it takes about three or four minutes (!) for the credits to appear. Once they do I can play the game without any problems.

Is there any advice on how to reduce the delay? (It appears regardless of whether I use the VDMS thingy to get sounds.)

Verrucosus

[Az]

I know what you mean. I had a problem of similar nature, trying to run a DOS-only game from 96' or so, on Win98. Never played it in the end.

[Urban Ranger]

Maybe you'd have better luck under Linux.

[Asmodean]

Verru: Have you tried running the game in Win95 compatibility mode??

I imagine that should do the trick.

Asmodean

[Datajack Franit]

So XP IS a ram sucker

[Asmodean]

Originally posted by Datajack Franit
So XP IS a ram sucker

That depends on how you look at it. XP is not good at DOS games.

But that really doesn't matter, as you can make XP emulate previous versions of Windows. Which is why I suggested he ran the game in Win95 compatibility mode, since that would come close to running it in DOS. I got my copy of Civ1 to work that way under XP.

Asmodean

[Verrucosus]

Thank you all for commenting. I'll try the compatibility modus next. I had read about it, but since I got my games working more or less without it, I forgot. Given Asmodean's experience, I may even get Civ1 to run with something other than IBM sounds.

Regards,
Verrucosus

[Asmodean]

You may have to do some autoexec programming for that to happen. But it should be possible.

Asmodean

[Verrucosus]

I have now run both Railroad Tycoon and Civilization under the Win95 compatibility mode. Unfortunately, the remaining problems have not disappeared. There is still the minute-long delay before the Railroad Tycoon credits appear, and Civilization is still unbearably slow with anything but IBM sounds.
However, using the compatibility mode finally allowed me to run Colonization again at acceptable speed. As I remember the game, the prospect of a real endgame (War of Independence) helps a lot to make micromanagement seem more important. I have not played it for ages, but I'm eager to find out whether I still enjoy it.
Anyway, thank you for helping. All my DOS games are now quite playable. For the time being, I will not bother to try autoexec programming (after all, Civilization is not primarily a sound experience), but I'll keep it in mind for some other occasion.

Verrucosus