Legend Gateway and Gateway II: Homeworld will not run

[Quasi_Stomach]

I can't get Gateway and Homeworld to run on my older PC. Both games run fine on DOSBox on my modern Windows 10 PC. Gateway has no error message and just returns to the DOS prompt almost immediately, but Homeworld specifically mentions "Critical Error: unable to initialize graphics."

This computer, (a Compaq Prolinea 4/25s), has trouble with several games that try to detect the graphics card. Here's a transcription of the output of HWInfo

Code: Select all

Video Chipset:             Tseng Labs ET4000
Video Card:                Unknown
Video Memory Size:         1024 KBytes of DRAM
Video Card Bus:            32-bit
Video RAMDAC:              Unknown of Standard VGA
Video BIOS Manufacturer:   Compaq
Video BIOS Version:        Unknown


Most games that allow me to specify graphics mode/level still work and any game that will "try anyway" works, but I can't figure out how to get these 2 running.

I decided to try to load as many of the Legend games as I could and everything that I have will run except Spellcasting 301, which gives the same error message as Homeworld.

I've tried every commandline argument I know, but I may not know many of them (just what's in the manual for Gateway - the only game I have the original manual for).

[realnc]

Have you ran INSTALL.EXE? What does it say?

Note that for the Gateway games, the best mode to select in INSTALL.EXE is "VGA", not "Super VGA." In Super VGA, even if you have a video card that supports it (this is pre-VESA, so the game doesn't support many cards), the graphics become too small.

[Jo22]

Have you ran INSTALL.EXE? What does it say?

I wonder the same. Also, what does GATEWAY.BAT contain ?

It should include something like "GATE VGA BLASTER 7 220 MT32 2 330" (for example).
It's also possible that it contains just a part of it ("GATE EGA" for example).