It's amusing that there's so many Dune II reproduction projects out there all of a sudden when there's been nothing for any Westwood RTS for so long.

That's cool and all, but is there any reason to play Dune II other than pure nostalgia? The game's mechanics have long been surpassed my later games by Blizzard and Westwood themselves. It happened in a matter of just a few years.
Maybe it's just me, I could never get into it after having played the later games. The fact that you can't control units with your mouse and have to press buttons to command is also kind of a killer for me (can't play Warcraft 1 for the same reason).

as for RTS I prefer the sidebar interface like in classic C&C & Red Alert (C&C: Generals not included of course),
I like it better than warcraft style 'unit/building commands' interface,
but that just me as most people I know prefer the otherwise.

And this HD update fixes both of those very issues. You use your mouse to select and command units, there is a new sidebar interface for building, and you can play in any resolution you chose.

Looks nice, thanks for the heads-up.

Anyone try this with one of those music packs? I like the OPL soundtrack well enough, just curious what else is worth trying.

Finally!
I haven't tried it yet, but OpenDune with Hi-Res and improved controls is the ideal combination.

There have always been remakes around.
But none of them ever replaced the original Dune 2 on my system. Dune II The Maker last demo was from 2006 and keeps teasing with news, but no new release. Now it doesn't matter.

Glad to spread to love <3

^^

VileRancour wrote:

Looks nice, thanks for the heads-up.

Anyone try this with one of those music packs? I like the OPL soundtrack well enough, just curious what else is worth trying.

I'm using this SC-55 pack:
http://dune2themaker.fundynamic.com/?page_id=102

And to me it sounds much better than the AdLib music.

I haven't tried the MT-32 version yet, but I think it's inferior.

Take a look (or maybe "take a heard") at the differences:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqCDj0IRSTk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK5TwFaKA2M

I very much prefer the SC-55 version.

OK I downloaded the music packs but how do I get it to work with Dune Dynasty? ^^

This is as good as I hoped. Very enjoyable.

I did encounter a problem on level 5 of the harkonnen. The carryalls airlift any heavily damaged vehicles to the repair facility as intended, but return them to the field unrepaired?, and then the carryalls repeat this process.

@Iris030380
dunedynasty.cfg holds the configuration for the music and such.

I had to convert them to FLAC using foobar2000 and the FLAC encoder.

Take the instructions here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15577/how-to-r … ith-foobar2000/

But ignore the part about Audio CDs. Just load the mp3 files and select them, right click and then "convert".

PS: By the way, I've downloaded the MT-32 pack and many tracks are exactly the same as in the SC-55 pack!

The intro, for example, is identical. And it seems it was recorded from an MT-32 🙁

That SC-55 pack is weird - the genuine MIDI tracks sound great, but as Leolo says, they're identical to the MT-32 ones. And the tunes you hear throughout most of the game are clearly just OPL versions (attack*.mp3, peace*.mp3, mentat*.mp3).

At least the MT-32 pack lives up to its name - still, an actual SC-55 soundtrack would be nice to have.

Yes, it would be great to have the SC-55 soundtrack.

Could somebody with access to such a Roland unit play the MIDI files and record them to FLAC, please??

By the way, there's another MT-32 pack here:

http://dune2k.com/Downloads/26

Click on the third link, the one called "Dune II Music mp3" from Jun 10, 2005, and then dump the OGG or FLAC files into the "fed2k_mt32" music folder of Dune Dynasty.

Guys, how do you manage to play this game in full screen with widescreen monitors?

Windowed mode respects the aspect ratio, but going full screen destroys it and squashes the image! 🙁

Leolo wrote:

Guys, how do you manage to play this game in full screen with widescreen monitors?

Windowed mode respects the aspect ratio, but going full screen destroys it and squashes the image! 🙁

That's strange. I'm using 5:4 monitors - not widescreen, but not 4:3 either; still there's no distortion in fullscreen (I get square pixels, same as in windowed mode).
Did you set screen_width and screen_height correctly in the .cfg? they should match your monitor's native resolution. If things still get stretched, it's probably some setting in your video card's control panel.

Note that having square pixels isn't very true to the original aspect ratio either... it's already kind of squashed compared to 320x200 on a 4:3 CRT, but that's as good as we're gonna get.

"Multiple unit selection with control groups" - it's like selecting an "easy difficulty" 😉

The difficulty change indeed asks for some compensation, fortunately there are options for insatiable sandworms and harder AI.

V1.3 is out. Hmm,The repair-bay issue is not listed in the changelist.

I am waiting for a Linux Mint deb file or an easy way from the software manager part of Linux Mint. Cause there is no way in hell I want to go into compiling mode again (I burned my fingers once there, so no thank you).

Hey, v1.3 has support for custom campaigns and modding. Wonder how far this could go -- would be nice to have campaigns based on Children of Dune, or (better yet) Heretics of Dune!

VileRancour wrote:

Note that having square pixels isn't very true to the original aspect ratio either... it's already kind of squashed compared to 320x200 on a 4:3 CRT, but that's as good as we're gonna get.

Hey, don't be so pessimistic! 😜 The problem of non-square pixels can be solved (dosbox and scummvm can do the aspect correction in software, for example)

Let's keep the hope alive for aspect ratio correction in Dune Dynasty also! 😉