Reply 20 of 25, by F2bnp
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- l33t
I used to be a member of the MagicBall Network so I remember these projects quite well. LBAWin was the effort of a sole person as you said, it was a godsend back then, mostly because it got rid of the frickin' getting hit by the well "feature" of the game 🤣 . I played LBA1 many years after playing LBA2, so that always irritated me greatly.
As far as I remember, there never was an attempt to create a reverse engineered LBA2 engine, I believe most people were happy with how the Windows version ran under Windows XP (this was still 2005-2006 after all), if of course you had applied the FunFrog patch. For some reason, LBA 2 produced garbled graphics on anything newer than ~GeForce256 I believe and someone produced a patch for it (Windows version). This situation reminds me greatly of Cryo's Atlantis which produced very similar issues with anything newer than a Voodoo Banshee/V3. LBA1 was more urgent since it was a DOS game and DOSBox was still somewhat slow (still remember how badly it ran on my Pentium 4 😁) and usually scared people because it had... DOS commands (not my words 🤣 ). So, I think the idea was always that we needed to fix LBA 1 first and then LBA 2. But then no one bothered with LBA 2!
Other than a widescreen patch at some point (which I do not know if it's at all possible to pull off without hooking into some code), I don't see what's so great about the Windows version. The GoG (DOS) version works fine and I've never noticed the supposed better audio quality. If I ever feel like replaying LBA2, I'll probably install it under Win95 on my retro box, but I don't see what the issue with the GoG version is. Whatever works 🤣 .