First post, by castiglione
Has anyone had any luck getting Mindscape's The Colony to run on DOSBOX?
I've got two issues which may or may not be related:
Issue #1: The mouse cursor.
To interact with objects in the game, you bump into them which brings up a bitmap image of the object over which you should be move your mouse and click on things you want to do stuff to.
I can't seem to get the mouse cursor to show up. I've Cntrl-F10'ed and I know the cursor is SOMEWHERE because moving the mouse around randomly and left-clicking incessantly eventually causes something consistent with interacting with the object to happen so I'm guessing the cursor is just flickering so badly that it's not visible so I've tried setting cycles to a fixed number (I tried 3,000 and then 10,000) and then Ctrl-F11'ing but so far, I can't make the cursor appear. I've also tried dialing mouse sensitivity all the way down to 10 and that hasn't caused the cursor to appear.
The game also allows for mouse control when you're just moving around and that works although the way "center" is defined seems to be very narrow as it's very difficult to stop rotating or moving forward/backward once you start moving with the mouse. Dialing down the mouse sensitivity HELPS (you rotate slow enough so that you can use the feedback you get to "center" the mouse) but doesn't solve the problem. I'm not sure if this problem is related to the fact that the mouse cursor won't appear or not but I thought it might be relevant since it's possible the mouse may be all the "over" on one side of the screen or the other due to these "centering" issues.
Issue #2: The graphics.
The Colony for the PC is purported to be a monochrome (black and white) game but during one of the moments when I was mouse clicking and pressing every function key I could think of, the graphics suddenly became "color" (filled polygons with some color) as if I had toggled a graphics mode key or something. The graphics actually resembled screen images and/or movies of what I have seen of the Macintonsh version of the game. The graphics also allowed the game to be somewhat playable since they show things like doors, staircases, etc. which don't show up in the black and white mode. I'm running on OpenGL (the default surface results in a blank screen showing in DOSBOX). I'm not sure if this is a function of the game or DOSBOX but I have a feeling it's specific to the game since while I was pressing every key combo, I don't think I was Ctrl'ing them.
So far, I haven't been able to replicate this change in graphics mode. The only graphics key in the game is F8 which toggles whether the black and white wireframe objects are transparent or not.
I'm running Windows 7, 4 GB RAM - Windows 7, Intel Core i3 2.4 GHz CPU with an NVIDIA GPU.
To re-iterate, I've set cycles to a fixed number and tried F11'ing. I've also played around with machine type settings (the game was designed for EGA so I've been switching between EGA and SVGA_s3) but that hasn't seem to have done anything. I've also dialed down mouse sensitivity. Besides that, I don't know what else to try to get the mouse cursor to show up in "interact with object" mode in the game. I know the mouse is working within the game because you can use the mouse to move around and it works although the space defined as "center" seems to be really small.