(I know this is a bit necro, but anyway...)

I was trying to get my old CD version of Privateer 2 up and running again, and I'm using Win7/64bit for this; in DOSBox my PC was not powerful enough for the intro videos, but with the latest official + the unofficial patch, the game works in Win7 using the Darkfix.exe (with Win95 compatibility on) - so for me Win7 works fine with Priv2.

An obvious difference would be the graphics card, as my box has an nvidia geforce 315 installed, FWIW.

Rwolf wrote on 2025-05-02, 16:05:

(I know this is a bit necro, but anyway...)

I was trying to get my old CD version of Privateer 2 up and running again, and I'm using Win7/64bit for this; in DOSBox my PC was not powerful enough for the intro videos, but with the latest official + the unofficial patch, the game works in Win7 using the Darkfix.exe (with Win95 compatibility on) - so for me Win7 works fine with Priv2.

An obvious difference would be the graphics card, as my box has an nvidia geforce 315 installed, FWIW.

"was not powerful enough for the intro videos"...

hmm have you tried increasing the cycles or using dosbox-x to simulate a more powerful pc?
https://dosbox-x.com/

Well, I did run the CPU at max cycles in normal DOSbox, v0.74 - that did not help, the videos never passed the splash screen (or the 'Intel Inside' splash, if I forced a pentium cpu type), regardless of the speed.

I'll try dosbox-x later, I have it installed but it's not setup for my frontend yet,so it is a bit unwieldy.

(Getting it to run 'natively' in Win7/64 was unexpected, but welcome nevertheless.)

edit: I tried my old version (2022) of DOSBox-x and it worked fine with the videos. 😀
I'll upgrade it to the latest one, and try again, but it probably works just as good.

Thanks for the tip!

Rwolf wrote on 2025-05-05, 13:52:

Well, I did run the CPU at max cycles in normal DOSbox, v0.74 - that did not help, the videos never passed the splash screen (or […]
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Well, I did run the CPU at max cycles in normal DOSbox, v0.74 - that did not help, the videos never passed the splash screen (or the 'Intel Inside' splash, if I forced a pentium cpu type), regardless of the speed.

I'll try dosbox-x later, I have it installed but it's not setup for my frontend yet,so it is a bit unwieldy.

(Getting it to run 'natively' in Win7/64 was unexpected, but welcome nevertheless.)

edit: I tried my old version (2022) of DOSBox-x and it worked fine with the videos. 😀
I'll upgrade it to the latest one, and try again, but it probably works just as good.

Thanks for the tip!

the max setting is bugged. I run it at 60,000 to 70,000 cycles, having it determine what max is or auto borks the games speed either makes it run too fast if its tied to cycles

It seems I needed to change more things, not just the cycles setting, but also using DDRAW rendering instead of surface rendering.
The normal DOSBox seems to also work fine now (with videos&sound) - this with the original striped videos of course, only the fixed Windows version has video smoothed.

Did not know about the cpu cycle auto/max settings being broken.

Rwolf wrote on 2025-05-06, 11:03:

It seems I needed to change more things, not just the cycles setting, but also using DDRAW rendering instead of surface rendering.
The normal DOSBox seems to also work fine now (with videos&sound) - this with the original striped videos of course, only the fixed Windows version has video smoothed.

Did not know about the cpu cycle auto/max settings being broken.

Hmm try using opengl and I remember watching a review by spoony where he found high quality production archives of privateer 2. Something looking like doctor who of 2006 back in 1996

Yes, opengl works as well.

(I found the Spoony review of the game accurate...it was long enough ago that I had forgotten most of the bugs.)

I saw this old (2023) news from wcnews: https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/16325
Even though the corny videos are most of the enjoyment in this game IMO, the game lacks captions/subtitles, maybe these can be added eventually.

Rwolf wrote on 2025-05-06, 18:11:

Yes, opengl works as well. […]
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Yes, opengl works as well.

(I found the Spoony review of the game accurate...it was long anough ago that I had forgotten most of the bugs.)

I saw this old (2023) news from wcnews: https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/16325
Even though the corny videos are most of the enjoyment in this game IMO, the game lacks captions/subtitles, maybe these can be added eventually.

captions and subtitles we will likely never see. I remember seeing people from Mythic Entertainment post pictures of doing archives from Origin's back catalogue.

https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/goodb … -29-2014.27408/

Still I imagine the original cutscenes are there if the source material is still in tact.

Its really cool to see different studios archive sister companies even though its all under one roof