XCOM / UFO Enemy Unknown MS-DOS + XCOMUTILS 9.7 \ VOGONS

XCOM / UFO Enemy Unknown MS-DOS + XCOMUTILS 9.7

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First post, by mombarak

Posted on 2026-04-25, 14:23

mombarak Offline

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Hi everyone.
I have the EU original UFO CD Version which is probably 1.0 or 1.1. The goal is to play 1.4 plus the XCOMUTILS difficulty fix to experience how it was supposed to be. The problem is that I cannot get there.

Here is my approach on MS DOS 6.22 on my P90 and Dosbox Staging:
- I failed to install any patch on the CD version which I have. It only installs around 2 MB of gamedata and it seems even the 1.2 patch does not work as expected.
- I found a CD version ISO which installs version 1.4. This version has a graphical dos menu while the CD I have wants the install c:\path approach.
-- For MS DOS 6.22 running the XCOMUTILS script XCUSETUP fails at copying 16 BIT files = NO and I do not know what to do to fix this
-- For Dosbox it hangs with detecting the OS version

Does anyone have a manual which can make this work on a MS DOS system?
Gemini AI spits out not helpful things like set a temp file and change attributes of the files in the UFO folders.

Any clue is highly appreciated. I do want to play the old version and not any OPENXCOM port which probably does not have all the problems... 😀

Reply 1 of 6, by xcomcmdr

Posted on 2026-04-25, 15:34

xcomcmdr Offline

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Did you try the CD version with dosbox staging ?

Once you have the 1.4 installed, you can install the UFO Enemy Unknown data patch from OpenXCOM, and then play with the MSDOS original executable.

Reply 2 of 6, by mombarak

Posted on 2026-04-25, 15:59

mombarak Offline

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xcomcmdr wrote on 2026-04-25, 15:34:

Did you try the CD version with dosbox staging ?

Once you have the 1.4 installed, you can install the UFO Enemy Unknown data patch from OpenXCOM, and then play with the MSDOS original executable.

I did not try the OpenXCOM data patch. Thanks for the recommendation. I only tried the XCOMUTILS 9.7 zip file contents which have a bat launcher in them. What is the difference of the OpenXCOM approach? Do you have a link of a DOS compatible version?

Reply 3 of 6, by xcomcmdr

Posted on 2026-04-25, 16:32

xcomcmdr Offline

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It's only a modification of some data files to correct the difficulty error:

https://github.com/OpenXcom/XcomDataPatch

Reply 4 of 6, by mombarak

Posted on 2026-04-25, 19:49

mombarak Offline

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Cool. Will try it. I thought there is a specific file which holds the difficulty management but it seems multiple folders got fixes from the openxcom team. Lets see how it works.

Reply 5 of 6, by xcomcmdr

Posted on 2026-04-26, 06:21

xcomcmdr Offline

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Yeah, it corrects more than that, indeed.

Reply 6 of 6, by mombarak

Posted on 2026-04-27, 11:20

mombarak Offline

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xcomcmdr wrote on 2026-04-26, 06:21:

Yeah, it corrects more than that, indeed.

If you are interested. I can get XComUtils to work with the same installation on a Dosbox 0.74. On Dosbox Stating it hangs when testing the operation system. But what bothers and confuses me most is the MSDOS behavior. The program simply says it cannot find "the 16 Bit files". OpenXcom works. But I wanted to give XComUtils a try because it also restores the sounds from before 1.4 which are better.
I tried it on 2 computes. It always has an issue with the 16 Bit files when copying from the CD to my hardrive on a P90 and 486.

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