First post, by RobAllen
A long time ago I managed to get Rules of Engagement 2, Breach 3, and Breach 2 all working together under the IGS (Interlocking Game System) the games came with. This allowed the three games to link between each other in specially-designed campaigns, turning them into a sort of large-scale multigenre strategy game.
I then started building a massive branching campaign that would make use of the IGS. Every so often I'd come back to it (I have the whole thing installed on my old Windows 95 laptop) and I'd build a little more of the campaign. It's gotten quite large. It's not finished yet, but it's getting to the point where I think others might enjoy it. I recently had the idea to try transferring this monster (actually it's quite small compared to amount of space games use these days) to my main computer and see if I could run it under DOSBox. Turns out, the games do work under DOSBox, but not with the 1.08 patch that enables Rules of Engagement 2's IGS to link to Breach 3. For some reason, that patch breaks DOSBox compatibility.
Now I'm trying to find a way to fix it. It's possible some setting in DOSBox will fix it, but I'm not sure. I don't know that much about DOSBox, so I'm not really sure what might do the trick - if it's even possible at all. At least the build I have will work just fine in Windows 95, and probably 98 too, and certainly in a real DOS environment, but it'd be nice if I could get it running on my main computer since my 95 laptop only has a floppy drive and apparently no network support aside from a dialup port. It was quite the chore to move all those files over via floppies. I'd like to share my campaign with other fans of these games, and of course it'd be nice if others could see this IGS system for themselves. I think it's pretty neat, and a bit surprised it hasn't been done again since.
This is the error I get:
Others have encountered this issue in the past, in various places around the net, and it appears no-one has come to a solution yet. So far I've tried increasing the amount of memory available to DOSBox, turning off sound, changing cycles, and disabling/enabling XMS, EMS, and UMB. None of these seem to have any effect.
I've thought about options other than DOSBox. The game will not run under Windows 7 in Windows 95 compatibility mode, even though it runs fine on my Windows 95 laptop. Any other ideas? I'm tentatively considering looking for some kind of Windows 95 emulator.
If you are interested, here is the 0.4 alpha version of my campaign. Again, it's not finished, but there's enough there for a few hours of gameplay at least - provided you have a properly IGS'ed version of the game and an environment you can run it in: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40870714/ … Frontier0.4.zip
I might be willing to put up a copy of my merged IGS build. It's probably legal since all the games are abandonware by now. But for now, here is a link to the 1.08 patch for Rules of Engagement 2 (the patch that enables the 3 games to work together): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40870714/ROE2_108.zip
Check out my Rules of Engagement 2 Scenario Repository: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5VSO … WDQ&usp=sharing