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[Nadaka]

I do, in fact I just downloaded a dos emulator, installed windows 3.1 and began playing it again. It works surprisingly well, in glorious 256 color and and rich midi sound! Nothing says "you loose" like hitting a star with no planets when you embark. Unfortunately the game is easier than I remember.

"How can I be of assistance commander?"

I may end up having to make a better outpost like game one of these days.

[Mephisto]

I've played both Outpost 1 and 2. Fun games. I could never really get into either of them, though. Possibly because I could never figure out food production and half of my crew starved.

[Sir Edmund]

yeah i remember that game(i think), my dad got it on some pirate cd. I remember repeatedly dieing and not really understanding it, though i did like the music though i think it only played the planets:mars over and over again.

P.S. a really good site for abandon ware is http://www.abandonia.com/  and also its sister site http://www.reloaded.org/  has quite a few very good free ware games many of which are based on dos games

[Jazz]

Played both games long ago. Still vividly remember how dumb the computer's AI was in Outpost 2. Fortunately, the colony building/survival aspects made it into quite a decent game.

[Soulwynd]

I liked the first one a lot. The second one became too much about whacking other people around.

[Sowelu]

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES.

Those games defined my ideals of a perfect game, both of them.

Outpost 1 was absurdly buggy and it was way more fun when I was younger...kind of like a lot of games I guess.  But I loved it SO much, and designed lots of knockoffs or similar games (while in grade school, which basically meant a lot of doodles).  "Alien Legacy" is a somewhat different genre but a very similar, though higher teched, theme as Outpost 1 and I very highly recommend it.  "Moonbase" was also similar.

I loved all the techs and all the different things you could end up building...but again I swear it was better documented when I played it when I was younger.  And apparently roads never actually worked?  Huh.  It does get very boring when you know what you're doing, sadly.

I'm currently, in my spare time, working on a text-based MU*-style game that is so very inspired by Outpost 1.  (And Alien Legacy and Moonbase.)

Outpost 2 was *FUN* but killed your entire weekend like NOTHING ELSE IN THE HISTORY OF ANYTHING.  Colony games could take like eight hours.  I liked that game a lot although the campaign felt a little too hard (the first time through most missions you were utterly doomed, because you didn't know how to prioritize and how to time things perfectly, which meant that the lava eruption would leave you two thousand minerals shy of building the vehicles you needed, or catch your structure factory when you had a command center, vehicle factory, structure factory, tokomak...but no common ore smelter.)

Outpost 1 was awesome storywise but a letdown in gameplay, but hey it was seriously awesome as a kid.  Outpost 2 shipped with two novellas--one chapter for each mission--and was a great waste of time, and even good online...heck I might try finding an opponent again one day.  Yay turning the lights off on your Starflare Lynxes.

...

Go get Alien Legacy.

[Mephisto]

quote:Originally posted by Sowelu:
<STRONG>"Alien Legacy" is a somewhat different genre but a very similar, though higher teched, theme as Outpost 1 and I very highly recommend it.
</STRONG>

No way. My Alien Legacy CD is ON TOP OF my Outpost 2 CD at the moment. I picked both games out of the "Almost ready for the garbage" bin at a Goodwill store a bit over a year ago. I never thought I would actually hear others talk about them.

Here's a site that's been in my bookmarks for a while and has quite a bit of info. More importantly, it's still active. http://www.outpost-universe.net/
That site also has a wiki with yet more information about the Outpost series in it, plus the tutorials if you happen to have lost your manual.

[Sowelu]

Tell me if you ever got your CD version of Alien Legacy to run?  I got it on 3 1/4" disks when it originally came out--it took up like 10% of my hard drive at the time...  I think I lost it at some point, and tried to get a CD version off eBay (Hey, voices!), but it never worked for me!  I think the copy protection, or maybe just the weird CD drivers they used in general, were the issue--it couldn't find my CD drive.  Of course this was in...probably Windows 98, and then XP.  I gave DosBox a try at the time but had no luck; that was an old version...

Disk version of Alien Legacy always worked great and that's the copy I have again now.  I'd love to try out the CD version.

Someday I'll make a FAQ for GameFAQs that lists the location of *all* the energy and ore resources, and science and other stuff, at all tech levels :/

[ April 10, 2008: Message edited by: Sowelu ]

[Mephisto]

Alien Legacy ran flawlessly. A relative gave me an old Windows ME machine when they upgraded. It installed and ran with no problems. This had around a 667 MHz CPU and either 32 or 64MB RAM. After the hard drive died, I bought another and installed a version of TinyXP on it and have never gotten around to attempting to install Alien Legacy on a different computer. Sorry.

If it didn't run in 98, I don't see why it would run in ME. The system requirements lists DOS as a requirement, not Windows. Anything up to and including ME should work. Have you tried DOSBox or something similar? There's a command you can use to mount your CD drive. It's not the normal command used for hard drives, but I can't remember what it is. I have installed a DOS game in DOSBox before, using a CD.

[McDoomhammer]

Found it in a charity shop a few weeks ago and picked it up for a dollar, but I couldn't get it to run.  A pity, it looked interesting.

[Nadaka]

http://www.classicdosgames.com/tutorials/advanceddosbox.html

To get dosbox to run outpost I had to go with an unofficial branch that includes videocard driver support for more than 16 colors.

I never did manage to get a copy of outpost 2 to check out, but I still have a couple of outpost cds from when years ago.

[Mephisto]

Outpost 2 needs no special configuration or programs to run in Vista. This thread prompted me to reinstall it. I'll try Alien Legacy in a bit.

Update: Alien Legacy installs with no problems in Vista. The sound is slowed down a bit, but it's still enjoyable and the voices are understandable. This also required no special configuration or programs. Just remember to set both sound options to the default settings when installing. It will say something about "Soundblaster blah blah (or 100% compatible)"

Of course, this may be useless if you're running XP. An interesting side note is that these games are so old, they can't see your whole hard drive. My 212 GB partition showed up at just over 700 MB free when there's around 44 GB. No biggie as the optimal install is only 60 MB.

[ April 10, 2008: Message edited by: Mephisto ]

[Sowelu]

Installs just fine, but...

code:

DOS/4GW Professional Protected Mode Run-time  Version 1.97
Copyright (c) Rational Systems, Inc. 1990-1994
Place the Alien Legacy CD in the CD-ROM drive.  If you cannot locate the
appropriate CD, type [ESCAPE] to exit to DOS.  Otherwise, type any other key
to continue.

Even happens in DosBOX.

...Ooh!  Until I mounted the CD right.  It needs to be mounted in DosBOX, and it needs to have the right volume name!

Huh, the new intro video looks pretty bad...the robot looks totally wrong, the cryo is all wrong, and the surface colony 3D is terrible...

... I was afraid of this ...

FIRST OFFICER PATEL DOES NOT SOUND LIKE THAT!!  NEITHER DOES THAT PSYCHO COLONEL ROMANOV!  HIS VOICE IS TOTALLY LOWER!

And something else is horribly wrong here...  What is it, I can't t--

They...they couldn't have...THEY CHANGED THE MUSIC!  The music was one of the best things ABOUT the original game!  Oh my god, how could they change the music, this new stuff is terrible, now I know why all the reviews kept panning the music!

*sighs, heads over to sector E-7* At least the bomb-scan exploit is still there ... What the heck, why is there a little white square over all the sectors I've visited?  Ugh!  It doesn't even depend on whether the sector is clear or not!  That's really going to mess with me...It clutters up my pretty planet!    

*goes to quit* And they even got rid of the dorky photos of the programming team on the options screen?!    

This is an utter travesty.  :/

One of the most memorable things about that game was the lonely, solitary music on the solar system screen.  Most of the music in fact.  And the music on the deck when talking to your officers was awesome too.  Now it's been replaced by this weird..generic..bubbly generic music that totally throws off the whole feeling of the game.  The new movies don't help either.  How could they do that?  I'd consider giving my CD version to Goodwill, but it would be too cruel to whoever finds it.

NEVER AGAIN.

Edit:  Okay, now that I've calmed down and gnawed on some yummy yummy celery, let me try to explain my rage a little better.  Sierra is a company that's known for its creative ability, or used to be at least.  It's kind of like LucasArts, there.  They were good at creative vision.  They are ALSO extremely good at 2d graphics, they are well known for it, and also for their hand-drawn animation.  So they had this great game called Alien Legacy, with a great and very cohesive creative vision to it...and then some other guy steps in, says "Great game, let's take the creative vision and TEAR IT TO SHREDS.  We don't need mood music!  Swap it out for something else, because it's MIDI, and god forbid we remaster that MIDI with real music, it has to be replaced completely!  We need FMVs, because they are NEW and HIP, but we don't need them to look ANYTHING like the rest of the game!  I don't like the blocky robots that the rest of the game uses...USE MINE INSTEAD I OWN THE GAME NOW AND THE PREVIOUS ART DESIGNERS CAN GO DIE!"  I want to meet the guy who redesigned Alien Legacy for the CD version, and kick him in the balls.

[ April 11, 2008: Message edited by: Sowelu ]

[Jurassiced]

wow i still have Outpost 2 in its box floating around my room somewhere hmmm just cuase of this i will have to go bring it out of the abyss

[Boksi]

Shiitake meat synthesizer.

Most memorable thing about Alien Legacy in my opinion.