Big X-com fan, need help.....

[Xcom-Stub]

This is an awesome web sight. I never knew so many people all over felt like I do about this game. I must have played this game a dozen times that goes for TFTD too.

 

I have seen it for sale on e-bay and would like to purchase it but dont knoe if I can play it on my computer. Athlon XP 1900, Win XP Pro, GF4ti4600.

 

I loaded it once a long time ago on a P3 450 and the game just ran way to fast for me to play it right.

 

If I am able then any help from all of you would be great.

 

[Orac]

You may need a slow down util of some sort. There are many out there. Tons to choose from. The most popular seems to be moslo though. Except keep in mine the free version of it is for dos. It's probably going to be the "biz" version that you'll be interested in.

 

Of course another alternative is to go into the BIOS and purposely slow down the computer, however that may be impractical. It's the best way to achieve the smoothest slow down though. The irony of it all is that they quit including turbo switches around the time of the Pentium, when the beginning of where it was needed even more.

 

There's alot to go over to even attempt to begin to describe all the different alternatives and ways to approach that issue. There's many different slow down utils some of them being real versatile and giving you alot of control, while others being more user friendly. Out of all of the ones I've tried, Moslo seems to strike a good middle ground between those two factors - pretty good while also being rather straight forward. Bremze is a real good one, but it tends to take alot of experimentation to find that sweat spot of enough slow down with maximum smoothness.

 

First of all though, you may want to give the Collector's Edition a try. Hell, that may be the only version that works on XP anyway. You may not need a slow down util for that version. You may however need a particular fix for it to get it to run on XP without losing sound without having to resort to turning off a directx related setting (can't remember the exact one off hand).

 

Personally, I'd go search around in the bargain bins and see if you can find the xcom games in the collector's editions at a steal. You'll probably be wasting your time even bothering with the dos version. Especially if your sound card will have pretty good wave table synthesis (which is about the only reason I can think of to go with the dos version - that it's FM synth music sounds so much better than the collector's edition, but like I said, it's kind of moot point if you have decent wave table synth, which you most likley will since almost any fairly recent sound card does, unless you're a real stickler). If you get the dos version, then you'll have some hassles of getting it to run under XP. May even need to resort to a dual boot or just be good at setting compatibility settings in XP. Remember that XP doesn't have dos, it merely emulates it. Anyway, the gist of it, is that the dos version are probably not the way to go for you.

 

Another alternative, and my favorite one, is to use an old system for xcom. That's really the best way IMHO. But it's going to depend upon what you've got to work with. Xcom is one of the reason (not the only one though) to hang onto old hardware. I mean, even if you have only a 14" monitor for your old system, it's actually rather nice that way since xcom is at 320x200 resolution. Looks nicer on a smaller monitor. Less pixelated anyway.

[Xcom-Stub]

You are gona laugh but I had a 486 DX2 sitting in a box for almost forever and a month ago I gave it away.

 

Oldest thing I have sitting around is a P2?, win 98 and a P3 450 win 98.

 

I saw some collector editions on Ebay so Ill get one of those and try and run it on the other systems.