Other Spiderweb Games, on Android, right now!

[promethean]

This isn't a lame misleading post about how you can actually kind of sort of play games through something like RDP or Logmein or VNC. This is actually running a few of the older Spiderweb games, on your Android.

 

The playable are are all of the original Exile series, including Blades. Here's how:

 

First, this was all done on the Kindle Fire, so you're mileage may vary, but as Android hardware goes it's fairly middle of the road, nothing too cutting edge, so most higher end phones and any of the major tablets should work about as well. My recommendation is for a tablet, but if you can manage to enjoy playing on the smaller screens too, well, good on you.

 

What you'll need:

1. Dosbox on PC. You'll do your setup here, for no other reason than I assume your PC is faster than your Android device. There's no reason you couldn't otherwise do it all native in Android.

 

2. Windows 3.11 install disk images. Dig out your closets and raid the garage, we're going old school. You'll be playing Exile on windows 3.11 on dosbox on android. I've read SciFi novels (Rainbow's End) which predicted this type of embedded recursive emulation and thought, "Why wouldn't they just use all their technology to find an easier way?" Well, the future's here, and it's just as kludgy as predicted, but in this case it works, and it works really well. There is no significant lag, stuttering, sound artifacts, or anything.

 

3. Prepare an empty directory to install win311 into, boot up DosBox, mount the install media in one virtual drive and you directory on the C:\ drive, keep ALL of the default drivers and settings the installer recommends, and let loose on the nostalgia because here comes the only decently stable consumer Windows system until XP hit the shelves.

 

4. Visit this page for links to a few necessary drivers and other useful goodies. In particular, I recommend the S3 video drivers and the SoundBlaster audio drivers. Everything else is unnecessary, but if you want to do anything else in the win 3.11 environment, I recommend Win32S for some basic 32-bit support and WinG for some basic pre-DirectX support: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=9405

 

5. On Android you need DosBox Turbo. I tried aDosBox, which is free, but it significantly under performs compared to Turbo and was too slow to be usable. anDosBox is another choice, and their speed is probably about the same as Turbo, but it's interface is not as friendly or configurable.

 

6. Assuming your Win311 is complete, just transfer that whole directory structure over to your Android device to wherever you choose to run things from.

 

7. Last, make sure your dosbox.conf is properly attuned to your win311 install. I have removed all the comment lines (for space) from my own and pasted it below as an example. It mounts an additional directory to the D:, but that is not really necessary if you don't want that. Otherwise, it allows you to easily access anything on your device. Beware though: Windows 3.11 didn't have much in the way of file protections to prevent accidental mishaps with your file structure, and it was not uncommon for poorly written programs to ruin or even delete entire disk volumes. So, some sandboxing is prudent.

 

8. That's it, you're ready to go! Download the demos of any of the Exile series, install, realize they're awesome, and purchase full copies!

 

LAST: You'll be tempted, as I was, to reach too far. To want the Exile remakes, Nethergate, maybe a Geneforge. Near as I can tell, it's simply impossible in 3.11 unless you want to rewrite drivers and perhaps additional work as well. They really seem to require a real version of DirectX, WinG is not enough, and that means Win95. Win95 will run, and run decently, at least on the Kindle Fire. But I spent days tracking down fixes for problems, and while the ultimate result was a usable Win95 system w/ basic DirectX 1 support (yes, version 1 only: 2 & 3 made things unstable) the result was still that Nethergate & Geneforge ran too slow to be at all playable, as in 10 second to move space, and Avernum wouldn't start at all.

 

Good luck!

 

Example dosbox.conf:

 

[sdl]

fullscreen=true

fulldouble=false

fullresolution=original

windowresolution=original

output=overlay

autolock=true

sensitivity=100

waitonerror=true

priority=higher,normal

mapperfile=mapper.txt

usescancodes=true

 

[dosbox]

language=

machine=svga_s3

captures=capture

memsize=63

 

[render]

frameskip=0

aspect=false

scaler=normal2x

 

[cpu]

core=auto

cycles=max

cycleup=500

cycledown=20

 

[mixer]

nosound=false

rate=22050

blocksize=2048

prebuffer=10

 

[midi]

mpu401=intelligent

device=default

config=

 

[sblaster]

sbtype=sb16

sbbase=220

irq=5

dma=1

hdma=5

mixer=true

oplmode=auto

oplrate=22050

 

[gus]

 

[speaker]

pcspeaker=true

pcrate=22050

tandy=auto

tandyrate=22050

disney=true

 

[joystick]

 

[serial]

 

[dos]

xms=true

ems=true

umb=true

keyboardlayout=none

 

[autoexec]

mount d ./sdcard/

mount c ./sdcard/dbgames/win31/

c:

cd windows

echo type win then return to start

[Slawbug]

One of these topics is enough, I think. Please see here to comment.