Ever wonder which game spawned the typical base-building, unit managing RTS format you see in countless games? Well, here it is! Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at Dune II, developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Interactive around the end of 1992. This episode covers how the game is played, how to obtain the game, and how to get it working best on modern systems using DOSBox. ------------------------------------------ Additional Information and Corrections: * To grab a copy of the game from the Completely Free Software website simply follow the link below, though bear in mind that nowadays the website frequently goes offline for whatever reason for large stretches of time, thus you may need to use the WayBack Machine instead: http://www.completelyfreesoftware.com/gg1_w31.html * Some people have been reporting that the file download at CFS is coming up as a malware/virus. I can assure you it's not and that those are false positives. Part of the reason this may be happening is because the CFS website isn't well known and the file was updated not long before my review went live to add a missing data file, the filedate of which is a little wonky but is the correct file nonetheless. * Another option for playing the game in a more modern way is to download one of the remakes out there, of which there are several, NONE of which use the original source code, much to my surprise! (Originally posted that they did..., whoops.) Anyways, a good article which has a bunch of them compiled together in one spot can be found here: http://www.indieretronews.com/2012/12/dune-2-history-and-remakes.html * Turns out Tandy audio IS supported... but the game will refuse to use it unless it explicitly detects a Tandy machine in place. DOSBox emulates Tandy machines easily enough, but doesn't provide higher graphics support for EGA/MCGA/VGA/etc. when it does, so you can get the Tandy audio working in DOSBox if you don't mind having a blank screen. Alternatively, there might be some unofficial builds of DOSBox out there which can emulate a Tandy machine type with a better graphics device, but I don't know enough about those builds to say for certain. I'm also told the Tandy 3-Voice sound in this game isn't so great so it probably isn't worth the effort to get working. :P * I was actually playing v1.0, not the patched version, over the course of this review. It's possible some of the things I discussed were fixed in the patched version, although from what I understand even that version is still buggy. There's also a fan-made patch out there which fixes even more issues so that's another thing to go looking up if you're so inclined. * Although you might think the unit-limit is memory related, it's actually not. If you know how to edit the mission files you can jack the unit limits as high as you want. Have fun manually controlling 100 units though... :P ------------------------------------------ Pixelmusement Website: http://www.pixelships.com ADG on Pixelmusement: http://www.pixelships.com/adg Alphabetical Index of ADG Episodes: http://www.pixelships.com/adg/index2.html