J Arcane
04-04-2010, 03:46 AM
GOG.com is running a spring sale on a bunch of games, among them Fallout 1, for a mere $3. Normally I'd avoid this like the plague, because Interplay are a bunch of crooks, and their recent illegal re-releases are likely to get shutdown soon as the result of the lawsuit still pending over the subject.
But hey, it's $3, and it promised to run on my Windows, something I'd been having trouble accomplishing. Normally under Windows 7, it doesn't like the 8-bit color mode and all the colors get screwed up. Used to be turning on all the compatibility settings fixed this, now for some reason it doesn't..
I plop down the 3 bucks, download the game, install it, but I don't get the chance to play it as I wind up going out for dinner or whatever. Get back to it later, fire it up, and I'm immediately greeted by a very familiar sight.
The font's fucked up, you see. The big yellow letters it uses for the menus are not so big anymore, in fact they're quite narrow, as if the font scaling is off and it's trying to squeeze the normal width font into half the space.
I know this bug. I've encountered it before. It's what happens when you have a European version of the game and install the US patch on it. I ran into it years back after I'd lost my hard copy and went seeking one on the pirate waves.
The readme file it installs is the one from the US 1.2 compilation version, but reports from the GOG forums indicate this is apparently the Euro version in truth, because the children are unkillable/gone like in the German version. It would seem that what GOG/Interplay have done for this version is take the UK/Euro version, slap a US patch on it, and then tweaked the ddraw.dll included to circumvent the color bug.
The forums have an FAQ on how to install all the fan patches to get the children readded (something that IIRC is important to be able to finish the game), but none of these fix the font mismatch.
So now I'm running a pirate copy once again, despite having purchased a semi-legit copy of the game, because otherwise it doesn't work right.
Oh, and it turns out if you install the hi-res patch, you can change the color depth and resolution and this fixes the color scrambling.
But hey, it's $3, and it promised to run on my Windows, something I'd been having trouble accomplishing. Normally under Windows 7, it doesn't like the 8-bit color mode and all the colors get screwed up. Used to be turning on all the compatibility settings fixed this, now for some reason it doesn't..
I plop down the 3 bucks, download the game, install it, but I don't get the chance to play it as I wind up going out for dinner or whatever. Get back to it later, fire it up, and I'm immediately greeted by a very familiar sight.
The font's fucked up, you see. The big yellow letters it uses for the menus are not so big anymore, in fact they're quite narrow, as if the font scaling is off and it's trying to squeeze the normal width font into half the space.
I know this bug. I've encountered it before. It's what happens when you have a European version of the game and install the US patch on it. I ran into it years back after I'd lost my hard copy and went seeking one on the pirate waves.
The readme file it installs is the one from the US 1.2 compilation version, but reports from the GOG forums indicate this is apparently the Euro version in truth, because the children are unkillable/gone like in the German version. It would seem that what GOG/Interplay have done for this version is take the UK/Euro version, slap a US patch on it, and then tweaked the ddraw.dll included to circumvent the color bug.
The forums have an FAQ on how to install all the fan patches to get the children readded (something that IIRC is important to be able to finish the game), but none of these fix the font mismatch.
So now I'm running a pirate copy once again, despite having purchased a semi-legit copy of the game, because otherwise it doesn't work right.
Oh, and it turns out if you install the hi-res patch, you can change the color depth and resolution and this fixes the color scrambling.