A while back, a friend of mine recommended that I play an old Star Trek game from 1996 called Star Trek: Borg. It's a moderately short interactive movie which has some interesting puzzles and features John de Lancie reprising his role as Q. It sounded like fun, and I love playing old games, so I decided to give it a shot.
I say I love playing old games, but really there's more to it than that. What I really love is figuring out how to play old games. I've spent many hours tweaking settings in a Playstation emulator trying to optimize Resident Evil. I dual-boot 32-bit Windows XP and 64-bit Windows 7 so that I can play the games that run in one and not the other. One of the twelve icons I have on my desktop is a shortcut to DosBox. It's the thrill of getting something working that didn't work before that really gets me excited.
Therefore, I apologize for geeking out a bit. The rest of this post will be rather technical and boring. Spoiler alert: I got Star Trek: Borg working, and it was hard.
What made Star Trek: Borg interesting was that any attempts to get it working in a modern operating system were pointless. Upon installing the game, the installer makes three checks. The first is to ensure that the host operating system is Windows 95, the second is to ensure that the resolution is set to 640 x 480, and the third is to ensure that the color settings are set to 16-bit color. These three checks meant that none of my usual tricks were going to work. I was going to have to get a Windows 95 machine.
Of course, it didn't have to be a real Windows 95 machine. Getting Windows 95 working on modern hardware is pretty much impossible, and I was not going to buy an antique computer to play an FMV game. So I decided to set up a virtual machine running Windows 95.
That was as far as I got before I started running into problems.
The first thing that I needed to do was get some virtualization software. As a student, I have access to Microsoft's Dreamspark program, which gives out free software to people with valid student IDs. One of the programs that they offer is Virtual PC 2007.
Perfect.
So I downloaded Virtual PC, but apparently it doesn't work in 64-bit operating systems, and I wanted to do everything in Windows 7, so switching to XP wasn't an option. I happened to have an older version of VMware Workstation, so I decided to use that instead. I also had a physical copy of the Windows 95 CD-ROM that I found in a drawer when my family decided to sell their house a couple of years ago. I installed VMware Workstation, created a new Windows 95 machine, and inserted my disk.
Nothing happened.
I played with the boot order, checked the settings again, made sure that the virtual CD-ROM drive was reading properly, and tried again. Still nothing. I was a bit stumped, but I decided that it had to be the disk that wasn't working. To test this, I created a new identical machine and installed Windows 98 on it. It worked like a charm. Now I knew that there had to be something wrong with the Windows 95 disk, so I went off in search of another copy. What I found was the thirteen floppy disks for the original build of Windows 95. I hesitated to do this because I knew that the original build not only had issues that were fixed in later releases, but also that it came without a web browser. That meant that it would be tricky to do things like download drivers and patches.
Well, I did it anyway, and the installation really went off without a hitch. The problem came when I tried to install the VMware Tools that come with Workstation. Included in the VMware Tools are the virtual video drivers that would allow me to set my resolution and color scheme. Whenever I tried to install the VMware Tools, Windows would give me the all-to-familiar "illegal operation" dialog box that, honestly, I had almost forgotten about. There wasn't too much I could do. I couldn't get online to download a solution, and if I couldn't install the video drivers, I wouldn't be able to set my color scheme beyond 16 colors, and I needed to get up to 16-bit color.
So I went off in search of another copy of Windows 95. This time I found the latest release that I could, the OEM Service Release 2.5, which was released in late 1997. This version came with Internet Explorer, was released on CD-ROM so I didn't have to keep switching floppies out, and was much more stable. It also came with Hover!, a capture-the-flag style 3D hovercar game that I sunk quite a few summer afternoons into as a kid. That last one didn't really help me achieve my goal, but it was an added bonus. This time installation ran smoothly and the VMware Tools installation ran, but there were errors. Specifically, the video drivers didn't install fully. That was okay though, because they provided instructions at the end of the installer on how to install the drivers manually. I did so and rebooted. Much better.
To test things, I got out my original Fury3 disk. It installed fine, but I noticed that there was no sound.
Sigh.
The sound drivers hadn't installed properly either. This one wasn't easy. I spent several hours browsing online before I found a solution. Apparently, sometimes the sound drivers just don't work in Windows 95. Imagine that. I eventually found a patch that installed different sound drivers. I uninstalled the default sound card, manually set the default to the new one, booted up Fury3, and was treated to this. Awesome.
By the way, as a side-note, Fury3 is a really fun game. I had forgotten that too.
Anyway, with all that done, I set my resolution to 640x480 and put in the Star Trek: Borg CD, excited to finally get to play something I had worked so hard for.
But I had forgotten something. When VMware Tools installed the video drivers, it gave me tons of option for resolution, but only three for color palettes: 16 color, 256 color, and 32-bit color. Of course, when you have 32-bit color why would you ever downgrade to 16-bit color? Except I needed 16-bit color to bypass the check that Star Trek: Borg made.
I was stumped. I had no idea what to do. I did Google search after Google search, and none if it yielded anything. My friend had told me about a patch for the game that just bypassed the three checks, but at the time I told him that wanted to run the game in its native condition. Now that option was looking better and better all the time. I was depressed. I had put all of this effort into something, and I had hit a dead end. I went to bed with the intention of asking my friend for the patch in the morning.
The next morning, I sat down at my computer to do my usual daily routine and noticed something that I had left up the night before. It was the VMware documentation for setting screen color depth. I'm not sure why I hadn't noticed it the night before. According to that documentation, VMware Tools would enable only 16 colors, 256 colors, and whatever color palette the host operating system was using (in my case, 32-bit). With this information, I set my Windows 7 color palette to 16-bit and restarted VMware Workstation. No change. But I wasn't ready to give up yet because now I knew what I was looking for. After a few more searches, I found a small app that would automatically change the virtual machine's operating system's palette to a specified color depth. I downloaded it and set it to 16-bit color.
Star Trek: Borg installed and ran.
I was so excited. It worked, it had sound, and the I did it without modifying the game at all. It was a wonderful feeling.
You might think I'm insane for all of this, but that's okay. It was worth it.
On to the next project.
