ROTT install issue

[Dreamphaser]

Hi guys,

I've been wanting to play Rott again (the old one)
but not to my surprise, installing didn't work due
to an incompatibility issue.

"this version of this file is not compatible windows 7 etc. "

Does anyone know of this? are there solutions for this so one
can play the game? I've come across some things but none of them
seemed to work. (or I'm not capable of making it work.)

Any help available?

[mrthejoshmon]

If you want to play ROTT 1994 you should consider using DOSBox to run it (and other DOS games).

[BigDickBzzrak]

There are ROTT sourceports, but only one of them is sorta usable-ish: WinROTT.
And even that one sucks, crashes all the time and multiplayer is broken.

So, DOSBox.

[MrFlibble]

Dreamphaser said:

I've been wanting to play Rott again (the old one)
but not to my surprise, installing didn't work due
to an incompatibility issue.

"this version of this file is not compatible windows 7 etc. "

Do you mean the shareware version or the retail one? Both installers are likely to work in DOSBox, but you can also extract the shareware version contents without installation if you rename ROTTSW13.SHR to ROTTSW13.ZIP (or just open it as a ZIP archive in your favourite archive file manager).

bzzrak said:

There are ROTT sourceports, but only one of them is sorta usable-ish: WinROTT.
And even that one sucks, crashes all the time and multiplayer is broken.

The original WinROTT worked for me (on Win8), but with three major issues: 1) you can't run it in windowed mode, 2) in fullscreen, parts of the screen are covered with Windows window graphics) and 3) the HUD and player's weapons are not scaled properly. There's also a bug with random character spawning IIRC.

WinROTT GL does not have any of these issues, but it doesn't use the software renderer (obviously). I played this one a bit and it seems pretty stable.

You can also try the Win32 binaries of ROTT for Linux. It seems to have functionality similar to WinROTT, but again the HUD and weapons are not scaled as they should be. Everything else seems to work fine (but I haven't tested this extensively, and only using the shareware data).

[BigDickBzzrak]

The Linux one couldn't run for more than 2 minutes on my computer.

About weapon scaling, I think you could resize the player's hands using the 5 and 6 keys, at least in WinROTT.

edit: 500th post, whee

[Spocks_Beard]

mrthejoshmon said:

If you want to play ROTT 1994 you should consider using DOSBox to run it (and other DOS games).

I tried so hard, but it just doesn't work...it always wants to install the game.

[mrthejoshmon]

Make a folder:

C:/dosgames

Place install for ROTT

Open DOSBox.

Type mount c c:/dosgames -freesize 1000

Using the -freesize 1000 will give DOSbox 1 gigabyte to work with and now you should be able to correctly install the game (this is necessary), after that then change the directory to the specified freshly installed one and then run ROTT from there.

[Spocks_Beard]

When I try installing it says directory not found or that I can't change the drive...

[Doominator2]

Spocks_Beard said:

When I try installing it says directory not found or that I can't change the drive...

I'll provide a step by step guide for you

1.) make a folder in C:/dosgames (C: being the C drive and dosgames the name of your folder)

2.)Put the Rise of the Triad folder in the "dosgames" folder you just made on the C:/ drive. Look in the ROTT folder and find the exe, take note its name for latter on.

3.)Now open DOSbox, from here you will want to type in mount c c:\dosgames and press enter

4.)The next thing to type in is C:\ and press enter

5.)Now type cd ROTT (or whatever the name of your folder is)

6.)Finally simply type in the name of the exe that you noted down from before and you should be able to play ROTT.

Anyways I hope this helps.

[Dreamphaser]

Alright thank you guys, I got it working with dosbox.
I thought i had the full game somewhere but didn't find
it yet so I started with the shareware.

Ahaa! it's still fun. :)

[Aliotroph?]

Windows likes to throw a fit about copying things to folders in the root of C:. People should use another disk (eg. D:\dosgames) or their user folder (eg. C:\Users\Aliotroph\dosgames).

[MrFlibble]

Dreamphaser said:

Alright thank you guys, I got it working with dosbox.
I thought i had the full game somewhere but didn't find
it yet so I started with the shareware.

Ahaa! it's still fun. :)

Don't forget you can expand the shareware version by adding the three extra levels from the LaserSoft version. 3D Realms made them freely downloadable, you can get the file here (called the Lasersoft ROTT Deluxe Levels). All three levels were made by Tom Hall.

There's a review of these extras by Psychedelic Eyeball:
https://youtu.be/rwnmCDMhr0k

[Edit] I just noticed that he incorrectly states that the new SP levels from the Deluxe Edition are warp-only, whereas actually they are inserted after the regular level 1 and before level 2.

[MrFlibble]

bzzrak said:

The Linux one couldn't run for more than 2 minutes on my computer.

About weapon scaling, I think you could resize the player's hands using the 5 and 6 keys, at least in WinROTT.

What I meant is that the weapons are not stretched vertically to the proper aspect ratio.

However, I played the Linux port (under Linux) a bit more and realised that the aspect ration issue is not addressed at all. Here's a comparison with the original DOS version (DOS screenshot adjusted to 4:3 using the method described here):


It's very obvious that the ankh pickup isn't actually round in the port compared to the DOS version, and the jump pad is of a flatter shape because it is not stretched vertically.

This leaves GLRott as the only accurate port in this respect so far.