AD&D Core Rules CD-Rom sorta works under wine.

[capheind]

I was able to find and run my Core Rules CD-Rom from 96, and surprisingly it does sorta work on my OSX desktop running wine. But, the applications (like the character generator) stop responding a few screens in, and the movie doesn't play. If anyone wants a trip down memory lane I could post some screenshots later.

[capheind]

NOTE: For copyright reasons, and my own inability to pay for any lawsuits arising from such action I won't be posting copies of anything actually contained on the disk here, or anywhere. Sorry. A little searching though would show that these files are readily available from those less concerned with copyright than I.

Well since nobody has responded it probably doesn't matter that I still haven't been able to screencap or screenshot this yet. Although i've had quite the time fiddling with it.

I'm a GNU/Linux geek who's made the transition to OSX since I was given the Mac for free. I don't currently have any windows computers at my disposal except a Win7 box. Putting a Win 3.1/95 disk in said win7 computer only made it look at me funny. I did have a Windows XP VM on VMWare, but I also have 2gb of ram on the computer running VMWare and as such it runs just slightly faster than a snail on full trot. So I tried it under wine, and after some fiddling I could get a few screens to display, but nothing beyond that, and the video wouldn't play.

Remembering that FreeDOS (http://www.freedos.org/) was now able to host Windows 3.1, and having Windows 3.1 files available to me, I created another virtual machine only to find that you can't get windows into 386 enhanced mode on FreeDOS. Still its really cool how far FreeDOS has come. I tried DOSBOX (http://www.dosbox.com/ the Boxer package specifically http://boxerapp.com/) but no dice, Win 3.1 would run, and would run in enhanced mode, but would crash with a "21" error every time I tried to start core rules.

I was finally able to get my Windows XP Virtual Machine to run, and was able to get Core rules running under that in Windows 95 Emulation Mode. Sorta. The introductory video still doesn't work right.

For those who aren't familiar with it, the AD&D Core Rules CD-Rom came out in 1996 during the flurry of 2nd ed. AD&D products that eventually sank TSR. Despite being labeled simply AD&D the disk contained RTF and HLP formatted and slightly revised versions of the AD&D 2nd ed. Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, Monstrous Manual, Arms & Equipment Guide, and Tome of Magic. In addition there was software making extensive use of the HLP formatted versions of these books, and bitmaps stored on the disk in windows BMP format.

Try as I might, I couldn't get the higher quality AVI of the introductory video (named TOUR.AVI) to play on any of the platforms tried. I could get the Lower Quality version to play by externally opening it in an older version of WMP (Windows Media Player 7 I believe). Oddly I couldn't get the on-disk MVI Player to play the TOUR.MVI file on any of the platforms tried, whatever this format is nothing seems to recognize it, and the player doesn't work on win XP's command.com or any of the Open Source DOS systems tried. The video has been posted to Youtube by another nostalgic soul though (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jslR11hhrYY).

HLP files are a pain, and I can see now why they weren't widely used outside of Help documentation for applications. Practically nothing but a windows 9x or XP help viewer seemed to understand these, after I confirmed that they were in fact identical to the RTF files with the exception of hyperlinks I became somewhat less interested in them. None of these HLP files seem to contain any images, rather the images are displayed by on-disk applications, and when you click for more information the relevant part of the HLP file is opened.

Aside from the menu based applications for character generation and monster customization (gads I remember using that to stat up all sorts of things) there are two full applications that came with this, a nifty (if easily superseded) map making utility, and a RTF word processor called the Handout Generator.

Its a neat piece of gaming history to have for as long as the plastic holds out, although as windows XP is phased out it'll become an increasingly more painful to run the applications. Still, it does bring back memories from my own young days of gaming (I grew up on AD&D and only discovered OD&D later). I'll try to post some sort of Screencaps or Screenshots when I can wrangle it. I also need to check this boards policy on linking before I post links to the video or any of the software mentioned.

Update: Nothing in the forum rules precludes non-solicitory links so I added them.

[Lareth]

mine actually workes fine with Windows XP

[Goblinoid Games]

I remember this. I have it and the Dragon archive packed away somewhere, though for Dragon I just browse the PDFs on my hard drive, I don't mess with the program. As I recall is was very buggy anyway.

I've been playing around with Ubuntu for a little while; I have a dual install with windows 7 on my laptop. I really like Ubuntu and all the great software available, but the main thing keeping me back from making the full switch is I have a lot of publishing files that would need reworking in the new software (very time consuming), plus the programs I use for work are not compatible, and they are memory hogs that I doubt would work with wine. So I'm trying to alter my behavior where I do some things with Ubuntu and maybe over time I can make more of a switch. Man, I wish Ubuntu had been this great 10 years ago, because I could have gotten into it full bore. With Libre Office and such you would basically never need to buy software again. It's high quality stuff.

[capheind]

mine actually workes fine with Windows XP

The video works? I know the GUI works, but it was the High-res video I was having trouble getting to work right.