Month: January 2025

The traditional Spanish point and click adventure game studio running a promo know for a bundle of all of their point & click adventures (minus “Yesterday Origins”), let’s look some at the titles which need some tweaking to get them working on your newest OS.

Let’s start with “Runaway: A Road Adventure” & “Runaway: The Dream Of The Turtle” .

Simply enable Low-Res graphics mode, as the default Hi-Res mode does display the games only in B&W.

Another interesting contender is “Yesterday“, which actually has been censored for the digital storefront releases of Steam and GoG, in contrast to the original DVD 2012 release which came uncensored when originally hitting the shelves, which unfortunately also introduced some sound bug.

Luckily, the almost 1 Gig that had been removed can be patched back in, more info about this can be found in the archived article of Steams Play Gamers.

Last but not least, beware of fail positives for the “Plugins” folder of “Yesterday Origins“.

For me it was Comodo Internet Security 2025 Premium falsely reporting the 2 files “MAU.DLL” and “dbdata.exe” from the game’s subfolder “YesterdayOrigins_Data\Plugins” as malware.

When I restored them from Quarantine and added them to the excluded files list, the game ran flawlessly!

Back in April 2024, I have started my research on how to get Lemmings games to run under modern hardware and Windows 11 24H2. I did however halt it in favor of other pressing issues! Now is the time to resume it and write down my findings for the afterworld!

My research started with finding the wonderful RGB Classic Games Lemmings Page!

Especially the availability chart really helped me out big time!

Let’s start with:

“Lemmings Paintball” from the “Let’s Go Crazy With Lemmings” collection.

The hint from 11 years ago to change the desktop resolution to 640 x 480 is no longer viable in a world where the minimal resolution for Windows is now 800 x 600. There are more elegant solutions nowadays.

There is also no “No CD Patch” so keep your original copy handy when the desire hit to play this game.
Actually, the very viable DXWnd community broke off a whole discussion about running this issue, and despite research on this issue, stopped on  2022-01-16, there is a config available that does let you play the game stretched.

However, in Win 11 24H2 particularly, the solution is very finicky, as it does not work as soon as one of the avi videos of the game plays (e.g. the intro!) at which point the main window stays in windowed mode and only when the intro is skipped in the right moment and the missing permission dialog of DXWnd is prompted well in time, I could get the main window to run in borderless Fullscreen. It worked for me 4 times, after which it always resulted in one of the following two error messages:

The solution in Win11 24H2 is considerably straight forward and easy indeed!:

Setting the compatibility settings of “LEMBALL.EXE” to the following:

Next up is “Lemmings for Windows” from the “Let’s Go Crazy With Lemmings” collection.

This 1995 Windows release based on the original DOS release is installing and working just fine out of the box, it also scales nicely on my 2K screen resolution with no hiccup, nothing to see here, time to move on.

Hold on, there is one little thing: The online help does not work anymore as the .HLP format is no longer supported in Windows 10 and 11. The solution here is to copy the old “winhlp32.exe” from a Windows XP installation (as newer versions require Internet Explorer to be present to work). I took one from a WinXP 64bit installation I have on another HDD. Use Unlocker to rename the old Windows 11 version to something like “winhlp32.exe.bak” and then copy it from the root of the Windows XP installation to the root of Windows 11’s folder.

Next up is “Lemmings 3D“, this can be either the standalone version or the one from the “Let’s Go Crazy With Lemmings” collection.

This config is based off the latest DOSBox version to date, i.e. 0.74-3

Common places on the internet describe specific cpu cycles to be used for certain CPU speeds and using CD Audio in combination with General Midi.
This is no longer the case.

Instead, the currently best config for DOSBox 0.74-3 for Lemmings 3D is:

CPU Cycles=max
sbtype=sb1

In the game setup, select CD Audio = No

Any other config will cause the sound to stutter and the game to run slower than necessary

Next up is “Lemmings 3” from the “Lemings 1-3 neon edition” collection, also known as “All New World of Lemmings” in Europe.

This requires the same DOSBox configuration as Lemmings 3D above, quote:

CPU Cycles=max
sbtype=sb1

However, CD Audio cannot be disabled or else you have no music.
Take note, that the game has a long history of not running well in DOSBox at all. It is playable, but you will have some crackling noises during gameplay.

Next up is “Lemmings 1” from the “Lemmings 1-3 neon edition” collection, which unfortunately I could not get to work with working music, not even by lowering CPU cycles. It is a known fact that some versions of this game do not work with music in DOSBOX. It worked when I tried it with another version of the game!
Also, the official DOSBox has a graphic glitch after the main menu of Lemmings. For a glitch free experience, I highly suggest using DOSBox SVN DAUN instead.

As for “Lemmings 2” from the “Lemmings 1-3 neon edition” collection, the following sound config was required for the sound to work:

sbtype=sb1
oplemu=compat

For the game itself, it had to be installed and as sound hardware, soundblaster had to be selected for music.

for CPU cylcles

cycles=max

was required, or else the game would crash during the intro.

At the moment, Steam offers the 3 games in a pack pretty affordably.

While Still “Life itself” does run without any hitches and modifications even in the correct aspect ratio on my 2K 16:9 monitor, “Still Life 2” and the first part of the series from 2002 aka “Post Mortem” are a different beast.

For “Still Life 2” to run:

I’ve actually used the guide of Steam user Factualvermin intended for “Still Life” to get it working.

However, since this guide is 5 years old, even in the Extended Mode, some options are missing or changed.
Hence I am providing here the updated version to the guide featuring current screenshots!:

1. Get DXWnd from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dxwnd/
2. After installing DXWnd, you can go ahead and from the edit tab on the top of the page on the starting window, click Edit > Add.
3. You will be brought to a new window and to the first tab called Main. Here you can name the DXWnd profile and set the paths for the executable as shown below. Also ensure that your window looks like the one below:

4. in my case of using a 2K monitor, the picked resolution is my best bet for getting the most out of the screen here

5. we’re gonna have the game run in 4:3 with vsync which will fix animation bugs and picture quality

btw don’t try and launch the game through DxWnd just save those settings and leave it running, then run the game though steam

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For “Post Mortem” to run:

I’ve actually used the guide of Steam user DarkSide but modified it a bit so it plays nicely on my 2K monitor (else the game window will be the size of a postage stamp!).

1. Download  dgVoodoo2
2. Unzip the archive and copy “dgVoodooCpl.exe” along with the contents of MS/x86 folder into the Post Mortem main folder:

3. Launch dgVoodooCpl.exe and set the settings like on the images below (make sure you added a new running instance / config folder setup for the game beforehand!):

In the “DirectX” tab:

The game will run in 4:3 screen aspect ratio with V-sync on (no tearing), antialiasing and anisotropic filtration.