Like an Onion Skin

I saw that Valve was offering a cheap bundle of all the old X-COM games on Steam, and I decided to buy them, hoping they’d run in wine.  The Steam version was too new to show up on wine’s compatibility list, but it was less than $14, so I gambled.  Out of 5 games, 4 run in wine well enough to play, and 1 does nothing.  Here’s the insanity: The older DOS games were not actually ported to Windows, so the Steam version includes a Windows-based DOS emulator.  In my case, I’m running Linux and launching wine, which runs the Windows program, which launches the Windows-based DOS emulator, which runs the old DOS game.  And it works.  You’d sound like a zealot or a crazy person if you suggested that I try to run it that way on purpose, but this only serves to highlight how good wine is now.

2 thoughts on “Like an Onion Skin”

  1. I recently played Solar Winds in dosbox and it ran pretty well. I ran it at 3x resolution and occasionally had sound issues that required me to restart dosbox, but I thought it was great.

  2. I just checked, and the Steam versions use DOSBox under the hood. Sweet! I tried dosemu a long time ago and nearly gave up computers because of it. I’ll keep DOSBox in mind for any other old games I have lying around.

    Incidentally, I still have the 3.5″ floppies for X-COM, but the quick and painless download of the Steam version, all set to go, was worth the price.

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