Outpost 1.5 Download & Run

[leeor_net]

It just occurred to me that not everybody knows to look into some of the other threads to find this.

A few months ago me and Lev talked about how to make it easy for people to get Outpost working on modern 64-Bit systems. I put together a package that uses DOSBox and Windows 3.11 that works on all modern versions of Windows:

http://outpost2.net/files/op1/outpost1.5_emu.zip

Basically, just extract the archive and run either of the two batch files in there. The 'High Performance' batch file is for newer computers that can run at higher clock cycles vs the plain one which is designed for older machines (like my laptop).


UPDATE | JAN 16th, 2019
I made a few tweaks to the package. I combined the 'high performance' and 'regular' variants -- with some tweaks to DOSBox's configuration it should run well on any computer setup and should take full advantage of any given CPU be it 'budget' or not. I also added a basic Read Me and update the links. Finally, better compression leads to a smaller file size.

If you've already downloaded a previous version, you can download this version, write it over your current version and keep rolling. Your save games will not be affected.

[Viken]

I recently re-found this gem of a game, and went with your Download and Run version cause it made it really simple.  Now however I've run into a problem that has me a little ticked.

I cannot seem to be able to save!

Both the Save and Save As... buttons are greyed out and unclickable in the game, and I cannot figure out why.  Any help would be great!

[leeor_net]

Odd... I don't have that issue with the download.

Did you extract it to a non-secured part of the hard drive? (e.g., not in Program Files)? Only reason I can think of that the save functions won't work is because the virtual hard drive setup in DosBox isn't working so I'd start there and make sure a VHDD is available to DosBox.

EDIT:

I checked it out on one of my work computers and, as you can see in the screenshot, the save/save as functions are working normally.

Make sure the folder 'vhd' is not flagged as Read Only and also ensure that you've saved the game to a user directory like the desktop or a plain directory/folder on your hard drive like C:\Games\Outpost.

[Viken]

I have done all of that, but it is still greyed out.  I cannot leave DOSBox open all the time, cause it is really stingy about that issue, so I'm kinda stuck banging my head at the moment.


Edit 1:  Okay, I got it to work.  I kept right clicking inside the selection screen by accident and thus it wouldn't come up properly.  Thanks for the help!  I did end up moving the entire folder to my C:\Games folder and making sure it was not set to read-only before it would work.

[leeor_net]

Really glad you got it to work! This is one of my favorite old games despite all it's flaws and after upgrading to Windows 64 bit I was pissed at being unable to play it again. This at least lets us continue to play this game in an environment much closer to what it was originally designed for.

[Rapier31]

How do I get it to go fullscreen?

[leeor_net]

Alt+Enter should do the trick.

[Rapier31]

Alt+Enter should do the trick.

Wow, that was a quick response, thank you very much!!! I've been missing this game for so long. I used to play it when I was a kid and I remember a colony I built that ended up with over 70k colonists. My dad was dumbfounded as to how I had accomplished that.

[leeor_net]

A lot of things were great. A lot of things weren't. All together though we all enjoy the game.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy that package! It runs fairly well but you can tweak the configuration a bit more if you have a more powerful computer to run it on (set cpu cycles higher or lower).

Enjoy!

[Rapier31]

I seem to having some trouble making the VHD file read only. Whenever I uncheck the read only box and hit apply and ok, it just resets the folder to read only. I've even tried on the desktop, and the contents of the entire folder as well 

Welp, nevermind. I forgot that I can only save it at the beginning of a turn. Its working now.

[leeor_net]

Glad you got it working as well!

[JetMech1999]

I gotta give a big shout-out to you for making the original available for us Outpost junkies.  I can't wait for Outpost HD to arrive, but in the meantime I can still get my fix.  Thanks again.

[leeor_net]

Glad you guys are finding this useful! Happy to help whenever I can!

[Dawby]

I have been searching a long time for a way to play OP1. I downloaded a couple different versions from two different places and ran across the same problem. I figured the one on this site would work better - so many dedicated players to this specific game. However, same problem.

I downloaded both the emulator and mount versions. I have a program that will handle the latter, but unless it does it automatically, I do not know how to work it. The emulator version will run on the high performance version, but I get this glitchy, stinted, halting audio and video. Sure, I can click through things, but I am missing a lot on those verbal instructions and such. How can I make this work? (I use Windows 10, although the Dos Box and whatever else is packaged in this site's downloads is how I "ran" the game.)

My computer skills are extremely minimal.

[leeor_net]

That depends a lot on the hardware specs of your particular machine. The glitchiness in the audio that you mentioned in 'high performance' mode probably means that the DOSBox settings are taking up too much CPU time and the emulation is choking on the audio buffer causing that stuttering. Basically, your CPU may not be fast enough to run it well.

I put the package together myself and would be very happy to help you get it running. Let's start with your computer specs. I'm going to assume this is a store bought machine from HP, Dell or something similar? If so, provide me the model number and I can look it up and determine your specs.

Also you mentioned it's not running in the other 'low performance' mode? Can you describe the issue you're seeing with it?


As for the ISO version, you'll only be able to install and run it if you're running a 32-bit version of Windows. Outpost was developed for Windows 3.1, a 16-bit flavor of windows. The modern 64-bit versions of Windows no longer support 16-bit applications which means you have no choice but to use the emulation.

[Dawby]

For the low-performance version I get a message that it can’t run on my 64 bit machine. I cannot remember if it opens DosBox or not.

As for my computer - not sure, but I’ll try, and quite likely it’s something lame/cheap and not powerful enough to run, well, a number of things. It’s an HP latptop.  The bottom says: Model 15-1039wm

[leeor_net]

Egad! You're running with an Intel Celeron N2830 -- it's a dual-core 2.16 GHz CPU -- it's definitely not up to the task of running that in high performance mode. 

Anyway, how are you running the 'low performance' mode? Are you running Outpost.bat? Because it works okay on my end.

If it still isn't working when you do that, you can edit the 'high performance' configuration file:

Open 'Outpost-high.conf' with any text editor (notepad will work fine).

Scroll down to the section labeled [CPU].

Change the line 'cycles=fixed 60000' to 'cycles=fixed 25000'.

Save the file, close out the text editor and then try launching the 'high performance' mode again. Hopefully this will resolve some of the sound issues for you.

As a side note, because of the reduces performance, you may still end up with scratching or popping. This was present back in the early 90's as well on low end machines -- there's not a whole lot that can be done about it atm. I'm going to work on an updated package at some point to improve compatibility and take some suggestions that others have mentioned in maybe making it work better / more streamlined.


Couple of side notes:

Ctrl+F10 releases the mouse. Alt+Tab also works.

Alt+Enter switches between fullscreen and windowed mode.

[Dawby]

Lots of helpful stuff - thank you! I can’t remember if I ran the .bat or not in low performance mode but will make sure when I try again tomorrrow. I didn’t expect good results with high performance mode and it only tried it when the other didn’t work. Thanks again!

[leeor_net]

You're very welcome! I'd like to know how it turns out for you. There's very little troubleshooting information ATM but I'd like to correct that -- the more I have users like yourself experience issues, the more useful information we can get compiled together.

Good luck and let me know how it turns out!

[Dawby]

It DOES run, though I didn't get a chance to run it long enough to actually play yet. It's "skippy" in the audio and visual, which is a bummer. It's one of the more stunning visual openings, and I love "Mars." We must have had a heck of a computer when I played it back in the day, as that "glitchiness" came as a total surprise to me. I Had no idea it was an issue even then.

[leeor_net]

Keep in mind that this is an emulation through DOSBox which was never intended to run Windows 3.1 at all. That I fudged it enough to get it to work at all is almost a marvel in and of itself.

Anyway, you can play around with the CPU emulation core (going up or down). It's very smooth on my computer (AMD Athlon 4.5Ghz 8-core CPU) and my old laptop (AMD Turion 2.8Ghz 2-core CPU). The first is a high-end processor, the laptop is a dual core CPU on par with an intel core 2 CPU... You're running a Celeron CPU which... to put it simply, Intel crippled that CPU on purpose basically meaning that it'll have a hard time doing anything at all. I would say drop the emulation CPU cycles down to maybe 15000 and see what kind of performance you get. Hopefully somewhere around there will provide an experience that's acceptable. You can also try dropping the screen resolution from 800x600 to 640x480. Would reduce the amount of drawing the emulator will need to do.

[Hooman]

I also have an Intel Celeron N2830, which is about 30x the speed of CPUs from when Outpost 1 would have been out. It seems a bit surprising that performance is an issue, even with the overhead of emulation. Usually emulation overhead is ballpark 10%. Though I suppose that does depend quite heavily on the emulator. There's infinite possibility to write badly performing code.

Maybe a different emulation package would work better? I'm guessing DOSBox was chosen not just as an emulator, but also for the software environment it provides.

[Dawby]

The first thing I did was run the correct non-high performance file. That prompted my previous response. I was nervous about changing anything "programming"-wise, but did give that a shot. I used the one for the lower performance and cranked it down to 10000. It seemed to be smoother at first, but after giving myself and my AI a name, it was back to the same level of skipping.

This time, too, I did not go far enough into gameplay to see if that was affected. I might be able to deal with skipping, though I am on my third attempt at a colony game in OP2 that pulls me away from this project very easily. 

[leeor_net]

I also have an Intel Celeron N2830, which is about 30x the speed of CPUs from when Outpost 1 would have been out.

I'd say something like 1000x faster than processors at that time. That doesn't mean it performs well though -- the Celeron is a crippled chip. It's FSB bus speed is super shitty, memory cache is pitifully small, hyperthreading and multitasking features are vastly inferior to literally anything else. It's a budget CPU that's useful for email and office documents... anything demanding (and emulating an entire computer is a demanding task) won't work well on these CPU's no matter how fast their main clock speed is. It's just not up to the task.

It seems a bit surprising that performance is an issue, even with the overhead of emulation. Usually emulation overhead is ballpark 10%. Though I suppose that does depend quite heavily on the emulator. There's infinite possibility to write badly performing code.

Bingo. DOSBox was never intended to operate any software on it. It was built and designed specifically to run DOS games. Windows 3.1 isn't a game and does all sorts of interesting an annoying things that DOSBox probably doesn't handle particularly well. I'm sure with modifications this could be vastly improved... but I'm not sure I'm willing to go poking around in the DOSBox code.

Maybe a different emulation package would work better? I'm guessing DOSBox was chosen not just as an emulator, but also for the software environment it provides.

I'm open to suggestions. We could use something like VirtualBox but I would hate to try that for the simple fact that Oracle has it's disgusting hands involved in it. I'm begrudgingly downloading VB 5.2.6 now to test it out and compare performance (and see if I can even get it working at all, though I have a feeling it's better suited to this than DOSBox). I dunno, if there are _any_ other options other than Oracle contaminated bullshit, I'm open to it.

[Hooman]

I've have pretty good success running VirtualBox on that CPU. Modern versions of Windows seems to run reasonably well. I did however upgrade my RAM from 2GB to 8GB. That made a significant improvement, especially with newer more memory hungry versions of Windows, or if I had other stuff open. Nothing quite kills performance like swapping to disk, and yes, I have a regular hard drive in that machine.

I've never tried Windows 3.1 in VirtualBox.

What about licensing issues? I was thinking, with VirtualBox, people generally run legitimate licensed software in the emulator. It sounds like DOSBox has it's own software environment that may sidestep some of those licensing issues. Though I'm guessing that didn't include the Windows 3.1 part, just the DOS part.